Earth’s oldest surviving tree genus, ginkgos were there before the dinosaurs existed, before Africa and South America parted. But after a long epoch of triumph over droughts and floods and mass extinctions, they came teetering on the brink of extinction for reasons entombed in mystery.

Ginkgoes disappeared from North America, then Europe, and finally Japan, becoming, by the Pleistocene epoch, mountain refugees in China.

It was there that itinerant Buddhist monks discovered them. Taken both by the trees’ medicinal properties, which had become a staple of Chinese medicine, and by their uncommon beauty, the monks began landscaping Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines all over Japan with ginkgos.

Read the whole, fascinating story: How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo – The Marginalian