NYC Vignettes: Those Golden Ginkgo Trees

Cascading fullness of ginkgo leaves

The sidewalks of New York’s East Village are lined with ginkgo trees which add a bright and welcome yellow to the street scenes there.  I’d never seen such large, mature ginkgo trees.  The ones I’ve seen in the parking strips of Seattle streets are spindly in comparison.  A label on a tree near Gramercy Park identified these ginkgos as “Maidenhair” trees.  I guess the cascading leaves do put me in mind of curly locks and tresses of fairy tale maidens.

It was uncanny how I kept encountering ginkgo trees and leaves on this visit to NYC.  I saw ginkgo leaves carved into a pillar at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens . . .

. . . and a miniature, groomed ginkgo in the bonsai exhibit there.

And then when I wandered through the “Beyond Love: The Robert Indiana Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, I saw that he created a piece of ginkgo art:

So it’s probably no wonder that all of these encounters inspired me to render my own watercolor sketch of some ginkgo leaves.

My watercolor sketch of ginkgo leaves from the trees in the East Village