Red leaves on a frosty tree

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Community Living

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String pulled on the Ginkgo tree this week

My favorite tree – and I have hundreds to choose from here at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods – is the huge Ginkgo tree in front of Corbe House, where I live.

The tree is huge! Sister Rose Ann Eaton and I just went out to measure the circumference of the trunk – 205 inches! While engaged in this pursuit, Rose told me a story she had heard from Sister Marceline Mattingly now in her nineties. Marceline remembers when the Ginkgo tree had only a single trunk. A storm broke the tree down near its base. As the tree regrew, it developed the multiple trunks very evident today. The tree’s shaggy bark, many trunks melding into one another and the sheer width of the branches lend distinctiveness, character and interest to “my” tree.