Moved to tears by... a naked tree
(Naked because it isn't bearing any leaves. Not naked in any other sense.)
I ordered a couple of plants last week. I've been wanting to plant a new hedge (or possibly several) for months, and last week Jörg wanted to buy a new toy for practicing his marksmanship, so it was a good time to mention that I'd like to splash some money on PLAAANTS. They were delivered today. I unwrapped them, and the first thing I noticed was something that didn't look like it was one of the plants I ordered. (I ordered young thorny bushes. Well, and five hellebores. This looked like a baby tree.) I checked the bill - nope, nothing on there that I hadn't ordered. Huh.
So I took the protective paper from around the pot, and looked at the little banderole at the base of the baby tree to see what kind of tree it was in the first place. (Hard to tell with deciduous saplings at this time of the year!)
The banderole stated: "I AM YOUR VALENTINE'S DAY SURPRISE! GINKGO BILOBA 4 YEARS OLD"
As we don't do Valentine's Day, Mid-February always sneaks up on me. I don't particularly like Valentine's Day - that is, I like the historical variations, but I'm not a fan of the commercial holiday it's become. Kinda like Hallowe'en, really. So I roll my eyes at Valentine's Day gifts. Except this time, I didn't. I actually got teary-eyed.
Time for a trip to the department of personal backstory!
One of my great-grandfathers was a huge Goethe fanboy. Seriously. By fanboy I mean that he not only read all the books and owned several different copies of the same book, he also collected other memorabilia, and he even had a cabinet maker make chairs for his dining room according to Goethe's dining room chairs (I think the design itself was by Goethe). He moved to Leipzig because of Goethe, although he relocated in the early years of the GDR. Once he had his own garden, he naturally planted a ginkgo tree. After his death, my grandparents kept the house and garden, and when my grandmother retired, she moved in. She was rather proud of the ginkgo tree, which had grown high and beautiful, and introduced me to Goethe's love poem about it, which I know by heart. (It's a very short poem, so it stuck at once anyway.) When we dissolved grandma's household last summer, I took some cuttings of the ginkgo tree, but they didn't take root.
I didn't desperately need a ginkgo for my own garden, so I didn't do anything about that. I mean, I love ginkgo, they're absolutely beautiful trees with their straight silvery stems and exotic foliage, especially in fall when all the leaves turn golden, and I appreciate their age ("survived the dinosaurs") and hardiness ("survived the H-bomb"), but I didn't consider buying one. But after ordering the bushes, I later thought "Damn, why didn't I think of looking for a little ginkgo ?!"
And they sent me one, anyway! PROVIDENCE EXISTS. And it made me a bit teary-eyed...
- - -
The biloba in the gingko's species name also tipped me off that the "leaf" argument in favour of pointy Elvish ears is probably void, since "lobe" (as in earlobe) and "leaf" (or German Laub) are very likely related, too. So it's probably a linguistic injoke rather than proof of anything. (And I have just proven that my great-grandfather had no monopoly on fannishness... his other passion was Japan, btw, so we can safely assume that I'm genetically biased!)