Ginkgo trees are No. 3 on my list of favorite trees, behind native madrone and oak. I thought about that when I saw some new ceramic labels for plant names or other messages. They're shaped like a ginkgo leaf and reminded me of the resilence of this ancient tree. Years ago -- so long that the story isn't posted online -- I wrote about a ginkgo stump that, to everyone's surprise, regrew. It now has a home at

.

A new set of labels shaped like a gingko leaf reminded me of a 9-year-old story about a tree that resprouted after being cut down.

The labels I

mentioned -- 5 inches high and 2 1/2 inches wide --

. You can write on with dry-erase marker to wipe off easily or Sharpie marker that is more permanant. A set of six is $29.95.

Since my ginkgo survival story was never posted, I thought I'd do it now. It ran in 2004.

She stood 80 feet tall at least, a venerable resident of the Lloyd Center neighborhood for more than 100 years. Her arms stretched wide and strong, distinctive fan-shaped leaves billowing around her like the grandest ball gown. Each fall, later than most trees, her lovely foliage changed from green to spun gold overnight. Just as quickly, she let go, and leaves blanketed the ground beneath her in a golden carpet.

As perhaps the oldest and certainly the largest female

Ginkgo biloba

in Portland, she was known and loved by many. Office workers gazed at her through windows, marking the seasons according to her attire, and allowing her regal calm to wash away workaday worries. Those who lived nearby came to think of her as a friend, often changing their path to walk under her wide canopy. In autumn, Asian neighbors came to gather her cherry-shaped fruit, ignoring its stinkiness, thinking only of the prized nut inside.

Consciously acknowledged or passively ignored, trees help define a community. Their longevity, especially of the ancient ginkgo, links generations. Their absence or neglect implies bleakness. Certainly in this nation, trees have become the yin to progress's yang -- or at the very least, a lightning rod for our divisiveness on the issue. Most often, trees must give way to the buildings and roads that bring progress. It is, say the builders, much more cost-efficient to remove the trees than design around them.

But what is the value of a gorgeously proportioned one-hundred-and-something-year-old ginkgo?

For some, priceless.

For others, worthless.

For the owners of the property where the Lloyd Center ginkgo grew, not enough.

People fought for her. The late William "Robbie" Robinson, Portland's head gardener for 25 years before retirement in the '80s, wrote letters and appeared before the city's Design Commission to try to persuade developers to design around the ginkgo when they put up a new office tower. Phyllis Reynolds -- co-author of "Trees of Greater Portland," in which this ginkgo appears with the notation, "We hope it has a long life" -- added her voice.

So did others.

But on an April day in 1996, progress won.

By the time Maryanne Caruthers found out about it, a chain saw had reduced the ginkgo to a three-headed stump.

"When I heard her days on Earth were threatened, I figured they would not destroy this tree. It's historic," says Caruthers, a professional photographer and artist who drove by the tree almost every day for 20-odd years. "But then I got the call, 'They cut down your tree.'

"I jumped in the car with my camera and hard hat and raced over there. I was stunned. I sat there and stared at the stump. I couldn't leave. I had to say goodbye."

No one can say for sure when the first ginkgo grew. There's a good chance they predate dinosaurs. Certainly, the one-of-a-kind trees sprouted in the Jurassic period when Tyrannosaurus rex and his kin thundered through a world of giants. But, according to fossil evidence, the ginkgo family tree could extend as far back as 270 million years, before the continents parted and there was only one supercontinent, called Pangea.

In that long-ago land, primitive wildlife, such as the crocodilian

Saltoposuchus

and the four-legged, sharp-fanged

Cynognathus

, lived near riverbanks and coastal bands, where towering tree ferns, giant horsetail, dark conifers and palmlike cycads grew into lush canopies. The air was warm and moist in these more-inhabited areas, probably tropical and conducive to the vast evolutionary changes that defined the era. This was the habitat of the first species of ginkgo,

G. yimaensis

, and it thrived in large patches in both the southern and northern hemisphere of Pangea.

As the continents drifted apart, ginkgoes rode along, shifting and adding characteristics as they adapted to new environments, including the Northwest, where the 7,500-acre Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park now preserves the remains of a giant ginkgo forest near Vantage, Wash. But those, as well as most of the world's other ginkgoes, vanished thousands of years ago. Why? Perhaps from cataclysmic events such as volcanoes, dramatic climate shifts or even the extinction of the dinosaurs, who helped disperse the large ginkgo seeds.

Today, only

G. biloba

is left in a genus that once encompassed at least 11 species. For a while, even

G. biloba

was thought to have disappeared. But, true to its fighting nature, ginkgoes again grow around the world, though this time in gardens rather than native habitats. Some small patches of what seem to be wild trees grow in China, but those probably stem from cultivated plants nurtured on temple grounds by Buddhist monks. The holy men revered the tree for its medicinal properties, its ancient lineage and longevity -- a single tree can live for hundreds and hundreds of years, perhaps as many as 4,000.

In its second incarnation, ginkgoes spread from China to Japan, where in 1691, German botanist Engelbert Kaempfer came across them. He took seeds to Holland in 1737. By the mid-1700s, ginkgoes had returned to England, and in 1784 a tree was planted in the United States near Philadelphia.

Once thought to be closely related to conifers, ginkgoes were later aligned with another ancient division of plants, the cycads. But recently, scientists have decided they're unique and have given ginkgoes their own classification. Their fan-shaped leaves are like no other, though they resemble those of the maidenhair fern, which explains ginkgo's common name, maidenhair tree. In modern times, ginkgoes are appreciated for their toughness -- nary a pest bothers them, and the heavy pollution of city streets doesn't faze them, either.

Arguably the world's oldest living plant species, these trees are a humbling reminder of how short the history of humans really is. Here's how the late John Leach, husband of Portland plantswoman Lilla Leach, summed it up in a Christmas letter in 1962: "Its history reaches back further than any living animal or vegetable. It's older than Mt. Shasta, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood or the Cascade range of mountains, and much older than man -- older than Christmas or any of the religions."

Longevity is something to respect, but so is the amazing survival capacity of the ginkgo. Consider the ginkgo that grew near a temple about half a mile from where the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. A month later, the stubborn ginkgo had budded without any deformity. The temple was gone, 80,000 people died instantly, but the ginkgo lived. It still grows today, the temple rebuilt around it, an inscription added that reads, "No more Hiroshimas." In China today ginkgoes are protected. Roads and buildings "must give way."

Maryanne Caruthers gaped at the three-headed stump, every bit as ugly as a three-headed monster. She had been so confident that the Lloyd Center ginkgo's history would save it from the chain saw that she hadn't joined in the effort to save it. Now it was too late. But she couldn't leave without a proper goodbye.

"I talk too much," Caruthers says. "I talk to anything that will listen. And as weird as it sounds, some stuff answers. I walked up to the stump, and I remember thinking out loud, 'Boy, they sure made a mess of you,' and I heard, 'What do you expect? This is what Manifest Destiny looks like. Selfish, selfish, selfish.'

"I said, 'Are you dead?' No answer. That was the end of the communication."

Caruthers took some photographs, scratched up some nuts around the base of the trunk, and nursed her anger and grief.

"I didn't know what to do, but I felt compelled to do something. It's not like it was rational, but I started interviewing people."

Eventually, she came upon the excavation operator and asked him what would happen to the stump. He told her he'd be taking it to the dump.

"The dump!" Caruthers yelped. "The idea -- that my old friend was going to the dump!"

Not surprisingly, the hard-hat guy was a bit flummoxed by Caruthers. He wondered where else a stump might end up. "Do you want it?" he asked.

"Yes, yes, I want it," Caruthers replied.

"Well, then, you'll need to show up here with a truck that can handle 6,000 pounds," he told her. "I'll be digging it up tomorrow."

Caruthers is not the type to be put off by a challenge, not by any stretch. But still, tomorrow? And what would she do with the stump?

"I didn't have any plan, no vision. I never, never expected the results that happened."

Caruthers went to her bosses, Bob Walsh and Bob Forster, partners in Walsh Construction. By then, her quick mind had formed a vague plan: Cure the stump so that a slab could be sliced off and turned into some sort of memorial plaque.

The two Bobs agreed to help. Forster authorized a flatbed to pick up the stump and haul it to Walsh's equipment yard. Walsh went along, telling Caruthers she had a year to figure things out.

The next day, the guys at the equipment yard eyed Caruthers warily. Much more accustomed to wielding the equipment to cut down a tree rather than save a stump, they nonetheless went at it with gusto.

"The forklift tilted forward, the tires were almost flattened," recalls Caruthers. "But we made it."

The ginkgo stump ended up in a graveled area of the equipment yard where drainage wouldn't be an issue and rot could be avoided. Caruthers capped each of the three trunks with plastic so they would dry slowly and not crack. Every week she visited the stump, washing it off and even using alcohol to ward off mold and mildew.

One day in June, Caruthers uncovered the stump and found sprouts shooting up, not that unusual for a stump still in the ground. But this stump had been amputated above and below ground and was still sprouting.

"I thought maybe we should take cuttings," Caruthers remembers. So she took Bill Robinson out to take a look and give counsel. "When he saw it, he cried. He said, 'It's not dead! It should be replanted.' "

That was not what she wanted to hear. "It's 6,000 pounds," Caruthers told Robinson. "We can't just pick it up and replant it."

But how could she go this far and not try? At first, efforts proved frustrating. She contacted nurseries and parks and public gardens. Then, in the fall of 1996, Caruthers was at Dan and Diane Snow's house taking photos of their children for a Christmas card.

"I happened to sit down in Diane's grandmother's chair and started telling them about my wandering ginkgo."

Come to find out, Diane's grandmother was the late Elizabeth Dimon, co-author of "Trees of Greater Portland." Dan happened to be Walsh's project manager for a construction job at Reed College, a campus proud of its tree reputation and where Dimon's co-author, Phyllis Reynolds, had developed strong relations. The stars had aligned.

Reed agreed to take the stump, and on a very soggy Feb. 27, 1997, the Lloyd Center ginkgo got another chance at life. Unlike the day it was cut down, the ginkgo had a respectful crowd looking on as the crane gently set her down.

Caruthers, of course, was one of them. She watched, regret that it had come to this balanced with hope for its survival. The tree felt like a metaphor of modern life.

"Everything is so easily disposed of," she says. "She didn't need to be thrown away."

But Ms. Gink, as Caruthers named her, is also a symbol of perseverance and community. If a stump can bring so many people together, perhaps the next time a tree can be saved.

Every week the summer after she was planted, Caruthers hauled hundreds of feet of heavy hose over to the ginkgo. Still, she didn't know if she was running a rescue operation or a hospice.

That September, a group of employees from Walsh posed around the ginkgo for a photo. The tree had sprouts coming up all over. Ms. Gink was nowhere near the majestic tree she had once been, but she was green and strong, roots beginning to take hold.

For several years after that, the Walsh group posed each September with Ms. Gink. She grew taller, 15 feet at last count. A dozen or more limbs as big as a wrist reach for the future; some of them will become leaders and end up trunks. Some of them, along with the original trunks, will rot away.

Her second life has begun.

-- Kym Pokorny