Ginkgo Leaf - Ginkgo biloba Folium - Bai Guo Ye / Yin Xing Ye - Organic

From China

A living fossil, and a modern herb. The ginkgo is the last surviving member of an entire order of trees. Fossils of almost the same leaf turn up in rock two hundred million years old, which makes it older than most of the insects that land on it. It survived in China when it died out everywhere else, kept alive in temple gardens.

The leaf is the newer story. Classical Chinese medicine used the nut, bai guo, and barely mentioned the leaf. It only became one of the most-used botanicals in the world after German laboratories began extracting it in the 1960s. So this is a two-hundred-million-year-old tree with a sixty-year-old tradition attached to it.

How it is used: the cut leaf is brewed as a tea, on its own or with chrysanthemum. Grassy and slightly astringent.