Hiroshima Ginkgo trees to be planted near Sebastopol Peace Garden today
A project of the Peace Crane Project of Sonoma County, the trees will be planted in public ceremony this afternoon
The City of Sebastopol has been working with the Peace Crane Project of Sonoma County to coordinate the planting of two very special Ginkgo trees near the Peace Garden behind the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center.
“They are descended from a tree that survived the bombing in Hiroshima,” said Larry Harper of the Peace Crane Project, which is a project of the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County. “There’s an organization in Hiroshima called Green Legacy that sends seeds from plants that survived the bombing around the world.”
Green Legacy sends seeds from all kinds of plants, but Harper said the group chose Ginkgos because they’re ancient and interesting.
“It’s one of the oldest living trees in the world,” he said of the Ginkgo species. “It’s prehistoric, and they actually thought they were extinct at one point. Then there was a grove of them found in China, and now they’re spread all over the place.”
The Peace Crane Project gave the Ginkgo seeds to the Sonoma Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen, which planted them and nurtured them as they grew. The seeds produced 10 trees, which are now between three and six feet tall.
Workers from Sebastopol’s Public Works Department will plant two of the six-foot trees in a public ceremony at the Peace Garden this afternoon. Mayor Diana Rich will speak at the event.
The Peace Crane Project has agreed to provide ongoing maintenance for the tree plantings.
Other trees from this same group have also been planted in front of the Lucchesi Community Center in Petaluma, and the group is working on plans to plant others at Sonoma State.
The Peace Crane Project has been producing commemorations of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place on August 6 and August 9, 1945, for over 35 years to keep the bombings ever present in the public consciousness. The planting of the ginkgo trees is inspired by this same sentiment.
“It’s a commemoration of the bombings that we did on Japan,” Harper said. “We believe that was a terrible thing we did, and we want to work to have it not happen again. Our perhaps unrealistic but hopeful goal is to abolish nuclear weapons, to just get rid of them.”
The tree planting is set for this afternoon, Tuesday, Oct. 29. The tree planting is at 3:30 pm and the dedication ceremony is at 4 pm in the Peace Garden next to the Youth Annex lawn, 425 Morris St., Sebastopol.
That is a cool thing to do.