As much as we may like to think of ourselves as capable of spontaneous enthusiasm, we remain creatures of habit. Maybe this default condition is a legacy of the past ten thousand years when most of us were yoked behind a plow and we got used to stepping into a furrow and plunging forward head down.

I have worked in Rockland on the shores of Penobscot Bay for more than three decades, driving to and from town, either lost in thought of what was done or left undone or listening to the radio as the scenery scrolled by. Which is why I was startled last week when I looked up and saw a tree I had never seen before—right there between the bagel shop and the food coop on the main drag, which I had driven by surely many thousands of times.

Even from the road at 30 miles an hour, I was arrested by the lovely jade green color of its leaves, which perhaps should have been a hint. But the mysterious tree’s shape was also different as it swept upward and outward like an elm, which clearly it was not. I had to slow down and stop to look at its leaves. These delicate leaves are fan shaped and incised in their middle into two distinct lobes with tightly parallel veins that converge at the stem. An oriental fan is not half as beautiful.

I dimly recalled that I had seen these leaves maybe 40 years ago on an urban forestry class field trip to Central Park in Manhattan. You might not believe it, but Central Park is a great place to take a forestry class because it supports 152 species of trees from all over the temperate regions of the world, which is why we were there. I remembered the leaves of this tree because its story is unforgettable.

For centuries, the gingko tree was known to science only from fossil deposits, where its delicate fan-shaped leaves had been preserved in coal beds from the Carboniferous Period in Germany, England and Scotland many hundreds of millions of years ago. Like most species from the age of tree ferns and giant club mosses, the gingkoes had long since disappeared into the dim recesses of the evolutionary book of life.

But then in the 17th century, a German botanist happened to visit a secluded Japanese temple and discovered a living gingko tree growing on its grounds! Soon other gingko trees were identified in other Buddhist temples in China, where monks had been tending them for millennia. Gingkoes are exceptionally long-lived trees, and Buddhist monks are exceptionally patient record keepers. It turns out that the gingko tree originally discovered at the Japanese temple had been planted there in 1192; others planted earlier in China have been on temple grounds for over 1500 years. Even Darwin was captivated by the gingko tale and coined the term “living fossil” to describe them. Soon American missionaries began bringing their seeds back with them from China to plant throughout the United States.

No one really knows what happened to all the other native gingko trees in Asia, but apparently they have been completely eliminated in the wild. Their habitat had been reduced to a total of a few score square miles in a handful of Buddhist temple grounds. Somehow, however, they have thrived on these sacred grounds, including six that survived the 1945 atomic bomb blast in Hiroshima, among the few living things found within a mile of ground zero, charred but alive and still living today.

The ginkgo’s record tenacity and long life perhaps explains a completely different reason for their notoriety today. You can hardly cruise a natural health website or corridor of a natural food store without coming across advertisements for gingko supplements. They will cure what ails you, we are told, and extend your life, if not for a thousand years at least beyond what you might have feared. I wonder if the supplements at the natural food store know about their grandfather standing over them, tall and elegant, next-door.

“So wake up!” I tell myself. The world is always fresh; nature is always new. There is always something of importance happening around us if we just pull our heads up out of our furrow and look around to be amazed.

Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.