Leaves
The leaves are unique among seed plants, being fan-shaped with veins radiating out into the leaf blade, sometimes bifurcating (splitting), but never anastomosing to form a network. Two veins enter the leaf blade at the base and fork repeatedly in two; this is known as dichotomous venation. The leaves are usually 5–10 cm (2-4 in), but sometimes up to 15 cm (6 in) long. The old popular name "maidenhair tree" is because the leaves resemble some of the pinnae of the maidenhair fern, Adiantum capillus-veneris.
Leaves of long shoots are usually notched or lobed, but only from the outer surface, between the veins. They are borne both on the more rapidly growing branch tips, where they are alternate and spaced out, and also on the short, stubby spur shoots, where they are clustered at the tips.
Read more about this topic: Ginkgo Biloba
Famous quotes containing the word leaves:
“Through all the lying days of my youth
I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun;
Now I may wither into the truth.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“When a girl of today leaves school or college and looks about her for material upon which to exercise her trained intelligence, there are a hundred things that force themselves upon her attention as more vital and necessary than mastering the housewife.”
—Cornelia Atwood Pratt, U.S. author, women’s magazine contributor. The Delineator: A Journal of Fashion, Culture and Fine Arts (January 1900)
“It was such a leafy wilderness; a place for fauns and satyrs, and where bats hung all day to the rocks, and at evening flitted over the water, and fireflies husbanded their light under the grass and leaves against the night.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)