When Greaton Sellers graduated from Furmans new campus in 1966, his aunt, Lottie Brownlee, presented him with an unusual gift. A few days before commencement, Aunt Lottie drove to the original Furman campus in downtown Greenville and potted three ginkgo tree saplings that had sprouted near the bell tower.

The mature ginkgoes around the bell tower would soon be bulldozed with the remaining campus buildings and trees to make room for a shopping center. Brownlee thought the salvaged saplings would be a fitting keepsake for her nephew.

Shortly after the graduation ceremony, Sellers transported the saplings back to his native Charleston. He planted one in his mothers yard. The two others were rooted at his home in nearby Mount Pleasant. Two of the trees flourished, but a third  one of the trees on Sellers property  did not fare as well.

In fact, as the years passed, it grew very little. Sellers transplanted the struggling tree three times in an attempt to find more hospitable soil. Yet the stunted tree failed to flourish. After almost 40 years of loving attention, the spindly tree was only seven feet tall. Its two siblings, by contrast, were over 50 feet tall.

Last year, as Sellers prepared to sell his property, he worried about the fate of the tenacious little ginkgo. The new owners, having no sentimental attachment to the tree, would probably replace it with a more robust specimen.

The ginkgo needed a new home. So Sellers contacted folks at Furman to ask whether the university would be interested in retrieving the orphaned tree whose roots reach back to the downtown campus. A few weeks ago, Greg Burris, campus grounds supervisor, and Danny Crain, grounds foreman, drove to Mount Pleasant and transported the tree back to the Upstate, where they planted it on campus in front of Cherrydale, the antebellum alumni house that itself was transplanted to Furman from its original location on Poinsett Highway five years ago.

Braced with sturdy string and hand-watered several times a month, the ginkgo appears to be adapting well to its new sun-drenched home in front of the brick-walled entrance to Cherrydale.

Ginkgoes are the world's oldest living species of tree, dating back to the era of the dinosaurs, and they can live as long as 600 years. Some 200 million years ago, they were widespread in Europe and North America, but were destroyed during the Ice Age, surviving only in a few regions of China. They would be extinct today had it not been for the dedicated preservation efforts of Buddhist monks who over the centuries planted the sacred trees in temple gardens in China, Japan and Korea.

Western collectors imported the trees to Europe, where they were particularly popular in London and Paris. Ginkgoes first appeared in the United States in the late 18th century. The hardy ginkgo  resistant to most insects, drought and storms  was used widely by landscape designers during the 20th century. Four trees in Hiroshima, Japan, survived the atomic bombing of that city and have since been labeled bearers of hope.

Although in recent years ginkgo trees have become more prevalent, they remain on the New York Botanical Garden threatened and endangered plant list.

The ginkgo, which sprouts delicate round-tipped leaves, is dioecious, which means there are separate male and female plants. Female trees produce foul-smelling, plum-shaped fruit when they ripen in the fall. Some municipalities have even banned the stink bomb ginkgoes because of their odoriferous fruit.

But dont fret, says Sellers. Hes fairly sure the diminutive Furman ginkgo is male. We'll just have to wait and see, laughs Greg Burris. Only time will tell.

Furman has time to wait. Colleges share with ginkgoes a heritage of steadfast resilience. As the paleobotanist Sir Albert Seward said in 1938, the ginkgo appeals to the historic soul: we see it as an emblem of changelessness, a heritage from worlds too remote for our human intelligence to grasp, a tree which has in its keeping the secrets of the immeasurable past.

Amid our frenetic cultural preoccupation with newness and rapid growth, we too rarely pause to preserve aspects of our heritage or indulge elements of life that are slow to mature. The transplanted little ginkgo (like little colleges) reminds us that small can be beautiful and enduring  and even heroic.