Comment

So ginkgo’s that do fruit. The fruit smells like dead fish, vomit, or rancid butter. They smell HORRIBLE and apparently that was a very attractive scent to the prehistoric animals and insects that did eat them. Yum yum.

Luckily most Ginkgo’s sold for landscaping these days are unable to produce fruit.

I have had the displeasure of smelling ginkgo fruit, because fun fact #2, a lot of cities decided years back they were very cheap and urban friendly to plant during city planning, but were unaware of the horror they would reek once they matured. Ginkgo’s grow very very slowly. So something like 50+ years later they had to chop a lot down once they started dropping fruit but only after making the city smell like a sewage dump every late summer.

I do not claim to be an expert ginkgoligist, but those are some fun tid bits I learned.

source

Sort:hotnew top

klemptor@startrek.website ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Yup - I went to Temple University and the whole sidewalk from the train station to campus was lined with these. The leaves are beautiful but the berries are just horrendous. We called them shitberries. It was really hard to avoid them and sometimes you’d step on one, and end up apologizing the rest of the day because that stench sticks around.

I think they got rid of those trees. The students now don’t know what they’re missing out on!

source
Tyoda@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Ginkgos are dioecious, so there are boy trees and girl trees. The girls produce the fruit, so they are rarely planted.

source
- VelvetStorm@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My local park has nothing but the female trees, and that fruit is stanky but still not as bad as a Bradford pear tree, which smells like a dead asshole.
  
  source
Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My college had a single female ginkgo tree, known sort-of-affectionately as The Poo Tree to most on campus.

source
- Elaine@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  This pleases my inner 12 year old.
  
  source
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This unintended consequences aspect is rearing its head where I live - they planted hundreds or thousands of gum trees that are now mature and each one drops shittons and shittons of spikey gum balls every fall - but about 20% don’t come out of the trees and just rot on the limb. You can’t even rake them out. And the 80% that do come down kill the grass and clog the gutters and drains. It’s a real shit show.

source
Cypher@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Im still baffled that Seoul in South Korea has so many fruiting Gingko trees. They make the whole city smell like an open sewer and I couldn’t stand it.

source
Tikiporch@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It should be “horror they would wreak”, but honestly yours fits the context pretty good too!

source
VelvetStorm@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The ones in my local park fruit and it does smell super bad. The trees also take like 20 years before they can start fruiting.

source