this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] MeatPilot@lemmy.world 80 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (9 children)

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 the OG ginkgo's during city planning, but were unaware of the horror they would reek once they matured. Ginkgo's grow very slowly. So something like 30+ years later, city planners realized their horrible mistakes and had to chop a lot down once they started dropping fruit. Still everyone in these cities would suffer a few years of the city smelling 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.

[–] Tyoda@lemm.ee 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ginkgos are dioecious, so there are boy trees and girl trees. The girls produce the fruit, so they are rarely planted.

[–] VelvetStorm@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month 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.

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