751

submitted 3 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

39 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] MeatPilot@lemmy.world 82 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] klemptor@startrek.website 30 points 3 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!

[-] Tyoda@lemm.ee 11 points 3 months ago

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 3 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.

[-] Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 3 months ago

My college had a single female ginkgo tree, known sort-of-affectionately as The Poo Tree to most on campus.

[-] Elaine@lemm.ee 2 points 3 months ago

This pleases my inner 12 year old.

[-] mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 8 points 3 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.

[-] Cypher@lemmy.world 7 points 3 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.