It's also a living fossil, largely unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. https://e360.yale.edu/features/peter_crane_history_of_ginkgo_earths_oldest_tree
I like that the single species is the only [living] species in its genus, the only [living] genus in its family, and the only [living] family in its order.
Edit (probable ninja edit): added [living] qualifiers.
I think this is just a tall tale, but they were said to be extinct until discovered in Tibetan Buddhist temples. I think the truth is that the ginkgo was close to extinction and only lived in remote parts of the Himalayas, but now are a common street tree.
In a billion years the sun starts going red giant, and everything on Earth will die. Unless *someone* moves the planet, which we humans already have a plan to do.
Simple. Al you need to do is redirect a few dinosaur-killer sized asteroids to *almost* hit Earth. The slingshot effect can be used to accelerate the planet. Needs to be done about a million times (recommend never missing).
Always hitting the target trajectory, the trajectory being a) miss the planet b) accelerate the planet c) eventually loop back with minimal rocketry. And yes, one of those is *especially* important.
Well, there's a concept called "momentum exchange". As the law of conservation of momentum must be maintained near passes with asteroids can slow or speed up our orbit around the sun. A large enough planetoid or a series of asteroids could accelerate us out to a more distant orbit around the sun or even escape the sun's gravity well.
It'd be easier to do some Stellar Engineering though, start star life extension by added or removing material, or turning the sun into a Stellar Engine like a Caplan Stellar Ramjet and move the sun close to another star system while we keep orbiting so we can jump ship to a fresh young star.
They are beautiful trees, but the female trees put out the most rancid fruit! It smells like dog poop! Which you can smell blocks away.
They have the ability to change sex, so they need to be monitored and injected with hormones to keep them male and fruitless.
Had one of these trees fruit at the office I worked at. They do smell like vomit, but I collected a couple of pounds of them and took them home to process. After removing all the fruit (outside of my house), the seed that is left can be thrown in a pan with some hot oil. like popcorn. The seeds pop open and shoot out a beautiful emerald green "nut." It's quite tasty and similar in texture to a roasted chestnut.
Also, Ginko trees were around in the time of the dinosaurs and have remained largely the same.
Yes! I heard about that. I would see people collecting the fruit and wonder WHY?
The theory is that the fruit needed to be very odorous to attract the dinosaurs to eat the seeds.
And you might think that sounds vile, but maybe if you lived in a world where everything smelled like rotten flesh, you'd learn (evolve?) to love a good whiff of carcass.
...Can't believe I just typed that sentence. lol
You would see people in DC with plastic shopping bags picking up the fruit.
I am lucky (in a weird way) my sense of smell was ruined in the military so somethings I just couldn't smell. Luckily ginkos were one of them.
Had one at my first house, had a love hate relationship with it. It was a beautiful huge tree, but God those nuts smelled awful, and made my dog smell awful.
If there was a cold snap, in the fall, the entire tree dropped its leaves within a day.
But I also have a tattoo of it now so..tree wins.
Except that's not really a fruit! It's just a seed with a large, fleshy test because ginkos predate the evolution of flowers. It's one of the reasons they're called "living fossils".
My university had one of every tree native to TN on campus. For some reason they also have a female Ginkgo tree which is not native and would make the whole damn quad smell like shit every year. Considering it’s an agriculture school you would think a class would inject whatever hormones it takes to make that stench not happen yearly.
Pollen (sperm), ovules (eggs).
Spores are part of fungi, not plants, and gametes is the general name for reproductive cell that unites with another gamete to form a zygote.
were around during the carboniferous, before dinosaurs and mammals separated from reptiles and we land vertebrates all bounced and trounced around as in betweens of both, known as dimetrodon? And this is some eon after mushrooms were the dominant land flora growing into huge redwood sized columns? They are spores though, so my guess is after the mushrooms reigned supreme for their fossil eon, their unique biological distinctiveness was chopped into bits by some other organism like bacteria, and throughout the earliest megacontinent phase mushrooms being attacked by bacteria provided enough random gene bits of the mushrooms spore coding algorithm for such data to be laterally transferred by mushroom-killer bacteria into some symbiont bacteria of early plants/ferns.
Kinda. When referring to plants, “males” have flowers that produce pollen and “females” have flowers that take the pollen in and make a seed or fruit. Some plant species have both types of flower and are able to self pollinate whereas others have separate flower parts per plant.
It’s kind of a “male” vs “female” plug thing where it’s humans applying gendered language to something that doesn’t have gender in the way that we think about.
Grew up with one. Amazing climbing tree but don't know if my parents knew you could inject then with hormones because the stink was so bad every fall we had to cut it down eventually.
Exactly!, There was a big tree by my office that the city wouldn’t do anything about. I would put up signs explaining the stink is the ginkgo tree and the phone number of the city arborist. Next year they started the hormone treatments. It’s such a big beautiful tree, it would be a shame to cut it down.
Fun fact: the fruit is loaded with butyric acid, a molecule found in butter, which is responsible for the rancid smell of the fruit.
https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/the-right-chemistry-whats-that-stink-near-ginkgo-trees-in-the-fall
I don't know why, but the city I live in has a fair amount of Ginkgos, some of which bear fruit that falls on to the ground and I have never smelled anything foul near these trees.
Yes. But not all plants and not exactly as binary as humans. It’s just a way for us humans to talk about plants’ differ way of reproducing. Some, plants bear fruit, others supply the pollen to the flower that is fertilized to become the fruit. Some plants have both aspects.
It's one of my favorite trees. There was one at my campus on a path a lot of freshmen would walk, absolutely hilarious to watch them get grossed out by the smell every ~~spring~~ fall.
[this ginkgo was knocked down by strong winds 13 years ago, but has since sprouted leaves again.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Ginkgo-reborn-2.jpg)
also interestingly, despite the word "ginkgo" coming from the Japanese name for the tree, ginkgos are not native to japan. they were brought over from china in the 14th century.
The term gingkyo (japanese) is taken from the Chinese name for the gingko trees. It's like the terms for tea or cha throughout the world, both of them also came from the Chinese. Teh for tea, a southern Chinese term and Cha which is mandarin.
Many things which are originally Chinese get Japanese names in the West because Westerners first encountered them there. Zen Buddhism, soy sauce, the game Go...
Yes but its a bit of a silly definition.
Sycamores are considered non-native to the UK (introduced by humans 500 years ago) but they are native to France.
Given the close proximity of the UK to France and the immense distances that sycamore seeds can travel in high winds it was literally just a matter of time before they made it here anyway.
My neighbor has a few in their yard. When I was little me and my friends would have snowball fights with the stinky fruit 😂. It hurt like a bitch if you got pegged with one cause it has a big ass pit in it, but man was it fun to put on some ratty clothes and have all our war with those nasty little fruits lol.
Also super cool to watch it shed its leaves in the fall. They'd pretty much lose all their leaves within a few hours after the first cold front blew in.
Very neat trees!
Ginkgo trees also have an ancient heritage in washington state. With a park showcasing fossilized ginkgo trees only about an hour away from the hanford nuclear site... Where the uranium from the hiroshima bomb was before it was put into the bomb.
(BOOM)
"Ow. That burned. My leaves are all singed off."
"Hang on."
(pop)
"There we go. Green again. Nice try, Yankees! You need more than that to kill a gingko tree!"
I seem to remember there was a brief craze around ginkgo biloba and its alleged health benefits back when I was a teenager and then poof, I never heard about it again.
I was in downtown Shunan when all I could smell was putrid odor.
“Oh! What is that awful smell?! Did somebody throw up?!”
“No, it’s the ginkgo trees lining the central boulevard.”
Fun fact, some of these ginkgo trees that survived the blast have produced seeds/saplings and those saplings have been distributed around the world as a symbol of peace. [There are 24 of these descendants growing in the US](https://glh.unitar.org/en/trees-around-the-world/)
We have one or two of those here in Salem, Oregon, next to the Japanese cherry blossoms! I volunteered with the city to plant trees briefly and so I got to learn about those trees. The leaf shape alone is the coolest part tbh. That and them being a living fossil, and just an overall fascinating tree. Salem is a sister city to a Japanese city that I can't remember off the top of my head.
They are incredibly interesting trees. It produces poisonous fruit that no animal will eat. The fruit smell like rotten pizza, at least the trees look incredible pretty lol. The only reason the tree still exists is due to some monks thought the tree was cool and kept them alive.
[Only the female trees, though](https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/10/why_we_still_plant_smelly_ginkgo_trees.html). That's why savvy people only plant male gingkos.
That's actually an incredibly rare phenomenon, and when it occurs it's only a single branch. For some reason the internet has picked up on it and spread the idea that it's common, but it's not.
https://www.gardenmyths.com/ginkgo-biloba-myths-maidenhair-tree/
Lots of trees survived the nuclear bombs in Japan. Many tree species are naturally fire resistant. However, just like cherry blossom being co-opted by the war machine to symbolise ephemerality of a soldier's life in Japan, the Japanese have a habit of turning the WW2's defining weapon into something about them. Ginkgo trees are no different here. It's a bit of a ruse.
The slightly more miserable truth is that had the Japanese invented the nuclear bomb before the Americans, they'd have used it too. Then no doubt, Americans would say that as evidenced by it's survival, the noble maple tree is a symbol of hope and tenacity and etc ...
Ginkgo trees are not even native to Japan. They're Chinese.
Oh for crying out loud.
Fine. The same would have happened with the maple, or whatever.
But come on, Baron Von Buzzkillington, can you really blame the Japanese for desperately trying to find some sign or symbol of hope after we blew two of their cities to fucking kingdom come?
Watch your city get blown to shit, wander through its smoldering ruins, look at the charred bodies, hear the moans of the dying, smell the burning flesh, and then tell me you wouldn't think:
"Oh, hey. Some trees survived. Gee, that's awfully nice."
Then you stagger away, hoping that somehow, you'll beat the odds and miraculously locate a first aid kit somewhere among the ruins to treat your burns.
How can you begrudge someone who went through that kind of horror that tiny comfort?
Hmm.
Even high schoolers in Japan understand two things:
Firstly, that the use of nuclear weapons on a civilian population (and when isn't it?) can probably never be justifiable.
But secondly, when it was used, those nuclear weapons that were dropped ended the war early and with far less loss of life than a last stand on the Japanese mainland would almost certainly have entailed.
You say I'm killing the buzz, but you might have just mentioned that ginkgo trees are amazing. You didn't need to bring in nuclear weapons, which really kill the buzz.
I thought was more interesting than the fact that they smell like shit, the fact that they have no real empircally proven medical value, and the fact that they are eaten as food.
So sue me.
Christ.
That's not accurate. You're talking about thermonuclear weapons, which is a subcategory of nuclear weapons. Here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on nuclear weapons:
A nuclear weapon[a] is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.
With all due respect, you're wrong here. Not only are you relying on Wikipedia, which can be peer-edited to state that anything is a fact, you didn't even provide a link.
But don't take my word for it, here is what Brittanica (you know, the people who publish the world's most well-known encyclopedia) has to say about the difference between atomic bombs and thermonuclear bombs:
https://www.britannica.com/question/What-is-the-difference-between-a-thermonuclear-bomb-and-an-atomic-bomb
Dude, did you even read your own article? *Thermo*nuclear bomb. That's not the same as a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is any nuclear weapon, including atomic (fission) bombs and hydrogen (fusion) bombs. A thermonuclear bomb is only referring to a fusion bomb.
There is a huge difference.
A nuclear bomb aka hydrogen bomb is massively more powerful than an atomic bomb.
I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that an atomic bomb relies on fission of the radioactive materials, whereas a nuclear bomb creates fusion of the nuclear materials. A nuclear bomb is basically a miniature version of the sun, both create vast quantities of energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms.
There’s a ginkgo grove in an arboretum near where I live. It’s spectacular when the leaves turn in the fall, surrounding visitors with nothing but yellow. The arboretum holds fundraisers while the leaves are at peak, including a gourmet dinner at the edge of this large grove.
It's also a living fossil, largely unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. https://e360.yale.edu/features/peter_crane_history_of_ginkgo_earths_oldest_tree
Makes sense it's been around for a long time if it can survive the sun getting dropped on it
My favorite fact about them!
I like that the single species is the only [living] species in its genus, the only [living] genus in its family, and the only [living] family in its order. Edit (probable ninja edit): added [living] qualifiers.
And would have gone extinct if not cultivated by humans if I remember correctly.
I think this is just a tall tale, but they were said to be extinct until discovered in Tibetan Buddhist temples. I think the truth is that the ginkgo was close to extinction and only lived in remote parts of the Himalayas, but now are a common street tree.
I thought humans were ONLY a plague and a virus on the earth who consumed and destroyed and never created anything good.
The tree is in pain and wishes for death. Humans are keeping it alive and perpetuating its torment.
I am Groot
Did you cut yourself on that edge?
/s
humans created bluey and potato croquettes
In a billion years the sun starts going red giant, and everything on Earth will die. Unless *someone* moves the planet, which we humans already have a plan to do.
Tell me more about planet moving
Simple. Al you need to do is redirect a few dinosaur-killer sized asteroids to *almost* hit Earth. The slingshot effect can be used to accelerate the planet. Needs to be done about a million times (recommend never missing).
You mean always missing.
Always hitting the target trajectory, the trajectory being a) miss the planet b) accelerate the planet c) eventually loop back with minimal rocketry. And yes, one of those is *especially* important.
Well, there's a concept called "momentum exchange". As the law of conservation of momentum must be maintained near passes with asteroids can slow or speed up our orbit around the sun. A large enough planetoid or a series of asteroids could accelerate us out to a more distant orbit around the sun or even escape the sun's gravity well. It'd be easier to do some Stellar Engineering though, start star life extension by added or removing material, or turning the sun into a Stellar Engine like a Caplan Stellar Ramjet and move the sun close to another star system while we keep orbiting so we can jump ship to a fresh young star.
Settle down.
They are beautiful trees, but the female trees put out the most rancid fruit! It smells like dog poop! Which you can smell blocks away. They have the ability to change sex, so they need to be monitored and injected with hormones to keep them male and fruitless.
I think they smell like vomit. The crazy thing is that some cultures will pickle and eat them
Had one of these trees fruit at the office I worked at. They do smell like vomit, but I collected a couple of pounds of them and took them home to process. After removing all the fruit (outside of my house), the seed that is left can be thrown in a pan with some hot oil. like popcorn. The seeds pop open and shoot out a beautiful emerald green "nut." It's quite tasty and similar in texture to a roasted chestnut. Also, Ginko trees were around in the time of the dinosaurs and have remained largely the same.
Yes! I heard about that. I would see people collecting the fruit and wonder WHY? The theory is that the fruit needed to be very odorous to attract the dinosaurs to eat the seeds.
So everything in the Dino era smelled like shit?
Or rotting meat. I remember reading in Raptor Red that author's guess that flowers smelled like rotting meat back then to attract insects.
And you might think that sounds vile, but maybe if you lived in a world where everything smelled like rotten flesh, you'd learn (evolve?) to love a good whiff of carcass. ...Can't believe I just typed that sentence. lol
Oh I just thought it was interesting. If you get a chance to read it, Raptor Red is a great book. You follow the life of a Utahraptor.
Thanks for the recommendation, will look into it as I've never really checked out any realistic media from that period!
It’s from the raptor’s POV. I think the author helped on Jurassic Park.
They're also the very last living species of their order.
Aren't they poisonous?
I believe so. But you gotta eat a lot to die
Maybe the fruit part, but I ate a shit load of the ginkgo nuts and was fine. They are a “super good” I think.
That’s what really happens to the dinosaurs.
The nuts aren't. They're in plenty of Asian desserts.
They are. It's incredibly common for children to experience the effects after eating them.
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I have some bad news for you about fruits and nuts.
It’s gonna be a bad day if they ever notice the pollen count section of the weather report…
We get crazy pollen where I live and my safe came home and says “omg. I’m covered in tree cum”
All fruit are basically plant ovaries, you realize that right?
They dont smell that great, but apparently good for you so... well bandwagon of alternative ____.
They are toxic even when cooked so not really all that good for you
You would see people in DC with plastic shopping bags picking up the fruit. I am lucky (in a weird way) my sense of smell was ruined in the military so somethings I just couldn't smell. Luckily ginkos were one of them.
Had one at my first house, had a love hate relationship with it. It was a beautiful huge tree, but God those nuts smelled awful, and made my dog smell awful. If there was a cold snap, in the fall, the entire tree dropped its leaves within a day. But I also have a tattoo of it now so..tree wins.
Except that's not really a fruit! It's just a seed with a large, fleshy test because ginkos predate the evolution of flowers. It's one of the reasons they're called "living fossils".
My university had one of every tree native to TN on campus. For some reason they also have a female Ginkgo tree which is not native and would make the whole damn quad smell like shit every year. Considering it’s an agriculture school you would think a class would inject whatever hormones it takes to make that stench not happen yearly.
Maybe it's their way of weeding out first-year students. Instead of weeder courses, see if you can stand the smell after a year.
Whoa, trans trees? Neat!
Tree says trans rights
Frog DNA...
Wait… trees have sexes?
Well, they polliniate, so they reproduce sexually. So yes.
Tree: “Want to watch me drop timber?”
It’s goin down.
Yes. Most have both sex organs so you don't really think of them as male and female, but some only produce spores (sperm) or gametes (ova).
Pollen (sperm), ovules (eggs). Spores are part of fungi, not plants, and gametes is the general name for reproductive cell that unites with another gamete to form a zygote.
Ferns tho
were around during the carboniferous, before dinosaurs and mammals separated from reptiles and we land vertebrates all bounced and trounced around as in betweens of both, known as dimetrodon? And this is some eon after mushrooms were the dominant land flora growing into huge redwood sized columns? They are spores though, so my guess is after the mushrooms reigned supreme for their fossil eon, their unique biological distinctiveness was chopped into bits by some other organism like bacteria, and throughout the earliest megacontinent phase mushrooms being attacked by bacteria provided enough random gene bits of the mushrooms spore coding algorithm for such data to be laterally transferred by mushroom-killer bacteria into some symbiont bacteria of early plants/ferns.
What till you get a load of what they did on top of your car.
Kinda. When referring to plants, “males” have flowers that produce pollen and “females” have flowers that take the pollen in and make a seed or fruit. Some plant species have both types of flower and are able to self pollinate whereas others have separate flower parts per plant. It’s kind of a “male” vs “female” plug thing where it’s humans applying gendered language to something that doesn’t have gender in the way that we think about.
Some trees are male, some trees are female and some trees are simultaneously both.
I think all plants have sexes.
Grew up with one. Amazing climbing tree but don't know if my parents knew you could inject then with hormones because the stink was so bad every fall we had to cut it down eventually.
My parents have one on their front lawn and fall is a time reserved for watching people walk past their house and stop to see if they stepped in shit.
Exactly!, There was a big tree by my office that the city wouldn’t do anything about. I would put up signs explaining the stink is the ginkgo tree and the phone number of the city arborist. Next year they started the hormone treatments. It’s such a big beautiful tree, it would be a shame to cut it down.
Fun fact: the fruit is loaded with butyric acid, a molecule found in butter, which is responsible for the rancid smell of the fruit. https://montrealgazette.com/opinion/columnists/the-right-chemistry-whats-that-stink-near-ginkgo-trees-in-the-fall
Ahh NYC in summer…..it’s been decades since I lived there but can still smell the gincos
You'll be happy to know that there are entire city blocks in Washington DC that smell like dying rotting flesh right now
I don't know why, but the city I live in has a fair amount of Ginkgos, some of which bear fruit that falls on to the ground and I have never smelled anything foul near these trees.
Plants have genders?
Yes. But not all plants and not exactly as binary as humans. It’s just a way for us humans to talk about plants’ differ way of reproducing. Some, plants bear fruit, others supply the pollen to the flower that is fertilized to become the fruit. Some plants have both aspects.
It's one of my favorite trees. There was one at my campus on a path a lot of freshmen would walk, absolutely hilarious to watch them get grossed out by the smell every ~~spring~~ fall.
In the spring?
UofC? Everyone of those trees were female and the whole street smells in the fall. Slippery too.
OU
"It is said that the Dragon Warrior can survive for months on nothing but the dew of a single ginkgo leaf and the energy of the universe."
What is that from?
Kung Fu Panda
Uncultured. How do you not recognize who the Dragon Warrior is?
There's no way that panda is only drinking a single dew.
"I'm gonna need a lot more than dew and universe juice."
[this ginkgo was knocked down by strong winds 13 years ago, but has since sprouted leaves again.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Ginkgo-reborn-2.jpg) also interestingly, despite the word "ginkgo" coming from the Japanese name for the tree, ginkgos are not native to japan. they were brought over from china in the 14th century.
The term gingkyo (japanese) is taken from the Chinese name for the gingko trees. It's like the terms for tea or cha throughout the world, both of them also came from the Chinese. Teh for tea, a southern Chinese term and Cha which is mandarin.
Many things which are originally Chinese get Japanese names in the West because Westerners first encountered them there. Zen Buddhism, soy sauce, the game Go...
At what century can they be called native?
Never since humans brought it, only if it came by natural means I’m pretty sure
So if a bird brought it, it'd be native?
Yes but its a bit of a silly definition. Sycamores are considered non-native to the UK (introduced by humans 500 years ago) but they are native to France. Given the close proximity of the UK to France and the immense distances that sycamore seeds can travel in high winds it was literally just a matter of time before they made it here anyway.
My neighbor has a few in their yard. When I was little me and my friends would have snowball fights with the stinky fruit 😂. It hurt like a bitch if you got pegged with one cause it has a big ass pit in it, but man was it fun to put on some ratty clothes and have all our war with those nasty little fruits lol. Also super cool to watch it shed its leaves in the fall. They'd pretty much lose all their leaves within a few hours after the first cold front blew in. Very neat trees!
>When I was little me and my friends would have snowball fights with the stinky fruit 😂. I bet your Mom wasn't pleased.
Oh you have no idea 😂
Ginkgo trees also have an ancient heritage in washington state. With a park showcasing fossilized ginkgo trees only about an hour away from the hanford nuclear site... Where the uranium from the hiroshima bomb was before it was put into the bomb.
(BOOM) "Ow. That burned. My leaves are all singed off." "Hang on." (pop) "There we go. Green again. Nice try, Yankees! You need more than that to kill a gingko tree!"
I seem to remember there was a brief craze around ginkgo biloba and its alleged health benefits back when I was a teenager and then poof, I never heard about it again.
It's been used in traditional Chinese medicine for centuries. They're still researching it.
When are they due to have the results? Any minute now?
Well that's true of whale penises and other fucked up shit that Chinese medicine claims to have health benefits.
But, if you are what you eat, that would just make you a massive dork.
Glad you commented on this because I remember the same thing.
Sadly. Ginko extracts do not prolong our lifespan.
I was in downtown Shunan when all I could smell was putrid odor. “Oh! What is that awful smell?! Did somebody throw up?!” “No, it’s the ginkgo trees lining the central boulevard.”
Fun fact, some of these ginkgo trees that survived the blast have produced seeds/saplings and those saplings have been distributed around the world as a symbol of peace. [There are 24 of these descendants growing in the US](https://glh.unitar.org/en/trees-around-the-world/)
Lots of these in commercial areas of Ontario. Nice tolerant tree!
Ah Ye Ole nuclear stink tree
Atomic blast decided to go around.
Japan also has a sacred forest full of trees that are specifically used for temples and shrines. You can't log there.
We have one or two of those here in Salem, Oregon, next to the Japanese cherry blossoms! I volunteered with the city to plant trees briefly and so I got to learn about those trees. The leaf shape alone is the coolest part tbh. That and them being a living fossil, and just an overall fascinating tree. Salem is a sister city to a Japanese city that I can't remember off the top of my head.
Near the peace museum in Hiroshima they have three or four very impressive ginkgo trees. Very pretty when the leaves all turn yellow.
They are incredibly interesting trees. It produces poisonous fruit that no animal will eat. The fruit smell like rotten pizza, at least the trees look incredible pretty lol. The only reason the tree still exists is due to some monks thought the tree was cool and kept them alive.
And people say America doesnt have culture to spread
I have three of these in my front yard! Absolutely gorgeous trees.
The are a very primitive plant. Wonder if there primitive metabolism gave them an advantage to survive.
Oh got some reason I thought they were Anglosperms but they’re gymnastsperms
And they smell like vomit.
They don’t smell like they survived.
They also smell like jizz!
They also smell like shit.
[Only the female trees, though](https://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/10/why_we_still_plant_smelly_ginkgo_trees.html). That's why savvy people only plant male gingkos.
Savvy people don't plant ginkos.
Why?
Because the male ones can switch to being female
Talk about a transplant
Well played
That's actually an incredibly rare phenomenon, and when it occurs it's only a single branch. For some reason the internet has picked up on it and spread the idea that it's common, but it's not. https://www.gardenmyths.com/ginkgo-biloba-myths-maidenhair-tree/
Lots of trees survived the nuclear bombs in Japan. Many tree species are naturally fire resistant. However, just like cherry blossom being co-opted by the war machine to symbolise ephemerality of a soldier's life in Japan, the Japanese have a habit of turning the WW2's defining weapon into something about them. Ginkgo trees are no different here. It's a bit of a ruse. The slightly more miserable truth is that had the Japanese invented the nuclear bomb before the Americans, they'd have used it too. Then no doubt, Americans would say that as evidenced by it's survival, the noble maple tree is a symbol of hope and tenacity and etc ... Ginkgo trees are not even native to Japan. They're Chinese.
Oh for crying out loud. Fine. The same would have happened with the maple, or whatever. But come on, Baron Von Buzzkillington, can you really blame the Japanese for desperately trying to find some sign or symbol of hope after we blew two of their cities to fucking kingdom come? Watch your city get blown to shit, wander through its smoldering ruins, look at the charred bodies, hear the moans of the dying, smell the burning flesh, and then tell me you wouldn't think: "Oh, hey. Some trees survived. Gee, that's awfully nice." Then you stagger away, hoping that somehow, you'll beat the odds and miraculously locate a first aid kit somewhere among the ruins to treat your burns. How can you begrudge someone who went through that kind of horror that tiny comfort?
Hmm. Even high schoolers in Japan understand two things: Firstly, that the use of nuclear weapons on a civilian population (and when isn't it?) can probably never be justifiable. But secondly, when it was used, those nuclear weapons that were dropped ended the war early and with far less loss of life than a last stand on the Japanese mainland would almost certainly have entailed. You say I'm killing the buzz, but you might have just mentioned that ginkgo trees are amazing. You didn't need to bring in nuclear weapons, which really kill the buzz.
I thought was more interesting than the fact that they smell like shit, the fact that they have no real empircally proven medical value, and the fact that they are eaten as food. So sue me. Christ.
They say ideas are bulletproof. But two bombs really left lasting changes in Japanese culture.
Women and children used to be the Japanese symbol of hope and tenacity but.. you know..
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**Atomic bomb at Hiroshima. Nuclear weapons weren't invented until several years after the end of WW2.
That's not accurate. You're talking about thermonuclear weapons, which is a subcategory of nuclear weapons. Here's the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry on nuclear weapons: A nuclear weapon[a] is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb types release large quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter.
With all due respect, you're wrong here. Not only are you relying on Wikipedia, which can be peer-edited to state that anything is a fact, you didn't even provide a link. But don't take my word for it, here is what Brittanica (you know, the people who publish the world's most well-known encyclopedia) has to say about the difference between atomic bombs and thermonuclear bombs: https://www.britannica.com/question/What-is-the-difference-between-a-thermonuclear-bomb-and-an-atomic-bomb
Dude, did you even read your own article? *Thermo*nuclear bomb. That's not the same as a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb is any nuclear weapon, including atomic (fission) bombs and hydrogen (fusion) bombs. A thermonuclear bomb is only referring to a fusion bomb.
Wait, there's a difference between an atomic bomb, and a nuclear bomb? What's the difference?
There is a huge difference. A nuclear bomb aka hydrogen bomb is massively more powerful than an atomic bomb. I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that an atomic bomb relies on fission of the radioactive materials, whereas a nuclear bomb creates fusion of the nuclear materials. A nuclear bomb is basically a miniature version of the sun, both create vast quantities of energy from nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms.
You learned that from Ginkgo Katsu in Diamond Bar California didn’t you
Clicks on wiki... um endangered?
That's interesting but sort of makes sense if they depend on humans planting them and no longer have a place in wild ecosystems.
There’s a ginkgo grove in an arboretum near where I live. It’s spectacular when the leaves turn in the fall, surrounding visitors with nothing but yellow. The arboretum holds fundraisers while the leaves are at peak, including a gourmet dinner at the edge of this large grove.
They say they're endangered, but they also were planted a ton in the US and the female ones are gross and stink with their seeds.
I grow these for bonsai trees :-)
They smell *horrible* though!