Ginkgo

Where it grows

Ginkgo’s only known wild populations cling to a few remote mountain ravines in southwestern China. But for over a thousand years monks have cultivated ginkgo at Buddhist and Daoist temples across China, Japan, and Korea, where many ancient specimens still stand. The species is now planted as an urban tree worldwide for its remarkable tolerance of pollution, salt, drought, and pests.

How to recognise it

Ginkgo is in a class by itself — literally. Its leaves are unique fan shapes with parallel veins, split down the middle in the species name biloba. The leaves turn vivid butter-yellow in autumn and often drop almost simultaneously after the first hard frost. Female trees produce fleshy seeds the size of cherries with a distinctively foul odour when fallen and decaying.

Uses

Inside the smelly seed shell is a sweet, edible kernel — ginnan — eaten in Japanese chawanmushi and Chinese savoury dishes. Leaf extracts are widely sold as a memory and circulation supplement, with mixed clinical evidence. Almost all urban plantings are male grafts to avoid the seeds.

Living fossil

Identical leaf fossils date back over 200 million years to the Jurassic, and ginkgo trees within 1 to 2 kilometres of the Hiroshima blast survived and resprouted after the 1945 atomic bomb.