Top: Horses cloaked by snow.
Below: An orange tabby camouflaged in a golden ginko tree. “Living fossils,” ginkos are the oldest tree species on earth, dating back 200 million years, when they shaded giant dinosaurs. (Domestic cats have slinked the earth for a measly 10-20,000 years; horses for 55 million).
The trees come in male and female, but because the females’ nuts, when stepped on, smell disgusting—some argue vomit, others insist human excrement—most trees today are male. Which is unfortunate, since once the stinky outer layer is removed, the inner nuts are delicately flavored and delicious.
Ginkos were generally thought extinct until a few hundred years ago, when a stand was revealed in China. All the ginkos in the world descend from those tough hangers on. Six of them, growing 1-2 kilometers from the blast site, were the only organism to survive that close to the Hiroshima atomic blast.
Today, ginkos thrive even on polluted city streets, turn sunshine yellow in autumn, and then in a single day, almost all the leaves flutter down like snow to form a carpet of gold on the ground below.
i have dozens of nuts/seeds stratifying in my fridge and ready to plant
have grown them each of the last 10 years
read somewhere that they can change gender (?) stress related? who knows
evolutionary/survival tricks ? lotsa time to practice
find the smell to be slightly-off-fruity (it's how I find them)
Good luck. Mine was one of two dozen seedlings I grew and it just happened to be a female. You are welcome to some seeds to plant and try for your own! All the commercially available trees are cloned males.