If it bears smelly fruit (or technically its supposedly not fruit, but people call it that) its female. If it produces small pollen cones its male.
en.wikipedia.org
Of course you would see these things well after it's already been planted, so it probably doesn't help much.
Also the male plant produces the pollen, but if the female plants are really smelly that might be a better option, unless your particularly allergic.
More on the smell
"One day last summer on a stroll down 66th Avenue in Oakland, a smell brought me back to a short street (one block) in the South End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, lined with a single tree species. The smell and the tree: the ripe fruit of the female ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba). It was pungent; for me, a cross between a rotten apricot and vomit."
"I mentioned that the fruit releases its odor when it is bruised or crushed (triggering the decay process), so the malodor could be mitigated by harvesting the fruit."
localecology.org
That odor doesn't sound at all appealing
And even if you can largely avoid it by harvesting, then apparently you would have to dispose of the fruit without bruising or crushing it first. You could eat it, it is edible, but even if doesn't smell as you eat it (because it needs to decay before it really starts smelling) I'm not sure you would want to have to eat a lot of ginko fruit/nuts quickly when they start to become ripe. Also apparently if you don't get the fruit in time, you get the smell, so you would have to be vigilant about it. |
