Ginkgo is one sexy tree

The walk from my car to office at Wesleyan College every day is like a walk in the park… not the work so much as the view of the wonderful old buildings and landscape.
And in the next few days we will be treated to a particularly special annual event - the fall of the Ginkgo leaves.
All at once the leaves will turn brilliant yellow; then, all at once, they will fall to the ground. People will be staring up and taking pictures of the trees. Some folks lie on the ground and make “angels” in the golden blanket of leaves.
What makes the fall show even more special is knowing that ginkgo biloba are the oldest trees on earth, dating back 250 million years to the time of dinosaurs. The living fossil was once thought extinct, but found in China hundreds of years ago and replanted around the world. The leaves have a unique fan shape, and the leaf extract is said to have memory-enhancing and other medicinal powers. Some trees in Asia are said to be 2,500 years old.
Here’s the sexy part. The boy trees have cones and the girls have seeds. In early fall you can smell the female tree from fifty yards away when the seeds fall to the ground and give off a really foul odor as they decay. The smell is so bad that people end up cutting down the female trees. It can take twenty to fifty years for the trees to mature, so you can’t tell the boys from the girls when you plant them.
There are one female and two male ginkgo trees at Wesleyan, and you can find others scattered around Macon. If I had a few more decades to live, I’d plant a grove.