The Scientifically Proven Reasons why Ginkgo Trees are Weird

• Etymology
• Living Fossil
• Gymnosperms
• Ginkgo Berries
• Addendum
• Comments

Ginkgo

Ginkgo biloba L. or the gingko tree is a very strange plant. The English name gingko comes from its name in Japanese “ginnan” meaning “silver apricot”, which you may notice sounds nothing at all like gingko. 

Apparently, this is because in the 1690s the first white man in history to discover the gingko tree did so by reading about it in a book that was written in Japanese. This man, Engelbert Kaempfer, who also happened to be the foremost expert on Japanese plants in the entire world (excluding the Japanese), didn’t know how to read Japanese properly and then also included a typo in the book he wrote about it. 

Some time later the inventor of giving pretentious names to things, Carl Linneaus, read Engelbert’s book and took his word on it. After all; “ginkgo” just sounds so convincingly oriental. Linneaus, by the powers invested in him by himself, officially named the genus and species Ginkgo biloba L. before signing his hard work with his own last initial as he did with every species he named.

English speakers, unsurprisingly finding that the garbled mess of letters “gink-go” is hard to say, started pronouncing it “ging-ko” instead. Then some dictionaries started spelling it that way as well, leading to the current state of there being two competing spellings of this name.

We should probably count our blessings though. At some point, people wanted to name it Pterophyllus salisburiensis or Salisburia adiantifolia. I think we can all agree that a Chinese ornamental plant that smells of puke should not be named after a processed TV dinner steak.

Ginkgo biloba L. is the only species in its genus. It’s also the only species in the family Ginkgoaceae, the order Ginkgoales, the class Ginkgoopsida, and the division Ginkgophyta. Which are all very creatively named. Linnaeus certainly deserves the recognition from that L. At least he managed to shake things up and not have its species name be the same as the genus name like he did with the black rat¹Rattus rattus rattus. The gingko’s species name biloba comes from Latin for “double lobed” referencing the shape of the leaves.

Old Ginkgold

The gingko’s last common ancestor with anything that isn’t extinct may have been 299-293 million years ago. By all rights, even our one species of ginkgo should be extinct. The gingko is a living fossil, which is the equivalent of something that looks exactly like a T. rex being a totally normal currently living animal species. Gingkos seem to evolve anomalously slowly. They haven’t changed appearance or environment for millions of years.

Gingkos seem to only be happy in the wild growing in disturbed soil along the banks of rivers, which is very specific. While it’s totally fine to have a very specific range, lots of species do, it’s important to at least be really good at it. Gingkos just aren’t.

Other species who live in places like this succeed by being able to reproduce very quickly since it’s a constantly changing environment. They don’t need to waste energy being able to live for thousands of years because the river bank will probably have moved by then thanks to erosion.

So what does the gingko do? It can live for thousands of years. They grow relatively slowly, don’t reach reproductive maturity for quite some time, and have large nutrient-intensive seeds. In fact, Gingkos are so poorly suited to their environment that around 2 million years ago they went extinct everywhere in the world except for a small part of China.

I could get into all the physiological and cellular reasons why the gingko is archaic, but then I would need to explain to you how normal plant cells work and how gingkos do things differently and are more outdated. This article is long enough as it is. Just trust me that it’s the equivalent of taking a Ford Model T to a monster truck rally or trying to run Crysis max settings on an abacus.

I’m not really saying that the gingko is terrible. If it was, it wouldn’t have evolved. What I am saying is the same thing I tell my grandpa every year at the evil supervillain family picnic. Whatever worked for you millions of years ago doesn’t work anymore because times have changed. New innovations, namely flowers, exist now and are better than you. (my grandpa’s arch nemesis is a superhero who can speak to petunias). But like my supervillain grandpa, the gingko isn’t able to evolve quickly enough to adapt.

Many scientists think that the only reason the Gingko isn’t completely extinct today is because the Chinese discovered it and have been cultivating it for centuries due to its beauty and belief in its magical healing properties. Though, if you think about it, that’s just kicking the can down the road. Sure, maybe it didn’t go extinct within the last thousand years thanks to humans. Surely this makes up for the millions of things that did go extinct thanks to us. But it’s still literally tens of millions of years out of place. How, exactly, did such a shit plant last that long? What really were the odds that it would have gone extinct within the last thousand years without human intervention? 

No one really knows. 

Ginkgomnosperms and Gingcones:

The gingko is a gymnosperm. An example you’re certainly familiar with is the pinetree. You may be thinking that the gingko is very strange since it’s nothing like a pine. That is true. But pines are also weird compared to other gymnosperms. 

Gymnosperms also include cycads (which look like giant half-buried pineapples with a single giant pinecone/flower thing coming out the top), gnetums (look like normal leafy plant vines), ephedras (weird stick shrubs with no leaves), and welwitschia(an immortal desert plant that grows exactly two blade leaves endlessly until it’s just a tangled pile of leaf). So you see, all the Gymnosperms are freaking weird ²except for gnetums which are suspiciously normal (making some scientists think that angiosperms evolved from them).

The thing all gymnosperms have in common, and that separates them from their rivals angiosperms (the flowering plants) is that they have seeds without a seed coat. That’s literally what gymnosperm means. ³The root gymn- means naked. Because in ancient Greece the gymnasium was where manly men would go to work out, make gains, be naked, wrestle, hang out with the boys and appreciate each other’s gains. While naked. Together. Y’know… Man stuff. For men.

This is overlooking the much more interesting thing about gymnosperm seeds. They’re made out of two genetically separate plant individuals. The “megagametophyte” is technically the embryo inside the seed’s mother. 

A long time ago when mosses evolved into vascular plants one of their two genders decided to check out and do as little work as possible outside of babymaking. They became these tiny little nothing plants called gametophytes. Basically just a sperm duct and a womb. You may not like it, but that is what peak performance looks like. They wait for spores from the other larger gender, the sporophyte, to fall on it. The gametophyte then fertilizes and impregnates itself (not the term you’d use with plants but whatever) with the spore. The offspring grows into a much larger sporophyte on top of the gametophyte, killing it in the process. 

Ferns, and their military alliance of nonfern relatives, still do this for some reason. (“ferns and allies.” is literally the name of the group) A small group from ferns and allies branched off and became gymnosperms by evolving the cone (like pinecones) which would keep the little gametophyte attached to the sporophyte basically acting as its genitals. Surely the freeloading gametophytes prefer this over just being on the ground somewhere.

Anyways, pollen impregnates the gametophyte inside the cone (still sounds wrong). The combination of the gametophyte wrapped around the baby plant embryo is known as the seed.

I thought about doing a joke about how all this is a metaphor for parenthood or something. But let’s be honest, it really isn’t. Plant sex is just fuckin’ weird.

Very Merry Ginkgo Berry:

Back to gingkos. For whatever reason, they evolved to have their cones look not at all like cones. They have two gendered cone types. Most pines have both male and female cones which look different, one producing pollen and the other housing megagametophytes. The two gingko “cones” are shaped utterly differently from each other. Also, neither looks remotely like a cone. The male pollen bearing cone lacks scales of any kind, instead just looking like a grape vine after all the grapes have been pulled off. The female one looks like a weird dog bone.

If you’ve seen a gingko, it was probably a male. Female gingkos produce “berries” whose juice smells like vomit thanks to containing a vomit chemical called butyric acid. They’re generally not planted areas you actually want people to visit. This is also the part the Chinese use in traditional medicine, because of course it is. 

I say “berry” in quotes because these aren’t actually berries. They’re not even fruits. It’s actually the seed. Remember how I said that gymnosperms by definition don’t have seed coats? Yeah, the ginkgo has one of those despite being a gymnosperm; taxonomy is a folly of man’s hubris. They also evolved seed coats that are soft, juicy, and brightly colored. Presumably for the same reason why flowering plants evolved true fruits: to trick a dumb animal into eating it and spreading the seed. This means that each berry is genetically three individuals since the seed coat comes from the tree’s cells. 

But why evolve vomit berries? Today, the only creature that regularly and intentionally eats gingko berries is the Chinese. A more recent but likely transient predator being the gullible American in the form of completely unregulated dietary supplements. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine likely hadn’t evolved a symbiotic relationship with the gingko millions of years ago. For one; the plant would probably have some actual medically significant effect if they did. Also, despite what the CCP may tell you, the nation state of China and its social order had not already existed before the dawn of time.  

Whatever animal that was so interested in eating vomit berries that a tree evolved to cater to this is now long extinct. The only thing to remember them by being their disgusting eating habits ingrained in the genetics of this one stupid plant. There’s something poetic in that, probably.

This also asks more questions on how the gingko managed to survive so long without its symbiotic partner. Another plant, the avocado, evolved to feed the giant ground sloth which could easily bite through the thick rind and swallow the pit whole. No other animal could spread the avocado’s seeds because they are just too big. Then humans murdered all the giant ground sloths and now avocados exist purely on our mercy because we happen to like them on toast.

Maybe whatever evolved with the gingko to exclusively eat its vomit berries was wiped out by humans in modern-day China who then adopted the tree? Like how Native Americans did with the avocado, or how current humans will with all plants after we annihilate the bees? 

Addendum:

Full disclosure, there are no cited sources because my source was my notebook from my college Plant Morphology course. I literally dug it up and flipped through it, marveling at how my ability to sketch leaf diagrams has improved and my handwriting somehow got worse. I’m not gonna cite my professor for his privacy. I’m certainly not gonna cite my textbook from that year. (Even if I could remember its name, I wouldn’t give that overpriced pdf the pleasure.) 

I also referenced Wikipedia to help decipher whatever the fuck it was I wrote in my notes, and so I could get sidetracked by botanical etymology for three hours – which is an essential part of my workflow.