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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-556
Ginkgo
Ginkgo biloba
Ginkgo is a living fossil, essentially unchanged for at least 150 million years and now surviving wild in only two small pockets of China. Its baked seed tastes something like a cross between potato and sweet chestnut, and its leaf is the source of the ginkgo extract sold worldwide for circulation and memory. Trees don't reveal their sex until 15 to 20 years old, and only females bear seed, wrapped in a fleshy coat that smells foul as it rots - which is why named male trees, not seedlings, line most streets. Otherwise nearly untouched by pests, disease, pollution or urban heat, it is one of the toughest trees there is.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 3–8
- Soil
- Sand · Loam · Clay
- Moisture
- Dry · Well-Drained · Moist
Vertical layer
Canopy- Soil pH
- 5.2–7.5
- Plant type
- Deciduous Tree
- Mature height
- 50–80 ft
- Mature spread
- 30–40 ft
- Plant spacing
- 30–40 ft
- Root type
- Tap
- Spread pattern
- None
Keep exploring
Similar plants
Discover more plants with shared forest layers or growing conditions.
Alligator Juniper
Juniperus deppeana
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Almond
Prunus amygdalus
Almond flowers earlier than almost any other cultivated tree, which is its biggest weakness as much as its gift to early pollinators - a warm…
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American Basswood
Tilia americana
American Basswood is famous for the bees - mature trees hum audibly for several feet around when they bloom in early summer, giving one of…
Canopy · USDA 3–8
American Beech
Fagus grandifolia
American Beech is a slow, long-lived shade tree that can establish and eventually fruit even under an existing forest canopy, unlike almost…
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American Chestnut
Castanea dentata
American chestnut once carried the sweetest nut of any chestnut species and covered more than 200 million acres of eastern forest, but an…
Canopy · USDA 5–8
American Elm
Ulmus americana
American Elm is a native stream-bank tree that grows into a 60 to 80 foot vase-shaped shade crown and, once mature, becomes one of the…
Canopy · USDA 3–9
The deeper layer
Plan what comes next.
- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
- Locked ecological function
- Byproduct
- Locked ecological function
Behind the record
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