November 5, 2016

Ginkgo glory.

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In our neighborhood today, the ginkgos won the award for best tree.

38 comments:

Skeptical Voter said...

Ah something that speaks a simple truth. That is in short supply these days.

mccullough said...

The maidenhair tree

effinayright said...

Had a gingko in front of my house when I was a kid. Nice color in the fall.

But when it produced fruit they smelled like dog poop or vomit.

Big Mike said...

Needs more orange -- the Illini caught MSU in a down year and won.

traditionalguy said...

It's a rigged system. Everybody knows the Maples are always the winners, and they come in more than one color. As Walt Whitman fans, we demand a full recount. It must have been those third party poplars that drew off votes.

Meade said...

"But when it produced fruit they smelled like dog poop or vomit."

The Ginkgo tree is dioecious, meaning each individual plant has either only male or only female flowers. It's the female that produces fruit that is so malodorous. However, a male ginkgo tree can be as old as 35 years when it mysteriously changes sex and becomes a fruit producing female. I have nothing against transgender humans but, if I had a ginkgo that flipped on me like that, I'd turn it into firewood and plant a whole new tree.

chickelit said...

I see lots phosphorus-laden lake poison

StephenFearby said...

wholelottasplainin' said...
"Had a gingko in front of my house when I was a kid. Nice color in the fall.

But when it produced fruit they smelled like dog poop or vomit."


Only the female tree does that. The flesh of the fruit can probably be used as a substitute for certain bodily fluids in Marina Abramovic's "Spirit Cooking" recipes.




Cheryl said...

We are having a ton of landscaping done right now, and the nursery owner called me and said he had a couple of large Globe Gingkos that another job couldn't use...did I want them. Based on your pictures, and the beautiful gingkoes on a golf course near here, I'm thinking I should find room. I have 55 acres. Shouldn't be hard.

Richard Dolan said...

The men are far and away the best ginkoes. The ladies of that species have the unfortunate habit of stinking up the street with their seeds in the fal. Lots of them in Brooklyn Heights, mostly female. But you learn to live with it. We planted a silver linden on the sidewalk in front of our house. Nice tree, and quite able to stand up to the harshness of life on the city sidewalks.

Meade said...

Silver Lindens are excellent. I'm also a big fan of Green Vase Zelkova.

Bob R said...

If you have a huge female Gingko tree in your yard and have sons ages 9 and 7, the sons may develop an irresistible urge to throw the stinky fruit at each other while waiting for the school bus. If the older brother wins the fruit battle, his younger brother may not forgive him - even 50 years later. You'd think younger brothers would gain some perspective after all that time.

Bob R said...

Winning a stinky fruit battle is a relative term. The winner smells like vomit for the rest of the day too.

Anonymous said...

Gingko fruits contain butyric acid (same as found in butter). It goes rancid and makes that awful smell. They are very old trees and appear in the fossil record.

Linden trees were holy to the ancient Germans. Courts and important meetings would be held under a Linden tree. Many towns and villages still have a Linden tree. In English, the German name 'Linde' is frequently translated as 'lime' although the Linde is not a citrus.

Nice to see the widespread use of the German name. That helps avoid confusion.

Pop quiz on this tomorrow....maybe?
Vote Trump! You can't stop the oligarchy by voting in the oligarch.

tim in vermont said...

I just saw a Hillary ad where she quoted military members who were claiming they didn't think Trump was fit to order them into wars the way Hillary likes to do. Where is ARM to decry the FASCISM?!?

Unknown said...

Don't remind me. I cleaned up the first ginkgo dog puke on the floor of the ginkgo season tonight. We have a huge female ginkgo, and three dogs that love to eat the fruit, and then puke up the pits in the house. I'm not sure that they love the last part, but it doesn't stop them from the first.

rhhardin said...

November 5 is usually the peak color day for my Norway Maple, pedalled home long ago as a 6 foot seedling from KMart on the back of my bicycle.

The idea was shade for Susie my Doberman, but it was only a Doberman later that real shade grew out.

bananarepublic2020 said...

We watched the Woody Allen TV show on Prime. A remake of Bananas with Miley Cyrus playing the revolutionary. Not horrible. He looks pretty good for 80.

Meade said...

"You'd think younger brothers would gain some perspective after all that time."

Ha ha!

Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...

I hope they were boy-trees. Otherwise Ginkgo STINKO.

Malesch Morocco said...

My parents Gingko is still totally green.

Gabriel said...

My favorite tree is the Sunburst Locust, which is a thornless*, podless* locust which has this kind of chartreuse color in spring, green in summer, yellow in fall.

*May produce thorns and/or pods occasionally.

I saw a very lovely tree in a parking lot this summer, so lovely I suspected that, like the gingko, it has a surprise. It was a mimosa, and yes they do have a surprise.

Ginkgkos in my part of the country are natively only found in petrified wood. They were saved from extinction by Chinese monks. I'm pretty sure every ginkgo in the US is descended from those Chinese monks' ginkgos.

Laslo Spatula said...

Sketchy Guy Who Works at the Adult Bookstore says:

At least eighty percent of the customers I deal with here at the Adult Book Store smell horrible. Not 'I didn't get a chance to shower this morning' bad, but agonizingly, astonishingly horrible...

Look, dudes: for a start, if you are going to chronically masturbate please try changing your underwear more than once a week. Splashing on cheap cologne doesn't hide your stink: you now just smell like chronic masturbation and cheap cologne...

I have had to take money from hands still scaly with encrusted semen; I have been given strangely oily coins. Do you know what it's like to be handed a credit card and notice there is a pubic hair stuck to the guy's thumb? There ain't enough Hand Sanitizer in the world for this shit...

I have seen lube stains smeared on the thighs of pants. I have seen semen stains, piss stains, shit stains -- sometimes all three on the same guy: and no doubt he'll come back in a week wearing the same fucked-up pants. These guys have officially Given Up, but they still want their porn...


Some are actually aware of their stench: I had one guy tell me he smelled bad because his asshole didn't work right anymore; another guy said it was because he was allergic to soap. Most don't seem to notice, though: they have become immune to the ravages of their own personal ecosystem...

When I get home after a shift the first thing I do is take a LONG shower, but sometimes that doesn't even feel like enough: it is like their smell has invaded my pores, and no matter how hard I scrub I have been tainted and the odors are incubating under my skin...

There is a reason why I tell customers the bathroom is Out of Order...

I am Laslo.

mockturtle said...

Laslo: EEEEEEUUUUUUWWWW!!!!!

Christy said...

I find ginkos unsettling. They creep me out. They are somehow just wrong!

Laslo Spatula said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Laslo Spatula said...

Sketchy Guy Who Works at the Adult Bookstore says:

Friends ask me why I just don't get another job. Yeah, that would be nice, if more places were open to hiring recently-paroled felons. I made a mistake, and now I am in the Purgatory of this Adult Bookstore, tormented by Lost Souls Who Want Extreme Porn...

Of course, I didn't do myself any favors by getting the prison tattoos on my neck and hands; let's just say in prison you gotta show your allegiances. Funny, though: some chicks dig it, but I sure ain't ever gonna be invited to meet their parents...

Once I got out of Prison I tried for a Pizza Delivery job; I aimed low, but evidently not low enough. Unfortunately I answered honestly if I had ever been arrested for a DUI; however, I DID lie about how many times -- three seems a lot my respectable than seven. Look: I can deliver a fucking pizza without getting drunk, but -- looking back -- maybe I couldn't. Dealing with impatiently arrogant assholes makes me drink, and thankfully at the Adult Bookstore you don't get the arrogant, you get the ashamed...

So I work here and pay my bills, and pay for the roof over my head, even if the homeless crap on my building's doorstep. To my neighbors I'm the Sketchy Guy Who Works at the Adult Bookstore, but I can live with that. I have the occasional drink or five at the local dive bar, and I mostly stay out of trouble. I don't ask for favors, and I don't expect any: I just want to keep to myself, and I'll be fine, even if I have to obsessively wash my hands twenty times a day...

I am Laslo.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Late every summer I watch in awe as I observe the ingenious way the Great Designer has provided for the maple to spread it's seed. Then I clean my gutters. Again.

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...

Birds gotta fly and fish gotta swim but the seed dispersal systems of some trees clearly transcend the brute evelutionary imperative to reproduce. Put an airfoil on it? How did that happen?

chickelit said...

Late every summer I watch in awe as I observe the ingenious way the Great Designer has provided for the maple to spread it's seed. Then I clean my gutters. Again.

The Great Designer gave maple splooge wing.

chickelit said...

Now watch Althouse get all Freudian with that photo of maple seed.

chickelit said...

Maple is one of the hardest woods...

Scott said...

A friend owned a home in Kingston, NH that belonged to the daughter of Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. The front yard has a Linden tree that he brought back as a sapling after the signing in Philadelphia. A beautiful tree.

Yancey Ward said...

What a beautiful tree!

rhhardin said...

It's atomic clock hell this morning. Half of them don't get the message.

MaxedOutMama said...

How dare you otherize and denigrate the elms and the maples!!!! How DARE you?

rhhardin said...

Man is an oak. Nature contains nothing sturdier. - Lautreamont

mockturtle said...

M.O.M. admonished: How dare you otherize and denigrate the elms and the maples!!!! How DARE you?

That's right! They should all get awards! ;-)