After going on a long walk through St. Paul after the recent hard freeze, I noticed that many of the local gingko trees seem to be dropping all their leaves at one time upon vehicles, sidewalks, or anything near them. It doesn’t look like your typical leaves falling off of a tree either… more like leaves dumped from bags straight onto the targets. After noticing these green leaves were from the all to familiar gingko tree, I got to wondering about a few things about the trees themselves:
- Gingko trees drop nasty stinky/gooey seeds.
- Gingko trees are native to China… not local at all.
Other than being a hardy tree that can survive anything, there really isn’t anything that says Minnesotan about this tree. Yet, we are totally okay with planting something that meets are solution for the time replacing elm trees.
As Minnesotans, I am sure we have spent a pretty penny bringing wolves controversial back into the state to restore “nature” to how we think it should be, yet think it’s acceptable to have Gingko trees lining the streets of our capital city. Wouldn’t the best way to go either manipulating our environment to an “easy” perfection, or deciding that if it wasn’t here 100 or 1000 years ago we shouldn’t be dragging these trees a crossed oceans and having mass plantings to fill in holes left by native species?
What are your thoughts on the gingko trees if you have had any experience with them? Should we be planting things from other parts of the world mass scale or should we be keeping tree and bush plantings “local”?
