We have a small ginkgo in our back lot. We also have a dawn redwood, another living fossil that is coming back.
I have one in my front yard, and mid summer, all the leaves fanned and fell of. I think it might have gotten sick somehow? I know it’s not dead, because a bunch of younger sprouts have emerged from the bottom, but I might need to cut off the main trunk come spring. I’m just hoping it somehow recovers, even if I doubt it.
I think there's well over a hundred ginkgos planted throughout my city, I almost feel like they're getting a bit overused. My street got a new tree row of ginkgos last year. The oldest individual around here was planted almost a hundred years ago. I've only seen females used (outside of botanic gardens) in Germany, at Invalidenpark in Berlin. I visited in october and didn't find the smell that bad, but maybe the fallen fruit hadn't fully "matured" yet.
It's unfortunate when a city lines a steet with just one type of tree. I was in Beijing last year, which was the first time back in seven years, and it was stunning how many trees had been planted in and around the city. Unfortunately, there was very little variation in the species used. We put about 30 different kinds of trees on our back lot, as well as a variety of bushes and grasses. I have noticed a number of insects that I haven't seen before. There is so much potential if we can get away from monoculture.
Los Angeles used strangler figs because they grow really quickly. They also drop dew when they're stressed because they tend to get infested with aphids really easily. Which means 20 years after someone thought it was a good idea, there are these massive Totorotrees everywhere whose wood is made out of depleted uranium, whose foliage covers a 30' circle with sticky varnish and whose roots... I mean, they patch the sidewalks around here in the PNW when they're about an inch or two separated. In my old neighborhood in LA I measured a 13" height difference between sidewalk tiles, and then gave up because within a mile I found dozens that were taller. Then they hauled the space shuttle through and needed to cut them all down and everyone got super-salty because they figured they wouldn't get replanted. To the best of my knowledge they didn't.
The dark secret of my profession is that 90% of landscape architects knows very little about trees. This square was built ten years ago and I doubt those trees have grown more than an inch or two since then. Common beech has the scientific name Fagus sylvatica, "sylvatica" meaning "of the forest", meaning the complete opposite of a windy, barren granite hellscape. But beech trees are "iconic" of the south and the competition entry promised beech and won because of beech, so beech it is. They have a really shallow root system so the whole sub terrain of that plaza is an artificial vegetation bed kept together with pumice, charcoal and prayers that nobody drives a truck over it. The runoff has to be kept separate and not allowed to infiltrate the bed since the salting of the roads during the winter would kill the trees in a year. A real marvel of engineering, but the landscape architect should be ashamed.
I saw some horrific statistic in a lecture slide some years back that not only was 90% of all street trees in Oslo Tilia cordata, but almost all of them were genetic clones. Although they're lovely and useful trees I haven't used them in a single project since then.