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David Marcellis, In Ginkgo Season, One Man’s Soup Is Another Man’s Stench; Cooked seeds can be tasty, but many cry foul over raw stink. Wall Street Journal, Nov 25, 2014 (front page).
online.wsj.com/articles/ginkgo-trees-stink-up-cities-when-seeds-fall-1416869012
Quote:
"Ginkgo seeds smell horrible, and their toxic flesh may cause rashes.
"'We eat them,' Wang Tong said as she looked for fallen seeds under several ginkgo trees on Roosevelt Island one late October afternoon. Grabbing one off the ground, she gently squeezed its ripe orange flesh to reveal a white, pistachio-sized nut that, once shelled, can be cooked. 'They’re great with rice, or in soups,' she said.
"Ginkgo trees, distinguishable by their fan-shaped leaves, are ubiquitous in cities, thanks in part to their extraordinary resistance to diseases, pollution and pretty much everything else. At over 200 million years old, they survived whatever killed the dinosaurs, and some of them withstood the atomic bomb blast that struck Hiroshima in 1945.
"When young, female ginkgos—the seed-producing kind—are impossible to tell apart from male trees. It takes a female at least 25 years to produce its first seeds, and even then, only females planted within close vicinity of a male end up doing so.
"The nuts themselves—which contain a toxin that can lead to vomiting and even loss of consciousness—need to be cooked to be edible, Prof Crane said. Heating them greatly degrades the toxin, but even cooked, 'you shouldn’t eat them by the handful.'
"Over the past decades, cities have worked to reduce the nuisance caused by smelly ginkgo seeds. They now exclusively plant ginkgos that were grafted from male trees. * * * [New York] city forbids planting female ginkgos on public property, but has no plans to cut down existing ones. * * * The city [Iowa City] agreed to cut down healthy female ginkgo trees that people wanted removed—yet in the end, few did. * * * Washington, DC, mostly focuses on nipping the problem in the bud. Every spring, its forestry department sprays the district’s 900 female ginkgos with chlorpropham, a herbicide traditionally used to inhibit potato sprouting. This leads ginkgos’ burgeoning seeds to fall off in the following days, the district’s forestry department says.
"Nearly all ginkgos on earth today have been planted by people: The only ones still found in the wild are in remote parts of China, which led the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 1998 to place the ginkgo on its list of endangered plants, where it remains.
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发表于 12-1-2014 19:33:08
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