Ginkgo biloba comes from China, where a handful of wild populations still cling to isolated mountain sites. The species is the last surviving member of a plant lineage that stretches back roughly 300 million years, making it one of the oldest living tree species on Earth. Today it grows on every temperate continent, but its wild roots trace to a few rocky refuges in eastern China.
A 300-Million-Year Lineage
The broader group that ginkgo belongs to, the Ginkgoatae, began diversifying around 300 million years ago during the early Permian period, when the planet’s landmasses were still fused into a single supercontinent. At their peak, ginkgo relatives spanned more than 16 genera and grew across much of the world. The genus Ginkgo itself first appeared in the fossil record about 170 million years ago, during the middle Jurassic, when dinosaurs dominated land ecosystems.
Over the following hundred million years, nearly every related species went extinct. What survived was a single species in a single genus in its own entire botanical division: Ginkgophyta. No other living plant sits alone like this in its classification. Genetic analysis of wild ginkgo populations shows that all living trees trace their deepest genetic split to roughly 390,000 years ago, meaning the current population is a relatively recent bloom from a lineage that has otherwise remained remarkably stable for eons.
Where Wild Ginkgo Still Grows
The only confirmed wild ginkgo populations survive in a few tiny, isolated pockets in China. The most well-known is on Tianmushan Mountain in Zhejiang Province, in eastern China. These are not planted groves or temple gardens. They are remnant populations that persisted through ice ages in sheltered mountain valleys while the species vanished everywhere else. The trees you see lining city streets from Tokyo to New York all descend, ultimately, from these Chinese refuges.
China has cultivated ginkgo for its edible seeds for at least 2,000 years, which is part of why distinguishing truly wild trees from ancient cultivated ones is so difficult. Buddhist and Confucian temples often planted ginkgo on their grounds, spreading the tree across China, Korea, and Japan long before Western botanists ever encountered it.
How It Reached the Rest of the World
Europeans first saw ginkgo in 1690, when the German botanist Engelbert Kaempfer spotted the trees growing in Japanese temple gardens. Seeds and saplings eventually made their way to European botanical collections, and the tree proved exceptionally easy to grow in temperate climates. It has now been cultivated in Europe for close to 300 years and in North America for over 200, though it has never naturalized on its own in either place. Every ginkgo outside East Asia exists because a person planted it.
The name itself reflects this journey through Asia. “Ginkgo” derives from the Japanese word “ginkyo,” meaning silver apricot, a reference to the pale, fleshy seed coating produced by female trees. Its other common name, maidenhair tree, comes from the resemblance of its fan-shaped leaves to the fronds of a maidenhair fern.
Male Trees, Female Trees, and That Smell
Ginkgo is dioecious, meaning individual trees are either male or female. Only female trees produce the round, plum-sized seeds surrounded by a soft outer layer that, when it drops and decays, releases a smell often compared to rancid butter or vomit. The odor comes from butyric acid in the fleshy coating. For this reason, cities almost exclusively plant male trees along streets and in parks.
This separation of sexes is ancient. Researchers believe dioecy in ginkgo evolved from ancestors that carried both male pollen cones and female ovule structures on the same plant, with those reproductive parts gradually splitting onto separate individuals over evolutionary time.
Ginkgo in Traditional Medicine
Chinese herbal medicine has used ginkgo leaves and seeds for centuries, with documented medicinal use dating to at least 1505 AD. The seeds were roasted and eaten or prepared in remedies, while the leaves were used in teas and poultices. This long tradition of use is what eventually drew the attention of modern pharmaceutical companies.
From Temple Tree to Global Supplement
Commercial ginkgo leaf farming began in the 1980s, first in France and the United States, then spreading to China in the 1990s. These plantations grow ginkgo specifically for leaf harvest, not nuts. The leaves are processed into standardized extracts, the most common of which contain 24% flavone glycosides (plant-based antioxidant compounds) and 6% terpenoids (compounds thought to improve blood flow and protect nerve cells).
China is now the world’s largest producer of ginkgo leaf material, which makes for a fitting full circle: a tree that survived ice ages in Chinese mountain valleys is now farmed across the same country on an industrial scale, its leaves dried and shipped worldwide.
A Tree That Outlasted an Atomic Bomb
Ginkgo’s reputation for resilience is not just evolutionary. In Hiroshima, a ginkgo tree more than 200 years old survived the 1945 atomic blast at Shukkeien Garden, just 1,370 meters from the epicenter. The tree still stands today, leaning toward the hypocenter because the returning rush of air after the initial blast wave bent it permanently inward. Seeds from that tree have since been planted at universities around the world as symbols of survival. It is one of at least three trees in that single garden that lived through the bombing, but the ginkgo’s story tends to resonate the most, perhaps because the species has already been defying extinction for hundreds of millions of years.