Maidenhair Tree Ginkgo biloba
Maidenhair Tree is an introduced perennial tree, found in the lower 48 states. It grows to 108 ft.
More about this plant
Ginkgo biloba, commonly known as ginkgo, also known as the maidenhair tree, and often misspelled "gingko" is a species of gymnosperm tree native to East Asia. It is the last living species in the order Ginkgoales, which first appeared over 290 million years ago. Fossils similar to the living species, belonging to the genus Ginkgo, extend back to the Middle Jurassic epoch about 170 million years ago. The tree was cultivated early in human history, remains commonly planted, and is widely regarded as a living fossil. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Drought tolerance
- High
- Shade tolerance
- Low
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Low waterlogging
- Height
- 108 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 55 ft wide open-grown, the broad end of measured crowns
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~5 caterpillar species
Ginkgo supports ~5 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Ginkgo in North America, including:
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
Wildlife & visitors 1 bird
Open records of who else uses Maidenhair Tree — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 bird species (fruit, seed, browse):
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (27) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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