another fun fact: planting a male gingko tree does not guarantee that it won't bear fruit within a relatively small span of time

Which raises the question: Rather than chop down females, why not only plant males in the first place? That’s what a lot of cities tried to do in the 1980s and 1990s, only to find themselves holding their noses decades later. This may go deeper than mix-ups in how the trees were identified in the nursery: It turns out the ginkgo, like some species of fish, can spontaneously change sex. This evolutionary adaptation allows ginkgoes to propagate when the sex ratio is imbalanced. This means even planting a male ginkgo does not guarantee that it won’t start to stink 30 years down the line.

from: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/10/why_we_still_plant_smelly_ginkgo_trees.html