Article content “Gee, I don’t know why people don’t pick up after their dogs. It stinks here,” moaned a friend as we were walking down a tree-lined street in Washington. The unmistakable scent of doggie doo was in the air, but heaps of the stuff would have been needed to produce such an intense odour. No such piles of poop were in sight, but there were plenty of what looked like squashed yellow cherries on the sidewalk. And they reeked! A mix of vomit, sweaty socks and outhouse fragrance would be an apt description. An upward glance revealed that they were not cherries, but rather the seed pods of ginkgo biloba trees, easily recognized by its duck foot-like leaves. Indeed, the ancient Chinese name for the tree, “yinxin” translates as “duck’s foot.”