A single species, a deciduous tree (Ginkgo biloba). It is a gymnosperm = gymno, naked, and sperm, seed. Based on fossil evidence, this species has existed almost unchanged for over 200 million years. Native to China, and currently found wild in two locations.
Ginkgo: the name given to this plant by Engelbert Kaempfer (1651-1716), a well-traveled German-born physician and botanist who lived in Nagasaki, Japan for just two years, Sept.1690-Nov.1692. He introduced ginkgo to Western science. The name ginkgo is derived from a Japanese phonetic spelling of the Chinese characters for "silver apricot", 銀杏, one of the Chinese names for this plant, of which there were several. One of the pronunciations given in a Japanese dictionary of 1666 is ginkyo. But why was the y in ginkyo replaced with a g to give ginkgo? Some have suggested that Kaempfer just made a simple spelling mistake. Others have surmised that his Japanese interpreter pronounced ginkyo using the regional dialect spoken in Nagasaki at the time and Kaempfer heard it in accordance with his northern German dialect (Crane, 2013). Linnaeus used Kaempfer’s ginkgo when he named the tree Ginkgo biloba in 1771.
Silver apricot: in this Chinese common name for Ginkgo, according to Kirschner and Heish, what appears silver-colored in not the fleshy, outer layer of the so-called “fruit” but the white hard seed coat (sclerotesta). Ethnobotany Research & Applications 10:321-328 (2012)