Years ago I lived in Brooklyn, NY, and worked one year as an Urban Park Ranger in Prospect Park. Frederick Law Olmstead was a post-Civil War designer (we used to joke that he practiced on Central Park, then got it right with Prospect Park). He established many defacto arboretums in his pastoral park designs, and this was one of them. There was one glade with a row of ginkgo trees, planted after Olmstead's lifetime but early enough in the 20th century to be very large trees by 1980.
Female ginkgos, when they drop those fruits, are popular with the Korean community, who collect them, grind the seed under their feet to remove the hull, then use the seed in food (I'm not sure how). But those hulls smell exactly like vomit. So how do you manage to store those seeds and discard the hulls without driving the neighbors or yourself nuts? You must have to bury them deep in the compost! Have you ever tried to eat them? Not a tea of the leaves, but food with the seeds?
When I was a child my family used to regularly visit Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park (
http://www.stateparks.com/ginkgo_petrified_forest.html) in Washington--these trees are rarely found in petrified form.