When should a ginkgo be pruned?
Dormant season, and unlike the oaks there is no disease window to work around — the real job is structural training in the first 15 to 20 years, selecting one central leader before competing verticals set up a codominant fork. The trap is over-thinning a mature ginkgo: it grows slowly enough that whatever a crew removes to "open it up" won't be replaced for years, so the thin crown is permanent.
Reading ginkgo before you cut
A genuinely declining ginkgo is rare and the cause is almost always mechanical: a girdling root, a root flare buried under builder fill, or trunk damage from a mower or string trimmer. Stress reads as short annual shoot extension and small pale leaves; if the tree leafs out fully and goes gold in November, it is not dying no matter how sparse it looked in July.
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