Ginkgo biloba ‘Hoss’ is a cultivar selected from seedlings by Josef Hahnl from Chorherrn, Austria. Like many other of his cultivars the seedlings were grown from seeds of the old Ginkgo tree cultivated in the Schönbrunn castle in Vienna, Austria (Please see the cultivar named Ginkgo biloba ‘Schönbrunn’). There was speculation that it originated from The Hoss Tree Farm, Virgil, Illinois. U.S.A. but this has been proven not to be true.
Josef Hahnl has named four other cultivars; Ginkgo biloba ‘Adam’, Ginkgo biloba ‘Ben’ , Ginkgo biloba ‘Hoss’, Ginkgo biloba ‘Hop sing’ and Ginkgo biloba ‘ Little Joe’. All named after the main characters in the American western television series, the Bonanza (1959-1973). The show is set in the 1860s and it follows the adventures of Ben Cartwright and his sons living near Virginia City in Nevada, in The United States of America. The cultivar was named after the film character, Eric "Hoss" Cartwright, a “big and friendly” son of Ben Cartwright.
Description – Ginkgo biloba ‘Hoss’ The leaves and the plant has typical look of a tetraploid with large, thick and wavy leaves that have irregular fine to deep/rough lobes. The leaves a are approximately 5 cm long and 10 cm wide. The growth is strong with thick shoots and branches. Ginkgo biloba ‘Hoss’ exhibits typical leaf dimorphism, the leaves emerging/sprouting early and later on the same buds. The earlier leaves are not so deeply and intensively lobed as the older ones, but they tend to curl to form a broad ‘cup’. The later emerging leaves are variable and not easily distinguished from other tetraploids. They tend to be flat or only slightly curling with some fine lobes eventually overlapping.
The mother tetraploid plant was cultivated for long in the same pot with a wild Ginkgo biloba and regularly pruned, so it was only 2 m high in 2020. Nevertheless, grafts on diploid rootstock growth quite vigorously and comparably to species in nursery conditions. The mother plant is now cultivated at the Masaryk University in Brno, in The Czechoslovakian Republic.