The Sperm Trees of Los Angeles
Mental Floss | The Tree Everyone Loves to Hate
every Spring somewhere between 10-20% of those trees bloom, and smell positively awful. And not just any kind of awful — they smell, no joke, like sperm, and are colloquially known as the Sperm Trees of Los Angeles.
I decided to get to the bottom of this. What are these nasty tree-beasts? According to Wikipedia, they are the hilariously-named Tree of Heaven, (or Ailanthus altissima), an invasive species from China, brought to California by Chinese miners and railroad workers around the turn of the last century.