That looks a bit premature.
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Do not, repeat not, plant a mulberry tree by your driveway.
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Me too. Pine tree nearby?
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When I was a kid, the house we rented had a mulberry tree. There’d be purple bird crap everywhere when the berries fell.
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Friends had one that overhung their car. Not a pretty sight.
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There’s an estate up near us full of cherry trees. They’re shit around pavements so some have had to be taken down and the pavements relaid. Anyway I go there with my children for pink snow fights with the fallen blossom. It’s fruiting time now and all but two slightly removed from the rest are male. What a waste! Cherries are over a tenner a kilo! I can pick half a kilo in five minutes while walking the dog. But all my trees that I use are running out at my height and here they all are taunting me with their no fruit. What weirdness would make you think fruit is a nuisance but the pavements being rotorvated and allergies being inflamed isn’t?
Car culture sucks.
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Very interesting. Never knew cities did this.
Though I guess i shouldn’t talk. After all, I’m over here intentionally sexually frustrating female plants so they’re more psychoactive.
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@thomdunn, there’s so much confusion in this piece…
Botanist by training and by heart here.
Let me pick some bones and trample on them a bit, shall we?
First, that photo you chose? Cherry blossoms. Pollinated by insects. Not going to give you allergies, even if you are allergic to cherries. Hermaphroditic flowers. They are simply not throwing their pollen around. Sorry, very wrong picture for the whole article.
And yet more, such as hazelnut and apple trees, produce “perfect” flowers that contain male and female parts within a single blossom.
“Perfect”? As opposed to what? (BTW: They are flowers, of course they are perfect.) Also: no, hazelnuts don’t have hermaphrodite flowers. They are monoicous, in a disachisum. Not everyone has seen this, so here is a female flower:
Others, such as oak, pine, and fig trees are monoecious…
Fig trees you would think of (Ficus carica) are functionally dioecious. There are male and female plants, which nevertheless do have sterile parts of the other sex in their inflorescences.
And you thought your sex life was complicated? Think again. And don’t get me started on the wasps they are reliant on…
more than 100 new varieties of maple clones, all male
Hm, curious: do they plant wind pollinated maple? Otherwise, this doesn’t make sense in an article starting with allergies. See: cherry tree. (Also: functionally male, see fig tree.)
Ogren sees gingko gametes as the far greater threat. […] “Once the pollen gets in your nose, it will germinate and start swimming up there to get to where it’s going,” Ogren says. “It’s pretty invasive.”
Dear me, that’s your problem? Do you have any idea what else enters you on a daily basis and starts moving around? Also, Ginkgo isn’t usually causing strong allergies. Even in areas where they are very commonly planted, only a small percentage of the population develops allergies.
And then, a voice of reason,
Ascribing a real-life human problem to the botanical world might seem like we’re trivializing what humans, particularly women, face,” [Ries] says
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No, it’s one of our oak trees. This is the stuff:
They’re called catkins, and shed the pollen. Then stick to everything.
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Another botany guy here. I agree with all that you write except the critique on the word “perfect”. I am going to hazard a guess that your botany training may have taken place outside the U.S.? Here in the U.S. “perfect” is a perfectly (ahem) acceptable botanical term for hermaphrodite, sometimes also called bisexual, flowers. The history of the term is interesting as it has to do with the Puritan desexualization of botanical terminology. I teach it to my students then immediately tell them I think it is silly, and then from then on use the terms “bisexual” and “unisexual” - plants with unisexual flowers being then divided between monoecious, when both staminate and pistillate flowers are on the same individual, or dioecious, with them being on separate individuals. Interestingly, I am sure you know this but others I bet do not, plants will in some cases change “sex” in the course of their life, switching from producing only staminate flowers to only pistillate flowers, or vice versa, sometimes after decades or even centuries for trees, or have a combination of flowers when they are “supposed” to be dioecious. Darwin wrote an entire book on the subject which is a good read for the true botany geek (On the Appearance of Different Forms of Flower on the Same Species of Plant, or something like that - not looking up the title right now). So I think flowering plants can teach us about how artificial these classifications can be. I have personally moved away from referring to “male” and “female” flowers and stick to the facts, staminate or pollen bearing, pistillate or ovum bearing, etc. just as my vocabulary for humans has shifted to be more exacting and less culturally biased.
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This has been known about for quite a while - I teach botany and natural (herbal) medicine and always mention it when I teach about allergies. Another factor that affects allergies is the low biodiversity of the tree species -so we get blasts of pollen from only a handful of species that are all flowering at the same time, rather than a mix of low levels spread over more time like in a natural ecosystem.
BTW though it is fun to let folks know pollen is really sperm, if you want to get technically correct about it, it’s not. Pollen are spores that then create sperm cells when they land on the pistil of a compatible flower. Sperm would never survive floating about in the air, just like our human sperm would not, so it is a rather ingenious way to solve the problem of needing to sexually reproduce with partners who are at a distance!
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