Pollen Allergies

Pollen Allergies – Which trees make me sneeze?

Pollen allergies and the trees that make us sneeze are the trees without showy flowers which are wind-pollinated.  Their pollen is light and produced in great abundance, far more than that of insect-pollinated trees. These are the trees that cause hay fever during the spring months.

Not all the wind-pollinated trees cause problems for people with allergies. Pines and spruce, for example, have a waxy pollen that rarely cause a reaction. The pollen of birches, poplars, ashes and several maples, on the other hand, are the bane of people who suffer seasonal allergies.

Then again, we don’t want to give wind-pollinated trees a bad name.  Many are dioecious, having male and female flowers borne on different plants. For these trees, there is an easy solution to the pollen problem.  Simply plant female trees only. They receive pollen, but never produce it.
If it were only that simply, these days we decidedly plant “seedless” trees (the male), especially in urban and suburban settings.

Why are male trees so popular? It’s because they’re clean.  Male trees produce only pollen, which is usually invisible. They never produce seeds that fall to the ground and accumulate, potentially blocking gutters and drains and adding to our yard work.

Female trees don’t produce pollen, but instead all those annoying seeds. That’s why cities and subdivisions generally avoid female trees.  But by choosing “neatness” as the ideal criteria for tree selection and planting almost only male trees, cities are causing hay fever to run amok.

In an ideal world all the trees that make us sneeze would be replaced by non-allergenic trees.   People would ban together to promote girl trees, figure out how to save the world with all those extra seeds all for the good of our health.

That day has not yet arrived. People with Pollen allergies still suffer from the trees that make us sneeze.  How do we defend ourselves from all this maleness?