(Olive flowers)
It’s
not always easy to live in nature and especially under the trees. In
spring you have to cut back weeds as numerous as hay in a stack and
hack away at nature that wants to invade you. You would think that
the paved parts of the garden would not need as much work: just a
sweep of a broom and you’re done. Well, forget that, if you have
black locust trees. They produce creamy white, lovely scented
flowers, a real treat for the hundreds of buzzing bees; but when the
flowering is over, the misery starts.
No
broom can keep up with a black locust tree that is losing its
flowers: you will find them everywhere on the ground, the garden
furniture, in your clothes and hair. And if you think that this will
only be a problem for a few days – you’d be wrong: it might take
weeks before you can sit down on a chair without first having to
clean away locust-flowers.
What’s
worse is that there are even more trees around the house whose leafy
branches provide cool shade in the summer, but in spring cause a real
plague. Take the olive trees surrounding the garden. Generally
people only think of their friendly silvery green leaves and the
golden oil produced. But when they come out of their hibernation and
are in bud and forming new branches, they produce hundreds of
thousands of tiny yellow-white flowers (an adult tree can have as
many as 500,000). And those blossoms also produce tonnes of pollen.
The perfume industry loves those flowers, filling elegant little
bottles with expensive scented liquid. But I’m not at all happy
with these blossoms, because they too have to fly free from the tree
– just at the moment when the black locusts have finished shedding
their flowers. And no broom can compete with the fall of olive
flowers: once you finish sweeping the far end of the terrace, you
just have to start anew at the beginning.
It’s not just the unwanted flower carpet that annoys, there is also
the pollen that colours all the plants yellow and is a danger to
health. The pollen of the olive tree is transported by wind and
insects to the place of fertilization, but can also end up in your
nose. It all depends on how sensitive you are, but olive pollen rank
high on the list of allergies and that is why it is forbidden to
plant new olive trees in Amman, the capital of Jordan.
Another
tree high on the allergy-list is the pine, and yes, there are also
some of them around the house. I must admit that pine trees do not
deposit as many shitty flowers. Pine trees have cones that are
responsible for propagation. The female cones are woody and fall with
the seeds of the trees in autumn, while the male ones – much
smaller – are herbaceous and fall from the tree after making the
pollen in the spring. That yellow powder is spread by the wind and
the female cones know how to manipulate the pine needles in order to
create an airstream bringing the pollen exactly were it is needed.
Well, part of it – because the other part covers my plants, terrace
etc.
By
the way, this transport of pollen can produce impressive visual
effects. Once, when looking over the pine woods above Parakila, I
thought I saw a wild fire. By observing it longer it turned out to be
pollen, that in dense sulfur-coloured
clouds, rose from the trees, turning and dancing in the air, before
descending gently between the pine needles. A rain shower can shoot
down all that pollen, turning the roads in olive groves and pine
woods yellow, a phenomenon I once thought was a kind of earth
pollution
The
Greeks fear such a cooling rain shower, because the water can wash
away the pollen. So I am not sure if I should be thanking the gods
for the refreshing shower we got today. My garden is finally a bit
cleaner, but that rain might have also abruptly finished the
fertilization rituals of the olive trees. The Greeks, who are nearly
entirely economized away by Europa, have the little that they have
left mostly due to nature, like chorta
(wild vegetables), their vegetable gardens and the products of the
olive trees (and here I mean olives and olive oil). So perhaps I’d
better sing these pollen
blues in
silence, nor will I mention that I probably discovered the cause of
my recurrent springtime sinusitis: pollen.
(with
thanks to Mary Staples)
©
Smitaki 2017
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