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Welcome to my web site, Greetings! Thanks for coming to visit. I’ve had my website up for more than three years now and have met a great many very wonderful people through it. If you’re completely new to all of this, let me give you a bit of the history of Allergy Free Gardening. Some twenty years ago I became very interested in this subject mainly because my wife, Yvonne, had terrible allergies and asthma. I was teaching horticulture and one day I asked my students to do some “sniff tests” with me. We sniffed pansies and petunias and nothing happened. Then we tried sniffing bottlebrush flowers and BLAM! people started sneezing, hard. In later weeks we tried sniffing a great many more types of flowers. I quickly discovered that certain flowers never made anyone sneeze, that some flowers made a few folks sneeze, and that there were others that just literally trashed people. Eventually I gave up doing these sniff tests because several people got dangerously sick from them. I realized I was playing with fire. By this time though I was hooked on the idea that the right garden wouldn’t trigger any allergies. I soon also started testing plants to see if they would cause any odd skin reactions and again found plenty that did and others that never did. I tried to buy a good book on allergy free gardening but in those days there was nothing to buy; there was no such book to be had. And so I decided to just keep on researching the subject myself. In the following years I learned a good deal. I went back to college and got my MS degree, focusing all of my graduate work on plant/allergy connections and on the different plant flowering systems. One thing that deeply interested me was that so many of the separate-sexed (dioecious) trees and shrubs often triggered severe allergies. Occasionally I would come across advice from lung associations or allergy groups that suggested no one plant any of these trees or shrubs. It occurred to me though that since these “very worst” plants were indeed separate-sexed, where one tree would be all male, and another all female, that in truth only the males would produce pollen. It also dawned on me that since female plants did not produce any pollen, that they were the ones that would be most truly allergy-free. This was no great piece of intellectual brilliance by any means, but for some reason no one else seemed to have noticed this crucial importance about the sex of plants and pollen allergies. At one point I started to photograph flowers of suspect trees and shrubs. Rather suddenly I discovered that although it was easy to find plenty of males to shoot, female landscape plants were surprisingly rare. I found this same situation in city after city. What, I asked myself, was going on? It seemed almost as though the cities had been landscaped to cause allergies, but I knew this didn’t make sense.

 

Website: http://www.allergyfree-gardening.com/