Tom: How'd I get into all this? I've been a gardener since I was a little kid. My Dad gardens and so did my Grandpa, and also Katherine Scott, the older lady who helped raise me. I've been at it almost as long as I can remember. I got married at 19 and my wife, Yvonne had allergies & asthma. I didn't. I thought that allergies were a head trip and I read at least one book, by an MD, on "psychosomatic" illnesses--mostly about allergy. Fifteen years ago I drove up to Berkeley, CA., from San Luis Obispo, where I live, to do a landscape job. All the Acacia trees.... were in full bloom and I loved the way it looked, masses and masses of bright yellow. In Berkeley, everybody was sick, even the guys I hired to help me do the job. But I was fine the whole week there. On the drive home I started thinking about it. Seemed to be a whole lot of coincidence going on. Probably just mass hysteria I figured. But I was interested. I was teaching horticulture at the CYA & the next Monday, back at my regular job, I talked to my students..., asked them if they would try some "sniff tests" with me. (Later I found out there actually is such a legitimate thing as a sniff test.) We all sniffed pansies, petunias, dianthus--nothing at all. Then we tried some bottlebrush. Blam! One boy sneezed, hard. We all laughed. Pretty darn funny. Then another bottlebrush-sniffer sneezed and another and another. They just kept sneezing, too, for the entire two hour long class. The next day in the class these same guys were still sneezing, over and over. They sneezed all week long. One sniff, total wipeout. I realized that I was, had certainly been, really full of it. This was no head trip. Psychosomatic my eye! This was real and it was instant and powerful. I was hooked. I decided, least I could do was to re-landscape my own house so that my darling wife, Yvonne, wouldn't be suffering from any of the plants in our own yard, and off I went to buy a copy of Allergy free Gardening---but there was no such book. Nothing remotely like it.
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