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Interview with author Thomas Ogren - Page 2

© Colleen Kaemmerer

I talked to all the experts: biologists, landscapers, nursery folk, arborists, botanists, horticulturists, allergists. The last did know about allergy, but not about horticulture. The first bunch knew nothing about allergy. I started to study it all myself. Took me about a year just to get all the exacting terminology down. Took me almost fifteen years to collect the data. I never set out to write the book, it just grew out of my need to organize years and years of data I'd been collecting. I had boxes and boxes of notes and charts and clippings and other data. I basically just wrote this book, one plant at a time. And I did them all alphabetically, A to Z. Turned out in the end that this was a pretty good way to do it anyhow, since it makes it easy to look things up.

Colleen: Pollen has the ability to travel more than a hundred miles. Does it really make a difference what plants are in your yard?

Tom: Okay, they always like to say, "pollen can travel more than a hundred miles." True, and not true. Some kinds of pollen travel well, but most do not. Gravity affects everything sooner or later, including pollen. Most tree pollen falls out right at the drip line of the tree. Look on the sidewalk underneath an alder or birch tree in the very early spring. Alders & birch have very light, buoyant pollen, BUT, right under the tree you'll see plenty of the bright yellow stuff. A few feet away from the tree you'll still see some, but not much. A few dozen feet from the tree and you'd be hard pressed to see any. Yes, pollen blows, but the truth is, most of it falls out, lands and sticks, right close to where it starts. Meteorologists measured the lightest of pollens, Timothy grass pollen, back in the early 1970's. A brilliant scientist, Gilbert Raynor, from New York, measured pollen at intervals going away from a stand of Timothy grass. What did Raynor find? At a mile out he trapped some pollen, but at a half mile from the field, more than 99 per cent of all the pollen had already fallen out. Right next to the field was where he trapped the most pollen. Think about it. It's just good old common sense. If I was standing right next to you, smoking a big, fat, stinky cigar--sure, some of that smoke could be found a block away, maybe a mile away. Heck, maybe some of that smoke would travel a hundred miles or more and somebody in a different city

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