Botanical Blog

Making a garden allergy friendly

By Betty Victor

The hills are green and the trees are in bloom

Its a beautiful time of the year. But for allergy suffers it can also be a time with watering eyes and sneezing, especially if you love to work in your garden.

While there is no such thing as an allergy-free garden, there are some things that can be done to put the enjoyment back into gardening and make it more allergy-friendly.

Start off by knowing what trees, flowers or shrubs you and your family, as well as your pets, are allergic to and eliminate them. If you eliminate a few each year in time you will have an allergy-friendly garden.

Try not to garden on warm, dry, windy days. The wind blows the pollen into the air. Garden when it is cooler or overcast, if possible.

To reduce the skin coming into contact with pollen wear gloves, long sleeves, and glasses to protect your eyes not just from the pollen but also from the sun. A hat will help keep some of the pollen out of your hair.

After gardening change your clothes if possible before going inside your home, so you dont bring any pollen.

Plant flowers, trees, shrubs that are pollinated by insects like butterflies and bees rather than plants that are easily airborne pollinated. This will help in an allergy friendly garden. Airborne pollen stays rather close to home.

Use native plants from our area when you can. They have adapted to our climate, will require less fertilizer or pesticides, are easy to grow and use in an allergy-friendly garden.

Make sure the plants you are adding to your garden are put in the right place to make them grow and thrive. Putting them in a place that they dont thrive will add to mold and spores and attract insects and disease.

When looking for shrubs or trees to plant, its important to know that some species can be male and female within a single plant, like a gingko. But only the male produces allergy causing pollen.

As a rule female trees and shrubs are messier than males. While females arent pollen producers, they help trap and remove pollen from the air. But they stink.

Male trees that are sold as fruitless or seedless are often very heavy-pollen producers. One of the highest allergy producing plant is bottlebrush. Its flowers contain a lot of pollen.

If you love bottlebrush and suffer from allergies plant it away from your home so the pollen doesnt drift in through an open window.

Plant a pollen-free tree rather than one like a sycamore. Sycamore trees produce fuzz on their leaves and stems, which becomes airborne. This can cause irritation to your eyes and throat.

Cottonwood, pecan, olive, ash birch and elm are a few trees that you might want to avoid in your allergy-friendly yard. Instead try a dogwood, redbud, poplar or magnolia as they are low-allergy trees.

If you have a hedge, thin it out so the air can circulate through their leaves. Hedges are very often heavy dust, pollen and mold collectors.

Keep your garden as weed free as you can as most weeds are also heavy pollen carriers.

Whenever possible look for a disease-resistant plant. They dont get infected with mildew, rust and other plant disease as easily so the air around them will be healthier.

Hybrids that have double flowers lack male pollen parts. Double chrysanthemums, tuberous begonias, alyssum, columbine, geranium are all pollen free plants. If you have a shade garden, you can plant hosta, azalea, camellias and hydrangeas as they are pollen-free plants.

If you love roses, petunias or daisies, plant them. They are low-allergy plants. Because pollen is heavy and sticky in perfectly (plants with both reproductive structures) flowering plants, they are not airborne pollinated. Insects pollinate these.

If there are plants you love and must have in your garden, but are high pollen producers, plant them where they can be seen, so you can enjoy them but not suffer because of their pollens. Keeping them away from the house, patio or deck also helps.

Trees are planted for their beauty and shade, but thinning them out to let the sun in so the air can circulate helps reduce mold and spores. There is a book by Thomas Leon-Ogren titled Allergy-Free Gardening. In it he lists more than 5,000 plants and how they rank as to the pollen each carries with No. 1 being that lowest allergenic and No. 10 the highest.

Check the library to see if this book is available.

When you go to your favorite nursery ask for help in choosing the right flowers, trees or shrub to help keep your garden as allergy friendly as possible so you can continue to enjoy gardening.

Betty Victor is a Master Gardener with the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Fairfield. If you have gardening questions, you can call the Master Gardeners office at 784-1322.

Flowers are a reminder of a treasured pet

By Sharon Leos

When we first moved to Fairfield, there was a house down the block from ours that, from spring through late summer, had a beautiful border of pink flowers along the sidewalk.

Although we never noticed them giving off any fragrance, our chocolate Labrador retriever (his name was Moose) liked to rummage through the knee high bed and sniff whatever it is dogs enjoy sniffing.

He would emerge from the flower patch with yellow pollen clinging to his face. From then on, we referred to the flowers as Moose poppies because the flowers had several large lobed petals and a papery texture and appearance similar (to my amateur eye) to Iceland poppies (Papaver nudicaule).

I could have knocked on the door and asked exactly what they were, but I was happy to call them Moose poppies.

Time passed on, as did Moose. Three years ago I noticed the Moose poppies had escaped their yard and were growing in the landscape strip next to the street.

I knew they would not be there long because the landscape maintenance company in our neighborhood is very efficient at either digging out or spraying herbicide on anything that does not look like plants that are supposed to be growing in the strip.

So I dug a few small plants out and brought them home to our garden as a memorial to our faithful friend. It was during the heat of summer and I kept the transplants well watered but they did not look like they were going to survive the move.

I forgot about them until the early spring of the next year when what I thought were weeds popped up where the transplants had been planted.

I was about to pull them when I realized the it was the Moose poppies. New growth was emerging from the soil and a few weeks later, several beautiful pink flowers opened.

I have since learned the true identity of the Moose poppies is oenothera speciosa, also known by several common names including: Mexican evening primrose, pink evening primrose, sundrops, and pink ladies.

The evening primrose is a naturally occurring wildflower in the southwestern United States and Mexico. It is not a California native, but was introduced here and has naturalized in the wild. While not officially listed as an invasive plant species in California, if left unchecked the evening primrose can rapidly spread in the garden by rhizome runners and seed.

The Sunset Western Garden Book describes members of the genus oenothera as being able to succeed in tough, rough places. This explains why it does so well next to the concrete sidewalk in our clay soil and also endures the hot summer weather.

Although they are called evening primroses, flowers of O. speciosa open in the morning. Two inch diameter, four petaled flowers emerge along stems that are roughly 18 inches tall.

The common flower color is light pink with a yellow center, but all white varieties are also available. The plants grow to about three feet wide in a shrub-like shape and do best in areas that receive full sun but will tolerate partial shade.

Once established, they are drought tolerant plants that require moderate to little water. A perennial, the evening primrose will die back in the winter and emerge again in the spring. Plants started from seed usually do not bloom until the second spring.

Many sources list the evening primrose as virtually pest and disease free and I have found this to be accurate. While the aphids are busy trying to feast on the plants surrounding them, the evening primroses in our garden remain clear.

Slugs and snails pose a hazard to tender new growth, but can be controlled by handpicking or baiting if necessary. If you decide to use bait, choose one that contains iron phosphate as the active ingredient (it is safer around pets, children, and wildlife) and read and follow all of the manufacturers instructions.

This year we have a beautiful mound of dozens of Moose poppies that are a daily reminder of the wonderful dog we once had. I read somewhere that nostalgia is the thief of time, but I think a little nostalgia in the garden helps keep me grounded in a wild world.

Sharon Leos is a Master Gardener with the University of California Cooperative Extension office in Fairfield. If you have gardening questions, you can call the Master Gardeners office at 784-1322.