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Sneezing Season
This past month, as well as preparing
gardens for the summer season, we have been coping with the
sneezing season... yes, a
professional gardener with hay fever!
In Crete, however, once the olives have finished flowering,
the symptoms do not seem to be so bad, and I can stop having to wear a dust
mask.
There’s no reason why other sufferers
should miss out on enjoying a garden; it is just a case of selecting the
correct plants and working during the right time of day.
Pollen is produced in order for
flowers to seed, and it is this microscopic dust that causes so much
irritation. So, you might say, let’s get rid of all those big blousy
flowers. Wrong!
Big, bright and/or scented flowers are
designed to attract insects and other creatures which then, inadvertently,
collect pollen and move it to other flowers. Such flowers, therefore,
produce relatively small quantities of pollen and don’t usually cause us too
many problems. The name, hay fever, and the fact that olive flowers trigger
such a strong allergic reaction, should indicate the type of plants to
avoid. Plants with insignificant flowers rely on the wind to blow their
pollen from one plant to another. When you get a lot of this type of plant
together (olive groves) the problem is exaggerated.
Pollen is like microscopic dust, so
small that during the heat of the day it rises with the warm air, and, once
the air starts to cool, it all comes floating back down again. Obviously
this is the time to avoid the garden. Similarly, wind direction has to be
considered.
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Overdependence on Weed Killers
Without opening a debate about
poisoning the earth or the atmosphere, here are a couple of recently
encountered problems. As a landscape gardener, I use glyphosate-based weed
killers as a tool to aid in controlling weeds in shrub beds…never relying on
weed killers alone. We recently took over the maintenance of a garden where
this had not been so. The main method of weeding in this two-year-old garden
seemed to consist of strimming down the long weeds and then spraying with
glyphosate. This did not produce an effective control for the following
reasons:
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Glyphosate works through the
leaves, so weeds with their leaves removed where not affected.
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Glyphosate will damage/kill plants
that get sprayed, and many of the larger shrubs had lost branches and a
number of smaller plants were dead.
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Healthy plants had obviously been
carefully sprayed around because the area within their branches were
infested with weeds (some as big as the plants).
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Some weeds are more resistant to
weed killers than others and these weeds can then become dominant. Areas
in this garden were covered with wild mustard.
The only solution was to hand weed,
which will be continued on a monthly basis aided by the use of weed killers.
Flowering
Now
Convolvulus sabatias
(Ground Morning Glory) is a favourite ground cover plant. Ground hugging and
rooting along the way, it produces pretty blue flowers during spring and
summer.
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