There is a price to be paid for beauty, and, at this time of year, there are people who suffer (and may not realise the cause), from the proliferation of pollen that floats in the air, often unnoticed, but felt in sneezes, snuffles and wheezings. A friend said that his neighbour came around the corner of her house asking what was "the stuff" floating in the air. She is younger and keener of eye than he is, and at first he could not see anything, but then, now and again, he could just spot a tiny particle of something pass him by. He tracked it down to a not very handsome-looking tree by a wall. He had planted one of them in another house: it was a balsam poplar. The attraction to him then had been, he recalled, was that he had read somewhere that when the buds of this particular poplar opened in Spring, they are covered with a sticky brown wax or balsam, possibly as a protection against insect attack. The substance was said to be delightfully fragrant, but remains so for a few weeks only until the bud-scales fade and fall and the leaves emerge.
But the catkins were what did the damage in this case to his neighbour. These are about two inches long, pencil-thick, and covered with the lightest, downiest substance. Particles of this down, floating through the air, were, almost certainly what gave our friend her sniffles. At times, when a gust of wind came up, it was like a minor snowstorm. There are also other potential sources of floating irritants nearby. Not fifty yards from that balsam poplar stands a big beech. In forty years it has never produced such a crop of flowers or catkins. The macadam under its longest-reaching branches, has had to be daily swept of the little, pea-sized male catkins, originally a bright yellow, now, on falling, a light brown. Daily, buckets-full have been swept up and conveyed to the compost heap. The surface of the car has had to be swept of them and the bonnet opened to extract those which were blown into the engine.
Do we know that these make us sneeze and snuffle? No book to hand tells us this, but the sniffling, of recent origin, goes on. As to the huge, hanging masses of yellow oak catkins, whose pollen is carried on the wind, this year's unusually prodigal growth of oak flowers can be deduced from the words of Ralph Whitlock in his book The Oak describing the flowering of the oak as an event of low key. What an amazing year we are in, for here it is prodigious. Y