Van Dycks

Sooner or later it seems to happen to most of us. We go out to the garden and find ourselves sneezing - or at least developing a stuffy nose. It's usually the pollen in the air and has become such a prevalent phenomenon that sites like the Weather Channel actually provide us with a Pollen Count index so we can see whether we want to spend a lot of time outdoors that day.

And yet do you know - I can't think of a single gardener that I know who lets that stop them. Pollen is everywhere whether you garden amidst it or simply leave the house to go to your car - or even if you like to have your windows open. You can't escape it. So the next best thing to do is to learn how to best live with it.

Pollen is actually pretty cool stuff. It's what the bees and moths carry from plant to plant to help those plants reproduce. A plant can't make seeds unless it has received its necessary allotment of pollen. Unfortunately, when that same pollen is carried to our noses it can trigger hay fever.

The good news is that the types of pollen that most commonly cause allergic reactions are produced by the plain-looking plants (trees, grasses, and weeds) that do not have showy flowers. So we ornamental gardeners aren't likely to be growing them. If there is an allergy provoking culprit in our yard it is most likely our lawn. My favorite solution to this problem is to get rid of it and plant more flowers. Unfortunately, this isn't always practical.

Every plant has its own pollen season, which depends a lot on weather conditions as well as its natural bloom time. There are days when the count is low - always a pleasurable time for gardeners, and others when it can be quite high. So if you are truly bothered by the stuff, the first order of business for you before venturing outdoors is to check that pollen count. If it's high, you may want to stay indoors and close the windows. Get an air conditioner. Or buy some of those inexpensive masks that hardware stores sell to people who work with wood and generate a lot of sawdust. Dust is also a big allergy trigger so these masks are made to filter those things out.

But the biggest thing you can do to help yourself enjoy the garden is to plant wisely.

First, as I suggested, cut down on the size of your lawn. It really is your biggest enemy when it comes to pollen, not to mention it being a big investment in time and energy. Consider using ground covers, hard surfacing, or large islands of mulch and pathways that reduce the amount of green turf that your yard uses.

Second - learn to love native plants. Using these - plants like coreopsis, potentilla, hardy geraniums, asclepias (Butterfly plant), heucheras, Aquilegia (columbine), and coneflowers are easy on the gardener. They are undemanding plants that can survive even if you get a whole string of high pollen days and need to take indoor shelter. And few of them are wind pollinated, so they aren't likely to release allergy provoking particles into the air you try to breathe.

A surprisingly delightful second strategy is to choose plants with big, showy flowers. In general, the bigger and showier the flower, the bigger the pollen. Big pollen doesn't drift insidiously through the air and into our nasal passages as easily as fine pollen does. So it is a lot less likely to affect us. And as a bonus, our gardens will be packed with color. Good choices include many beloved spring bulbs. Daffodils, hyacinths, the early rock garden iris, and tulips are good, safe bets. Surprisingly, even though the flowers are small and may not be considered showy, crocuses also make the approved allergy sufferers list.

In summer, your best bets include begonias, irises, including the very showy German bearded type, Phlox, Clematis, Lilies, Roses, Dahlias and Salvia. Peonies and Tree peonies also have extravagantly flamboyant blossoms.

Hostas are rarely grown for their flowers but they do bloom - often quite beautifully. They are as low maintenance as your typical native plant (even though they actually are imports from the Orient) and fall onto the allergy-approved list as well.

Avoid plants with homely little flowers in brown and green. Unlike human nature, where beauty is not an indicator of goodness, and homeliness doesn't automatically mean badness, in the garden homely plain flowers are bad news. Almost inevitably these are wind-pollinated and so are the main cause of your misery. If you've ever gone too long without mowing the lawn you'll see what I mean. Grass has a flower - although gracing it with that name seems like an exaggeration. It looks somewhat like threads and dots in brownish green. Keep that lawn mowed if you must keep it at all. And watch for weeds that have similar blooming types.

Highly scented plants often prove to be allergy triggers, so I f you are really susceptible, it's best to keep to those with little or no scent. It's not so much that scented plants are pollen-filled, but the scent often triggers our allergies and so is best avoided. It's the same reason most allergy doctors forbid their patients to wear perfume to an office visit. You'd make everyone else in the waiting room suffer.

Other plants to avoid include several types of trees, including ash (male), cottonwood, elm, hickory, juniper/cedar, maple, mulberry, oaks, walnut, pine, poplar (male), sycamore, Russian olive, and willow. It may not be practical to cut them down if you already have mature specimens in your yard - but be aware that they are potential problems for you. If possible, keep them heavily sheared to reduce blooming. (Yes - even trees that don't have easily recognizable flowers do bloom. That's where all those seedlings you find around your yard come from. So another bonus is that you won't need to waste time pulling so many of those.

Other allergy producing plants can include: Kentucky bluegrass (if allowed to flower), orchard grass, timothy grass, castor bean, pigweed and lamb's quarter. Notice that most of these fall into the class we refer to as weeds. And notice that we would rarely choose to include any of these in a floral arrangement. That may give us a hint about what to avoid.

A good clue as to whether a particular plant is going to be good for you is seeing a lot of activity around it from bees. Flowers are natural coquettes who have an inborn ability to attract the partners they need. Any flower that continually attracts bees has heavy pollen. Those that the bees ignore tend to have light pollen that is windborne. The same goes for moths - some plants are night pollinators - especially most varieties of white flowers. Take a few evening strolls and see where the moths hang out. Those flowers are your friends.

Touch can also give you a clue about friendly flowers. If it is sticky it has heavy pollen and is a good bet for your yard.

Cleanliness is also your friend. Spores - another villain to the allergy prone - can emanate from such places as piled up leaves under trees and shrubs. Keep them raked clean and cut down on problems.

Use less bark mulch. Find an alternative if at all possible, because this tends to harbor fungus - another of our natural enemies. If you see your mulch sprouting mushrooms or other spore-like growths, you know you've met up with yet one more thing that contributes to your suffering. The ideal, allergy-free alternative is black plastic - but if your aesthetic sensibilities can't abide this, try disguising it under a layer of soil. Or use fine gravel. You might also consider using groundcover plants to cover any bare soil. That way you can suppress many weeds and help hold moisture into the soil without any mulch at all.

If you must use mulch and have a lot of leaf-magnet type shrubs, you have the perfect excuse to pass any chores involving them to someone else. They are hazardous to your health. The same goes for raking and mowing the lawn.

If you're one of those people who love to do your gardening in the early morning - stop it. That's when pollen counts are highest. After about 10 a.m. things start to quiet down. It's the rising heat that does it. So wear a hat to protect yourself from sun, put on a good sunscreen and venture out when things start to heat up. Better to be a bit hot than totally stuffed up. You don't' want to sneeze all over your flowers, do you? You may end up cross-pollinating something you never intended to.

Also, try to do your gardening on cloudy, humid or overcast days when possible. A dry, sunny or windy day is a day when the pollen and spores are blowing everywhere.

Do not allow mating in your yard. This may sound sexist, but you may want to cut down on the use of males in your garden. Not humans, but those plants that demand a male to go along with a female counterpart in order to allow the female to flower and bloom. Hollies are infamous for this, as are Arctic kiwi vines and more. If the guy at the nursery tells you that your shrub needs a mate, better forget the marriage and settle for an un-blooming female. Sad but true. It's the mating call that causes these pairs to produce pollen. Partner-less, each is quite safe. Female plants don't have any pollen to bother you.

If you absolutely must grow some high pollen allergy-provoking things, put them at the far reaches of the yard. Keep them away from the house (and your open bedroom window.) Make sure they are located downwind of the house. Depending on the way your house is sited, this may mean planting them in the front yard.

Here's another tip that provides unexpected bonuses. Some allergies are actually provoked by insect dander - so obviously you want to avoid too many insects. So buy a few bird feeders and use them. Plant things like coneflowers that provide seeds that birds love to feast one. The birds provide great pleasure - song, color and movement. And they eat those bad bugs.

Finally, there are a few practical things you can do for yourself to make things feel better. Maybe you can't resist that ultra-fragrant plant - but you can take an antihistamine or use a nasal spray half an hour or so before you plan to start gardening.

Wear a scarf or hat. A wide-brimmed hat will not only protect you from harmful rays of the sun bit can help prevent pollen from sticking to your hair. If your hair is long, pin or tie it up. That's better than having it hanging down your neck on a hot day anyway.

Avoid touching your eyes or nose when gardening. You'll get pollen in them.

And when you get back indoors, toss your gardening togs into the washer. You don't want to wear your collected pollen around the house all day. Best to get it washed out so it doesn't linger and bother you inside the house.

To find out if a particular plant that you are considering is likely to cause you problems, check the OPALS scale on Allegra's site. Developed by allergy-free gardening specialist Tom Ogren it allows you to simply type in the plant name and get its allergy- rating on a scale of 1-10 (with 1 being best, 10 the worst.) And if you really do suffer check the Allergy Free Gardening that Ogren himself has created. It contains several great articles as well and many hints and tips that space preclude my including here. It also covers other types of allergies such as those we may get from touching certain plants. Definitely worth a look.

After all - we want to enjoy our gardens, not look on them as enemies. And with a few precautions and some careful planting, that is something that is possible for even the most allergy-prone among us.