Welcome!

If you have had any kind of allergic response from a plant and it does not appear to be covered well in Allergy-Free Gardening, do send me some kind of note, please! If you know of some species of plant that ought to be listed, but isn't, let me know. I want this book to be useful to people from all over the world, in any climate.

It is my dream that people with allergies will start to stand up for their rights. We now have the data on hand to put an end to all these high-allergy landscapes. In the past, cities, counties, park departments, state agencies, Federal agencies, all of them have been planting trees and shrubs with little or no regard to allergies. In many, if not most, cases, they have been planting heavy pollen-producing plant materials over and over, year after year.

People with allergies should have the right to clean air. People with asthma should be able to go out without being constantly bombarded with irritating pollen from their city's street trees. Enough is enough! The too-long fashion of using male trees, just because they don't drop "messy" seeds, this has to stop. There are thousands of perfectly fine, beautiful, hardy choices of trees, shrubs, and even lawns that are now known not to cause allergies. These are what our agencies should be planting.

Some people are hard-headed. I still run into people who claim that "allergies are all in the mind." What an utter bunch of hogwash! Allergies are perfectly for real. Deaths from asthma are all too real, too.

Many cities now have tree committees that decide which trees can be taken down. Generally they only consider the health of the tree and whether or not its roots are cracking the sidewalks. I would like to see the tree committees consider the sex of these trees, too. If the tree in question is a male, pollen-producer, I say, let them take it down. Replace it with a female tree.

How much protection is in your window screen?

Quite seriously, we also need to start doing sex-changes on male trees, and we need to do lots of these operations. Some folks laugh at this as though it is a ridiculous idea. Truthfully, it is often easy to change over a tree from male to female. I have top-grafted quite a few male "fruitless" mulberry trees already myself. While they were dormant I cut the trees back to large stubs and then cleft-grafted these to scion wood from a female, fruit-bearing mulberry tree. Next spring, Bingo! The grafts sprouted, grew like mad, and I then had a female tree. By the second year some mulberries actually appeared. Eat the mulberries! They're good.

Wouldn't it be grand if cities hired people and had them graft over male trees all winter long! Many cities now have absurdly high numbers of these allergenic male trees. In Las Vegas, for example, they have over 200,000 full grown, male mulberry trees alone. Time to start grafting these to female wood.

I will try to come here often and do updates. This is just a one-man show here, so please excuse if the site is a little rinky-dink. We'll get better. Please help me promote the concepts of allergy-free gardens and landscapes. I'm counting on you. Keep in touch!

--Tom Ogren