Tom Ogren set out on a mission to end the cause of our terrible pollen seasons: botanical sexism. The good news is that he accomplished it, and you might be tempted to congratulate him.
The bad news? It’s abject fuckery he more or less made up. A round of applause anyway though, for the utter goddamn audacity.
Today’s Moment of Science… The myth of botanical sexism.
If you google ‘tree sex,’ it’ll take a hot minute to scroll past whatever the fuck you perverts are up to before arriving at ‘plant reproductive morphology.’ Which might be why it was easy enough to hoodwink the internet into believing boy trees, reduced to involuntary celibacy, are spraying hot loads of pollen all over the place. It’s not a topic that people know tons about, and you’ll get distracted by the first google results anyway.
This whole “tree sperm are spunking demon allergens into our eyeholes” idea is yanked from the pages of the 1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture. In Ogren’s retelling, the yearbook’s recommendation to plant only male trees in cities– in order to avoid a bit of mess from the female trees– led to our current pollen explosion.
Hooboy.
This leaves out so many details that, as crop scientist Dr. Sarah Taber pointed out on twitter, it seems like a “deliberate misreading” of the text. These were species-specific recommendations to plant male trees. There were even some species for which the yearbook recommended planting the female varieties because the males smelled bad.
“But Ms. Auntie SciBabe,” my one Gen Z reader asks, “Tiktok said this is a capitalism thing because female trees bear fruit and just imagine what type of society we’d be if we used urban sprawl to feed the hungry.” Let’s say that yes, some fruit trees could thrive in certain regions and cities. And sure, some of it would be consumed by hungry locals free of charge.
If you think it would look instagram ready like the orchards where you go apple picking, think again. Those orchards are maintained for tourism. Someone who’s not making memories is picking up the all-natural applesauce behind you. For shade trees, cities with tightly stretched budgets want something that needs minimal maintenance. So even if people were encouraged to enjoy the city’s orchard? Plenty of fruit would inevitably plummet to the ground, rot, get super stinky, and serve as a feast for the local trash panda population.
It wouldn’t just be a small mess. It would bring pests and disease to the area.
It may come as a surprise that what Ogren calls a lack of “sexual diversity” isn’t the main contributor to our pollen issue either. Only about 5% of trees are dioecious, meaning they’re ‘sexed’ male or female. The other 95% contain multitudes, falling under one of a few categories that grow both male and female components on the same plant. Some of the most common trees planted for shade, like maple and oak, come with self-pollinating features. Cottonwood, on the other hand, is dioecious. And that’s what Tom Ogren based this whole fucking thing on; the recommendations in a 70+ year old book regarding the cottonwood tree.
If Ogren’s ideas were solid, there’d be some evidence that pollen allergies were worse in the city. Allergies are worse out in the country though, surrounded by trees that were selected by nature. So what gives?
It’s climate change. It’s always fucking climate change.
Not only is it hotter than it used to be in the middle of summer, but it starts getting hotter earlier in the spring. The additional heat along with heightened levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fuels the growth of pollen. The extent of this effect varies, but research suggests that pollen season in the US starts twenty days earlier and lasts ten days longer now than it did in 1990.
Even without the extra fuel, trees produce pollen in excess. That’s just what’s needed to make sexy times work when your moneyshot is scattered on the breeze. To borrow a term from Dr. Taber, there’s no amount of “tree pussies” that could catch every grain of pollen, gender balanced or not.
Now, about Thomas Ogren.
The first place that gave this motherfucker a platform to write his inane drivel about tree boning was the New York Times. Then a decade later, tiktok happened. I still blame the New York Times (and literally every outlet that promoted this guy).
OPALS, his system for ranking plants based on allergenicity, is not exactly scientifically sound. Not that anyone has been able to evaluate it because Ogren has only released a handful out of the supposed 130+ factors that go into considering how sneezy a plant is. While his wikipedia page says that the CA department of public health has ‘endorsed’ the system, the best I can find is that they “encourage” the use of OPALS for creating reduced-allergen landscaping.
Ogren’s made a career out of helping you grow “allergy fighting” landscaping through the life changing magic of tree pussies. I recommend Zyrtec instead.
This has been your Moment of Science, wondering if the Ents in Lord of the Rings failed the Bechdel test.
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