Good evening everyone:

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Adult warning: the following contains elliptical references to the different propagation functions of males and females, so reader discretion is advised. If you have small children in the vicinity of your device, you might want to shoo them away for a bit.

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. . . . . .

I should know better than to think that Anna was just trying to confuse me. We talked recently – after my note about the sequoia tree in Palo Aalto, I think – about trees. And she remarked that her allergies were really bothering her. She said, almost off-handedly, that it was just another manifestation of ecological sexism. After my face showed utter incomprehension, she assured me that that is a real thing – something anyone interested in the urban environment should know about. So here’s my personal crash-course.

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Over-simplifying terribly, trees can be one of three types – distinctly male , distinctly female, or both male and female on the same tree (called “monoecious” – oak, pine, and fig are examples). Turns out that American city planners have long preferred male trees to female trees. A male tree doesn’t have seeds, flowers, pods, or fruits capable of making a mess and looking untidy – heaven forbid. Just another example of the difficulties males have in accessorizing properly.

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Indeed, planners have gone so far as to breed tree species away from their “natural” gender to become male. A little like The Handmaid’s Tale pays a visit to urban forestry or vice versa. One observer called it “botanical misogyny.” Indeed.

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Seem too outlandish to believe? Consider the advice/directive contained in the United States Department of Agriculture’s 1949 Yearbook of Agriculture: “For street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.”

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In fact, when Dutch Elm disease in the 1970’s almost completely wiped out the gorgeous, bi-sexual, and virtually non-allergenic elms gracing streets across America, male tree-planting went into hyperdrive. Hundreds of varieties of male maple, willow, ash, mulberry, aspen. Even bushes and shrubs went that way – presumably to avoid having to wait for males and females to go about the business of naturally pollinating each other.

Problem was – and is – male trees may not flower, but they do produce pollen.  Often lots of it – thick, yellow, tacky. So much for the not-making-a-mess argument. Disgusting. Evidently, the planners in their wisdom believed that that particular male output could more easily be dispensed with or cleaned up or ignored than that of the females. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

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And what’s worse, arboreal patriarchy wreaks havoc with people’s health. Hundreds of millions of people suffer from hay fever, which in turn can cause asthma. Male tree pollen is one of the most significant contributors to hay fever. And all of this is compounded by climate change – the evidence suggests that increasing temperatures are directly correlated with more extreme allergy seasons.

It’s taken a long time for urban planners – and their fellow-traveler urban horticulturists – to realize the folly of their ways.

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But it’s been really slow and spotty, because most cities are already filled with trees. Cutting them down seems harsh – even if they are males producing gooey substances. But some cities are replacing dying trees with varieties that are less allergenic – hawthorn, mountain ash, dogwood, cherry, and serviceberry are increasingly popular. And others are making sure that plantings around new construction – particularly around hospitals, around sites with older adults or around childcare centers, schools, recreation centers, and other places filled with children – can become more gender-inclusive.

I realize that trees are beginning to challenge cosmology on my list of most-often-citied topics. There was that note about the grand lone sequoia in Palo Aalto, as well as the wondrous tree ecologies of Finding the Mother Tree. If you can think of other tree-related topics I should branch out to include, please let me know.

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