Flowers of October

October is a great month to be in Naples; it is when the Kapok tree, Chorisia speciosa, is covered with masses of pink flowers. Of course as with many other trees, breeders have selected many colors and forms of flowers. We have a chorisia next to the Pink Courtyard with 20 or more different cultivars grafted to it. The plantings of kapok trees around Pelican Bay are particularly beautiful.

Of course not all flowers are greeted with the same enthusiasm. I was in Chicago last week and people were bemoaning the fact that the goldenrod was flowering and giving them hay fever. I did speak up on behalf of this beautiful flower and explained that it can’t cause hay fever because its pollen is too heavy to float around in the air. The likely culprit is ragweed or possibly late flowering grasses.

Flowers have fragrance or are colorful to attract pollinators. They generally have sticky pollen that will adhere to the pollinator and generally need less pollen because it is being carried to a flower of the same species by the pollinator, perhaps a bee, butterfly or hummingbird.

Wind pollinated flowers need to produce lots of pollen because the odds of the grain of pollen landing on the stigma of the same species is definitely right up there with a needle in a haystack. The most successful wind pollinated plants often live in large somewhat homogenous communities such as grasses, pines, oaks or cypress. The proximity of so many flowers really helps the success rate go up for seed production and our sinuses to twitch like crazy.

Not all airborne pollen causes hay fever. A yellow coating of pine pollen seems to cover my car everyday for a couple of weeks in the spring. The pollen is too heavy to float very far and as a result is generally not the allergy causing culprit – it is more likely to be oaks at that time of year.

The worst culprit is ragweed – my nose gets itchy just looking at the spiny pollen grains. Unfortunately here in South Florida some plants are almost always flowering, but on the positive side, we don’t get the dense burst of pollen that they have to deal with in the north. Ironically the genus for ragweed is Ambrosia. There are many species of ragweed and all are noxious weeds.

If you are curious about pollen and allergies check out www.pollen.com. It is a great site for those of us who suffer from hay fever – you can even get allergy alerts!