It's easy being Green

Around here, at least, Kermit's old maxim is being turned on its head. You see, the trees are in bloom, which means not just flowers, but pollen. Yellow-green pollen.

Imagine a lowly ragweed, standing perhaps two feet tall, with a handful of tiny flowers. Imagine yourself as a hay fever sufferer, sneezing away a hundred yards downwind. Now, scale that plant to the size of a Sycamore Maple, with a crown covered in dense handfuls of bunched blooms, and put yourself anywhere within a few miles. We're talking pollen in Kilogram quantities, pollen that blows like powder snow across the streets, covers the puddles with an oily film, and turns every car into hip-color-of-the-month from the VW dealer. It's a bit warm so all the house windows are open, and each window is shadowed by a diffuse semicircle of green dust on the floor below.

In our back yard we have an English Elm, more than three feet in diameter and well over a hundred years old. I am of the firm belief that it sees its responsibilty in life as personally pollinating every female English Elm within eastern New England. Watching it in the wind is like seeing a smoldering fire being fanned, except the clouds coming off it are yellow.

But, the rains are coming, and all the pollen will wash away in lemon jello colored streams, leaving nothing but a few mysterious puddles of dried pigment behind to confound newcomers.