Allergy Free Gardening!!

Thomas Ogren holds a Master of Science in Agriculture, with an emphasis on plant flowering systems and the connections between landscape plant materials and allergy. Tom started researching allergy-free gardening because his wife, his mother and his sisters all suffered from hay fever and asthma.  He is the creator of the Ogren Plant Allergy Scale (OPALS^TM), the first plant-allergy ranking system in existence, which is being used by the USDA to develop allergy rankings for all major U.S. urban areas. For twelve years, Tom taught landscape gardening in a California Youth Authority maximum-security prison, and he has also worked with the University of California Youth Cooperative Extension to establish community gardens in the Los Angeles inner city. He has been the co-owner of a family nursery in the Midwest, where he hosted the popular radio call-in gardening show, "Tom Ogren's Wild World of Plants.”  He writes for Garden Design, California Landscaping, The New Scientist, Alternative Medicine, American Rose, Conscious Choice, Awareness, Environmental Building News and Pacific Coast Nurseryman. This is his third book.  He lives with his family in San Luis Obispo, California.

Tom tells us, “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 hardheaded.  I still run into people who claim "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.

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 are 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

Praise for Allergy-Free Gardening  

"What a grand contribution to fields of pollen allergy, horticulture, and the garden. Congratulations to you both: Tom for conceiving and writing Allergy-Free Gardening , and Ten Speed Press for picking it up for publication."

--Walter H. Lewis, Ph.D.
Senior Botanist, Missouri Botanical Gardens
Author of Medical Botany

"Allergy-Free Gardening  should be on the shelf of every serious gardener. All allergy specialists would be wise to own a copy, and certainly the book should be in the library of every nursery and municipal park department. Perhaps most importantly of all, this text should be required reading for every college student of landscape design and horticulture."

--David Stadtner, MD
Allergist, Stockton, California

"This book presents a new idea and does so very well indeed.  Ogren, a former landscape gardening instructor, proposes that in our private and public landscaping we need to reduce the use of plants that cause allergies. Until the publication of this book, the information needed to make allergy-free choices had not been compiled in one easily accessible source; nor had a scale been devised for rating plants that cause allergies.  Here, Ogren accomplishes both these aims.  His introductory material presents many plants and allergies new to this reviewer, and he shows how to apply his ideas. The main part of the book consists of plants listed in alphabetical order by their scientific names, with numerous cross references to their common names.  Brief annotations provide descriptions and notes regarding allergies.  The most important feature, however, is the rating of plants on a scale from one to ten (with ten causing the worst allergic reactions).  As David Stadtner, a practicing allergist, writes in his foreword, 'the book should be in the library of every nursery and municipal park department.’  It should be in public and academic libraries as well."

----Carol Cubberley
Univ. of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg
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