Plants are an integral part of our lives – Susan’s and mine. Some years ago, Susan asked me to gift her a Mountain Laurel for a special day, her birthday, I think. I bought a specimen maybe 18-24″ tall, and we planted it in our front yard beside the driveway. Texas Mountain Laurel is a slow growing shrub native to Central Texas.
A few days ago, we were sitting on the front deck. I caught an unusual fragrance, and I asked Susan what, if anything, she smelled. To me it was incense; to her, it was undetectable. Cats’ sense of smell is a couple of thousand times more sensitive than ours, and dogs probably four to ten thousand times or more.
A couple of days later, Susan noticed that the Mountain Laurel, now ten or twelve feet tall, was full of blossoms -the source of the incense, of course. It looked like this.
The White Oak that emerges from our front deck is full of new growth – new leaves and pollen tails. In the summer and later, the tree foliage is green, but at this stage, it is quite yellow. Neither of us is allergic to the pollen, but many folks are. Mostly, the fall of pollen grains covers our automobiles, our porch, and other structures with a gloss of sticky yellow pollen grains.
