Allergia

Before going to bed on Sunday--soon after an in-depth, intimate discussion of allergies with friends at the Groundhog pub--I opened windows front and back to create a cooling, fresh-air breeze.

My head had hardly hit the pillow before I began sneezing and snorting as my eyes dripped wetly. I leapt from bed, Kleenex-equipped, and slammed shut the windows to guard against any further personal damage wrought from what--I had been reminded only hours earlier--was a wild and dirty outdoor sex orgy.

I should have known better than to expose my sensitive senses with windows ajar to the loose living among the rapaciously sex-mad vegetation outside.

I had just been remindingly warned by friend Peter Calamai in a racy Toronto Sunday Star article in its Ideas section (pasted below), headlined "Pollen and the hidden sexuality of flowers."

Hardly hidden, I'd say. The article gets, at times quite rudely, into the immoral behaviour going on too close to home for my liking.

To wit, Peter writes: "The hot and heavy action begins when a pollen grain lands on the surface of a flower's stigma, the outermost lip of the pistil or female sex organ."

Well, I tell you, plants and trees, as I now yell at you every night before closing the windows˜"MY SCHNOZZ AIN'T NO STIGMA!"

Speaking of stigmas, our house is surrounded by them--six trees out back, three out front, not to mention the flowers and grasses. As well, there are the inevitable Lilacs and Forsythias, which are becoming for me as morally offensive as the Dubya Bush.

But how is it possible for me to counter-attack in a time when greenery, for all its shameful and personally injurious behaviour, is championed as a foe of global warming by almost everybody but Dubya and his pal Steve Harper?
cm Monday, 11-6-07

P.S. For quite sexy colour pix of six of the horniest pollens, look up Sunday Star's pg ID3.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/223612

The kicker of the Calamai report notes: "As these photographs testify, pollen is very much a union of art and science. It certainly isn't anything to sneeze at."
Yeah, right--Haaaschooo--Peter. / cm


Pollen and the hidden sexuality of flowers
Of stigma, pistils and swollen tubes, and how pollen is optimized for `the sex act'

Toronto Sunday Star June 10, 2007 Peter Calamai Science Reporter

So small, so vital, so beautiful. And so very sexy.

That pretty much sums up pollen, whose grains can be mistaken for specks of dust, but which is essential to the survival of most of the world's 250,000 species of flowering plants, including vegetables like tomatoes and even palms.

Under the close-up lens and microscope, however, pollen grains are revealed as nature's temples, breathtakingly complex in design, seemingly infinite in variety and bursting with sexuality.

Deep down we probably all realized that pollen is somehow involved in the sexual reproduction of flowering plants.

Artist Rob Kesseler and botanical researcher Madeline Harley explain the overriding optimization of pollen for what they call "the sex act" in a stunning volume Pollen: The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers (Firefly Books, $60).

The 200-plus photographs, most in colour and enlarged hundreds or thousands of times, bring out the inherent sensuality of pollen, just as the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe and the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe did for flowers.

The end result of Kesseler's artistic interpretation and Harley's botanical explanation bears out the 17th century judgment of Nehemiah Grew, one of the first to study grains of pollen through a microscope, who called them "particles of prolifick virtue."

Microscopes are crucial to the scientific saga of pollen because the largest grains – those of the common Forget-Me-Not – are a mere half-millimetre across. Most are only one-tenth that size. Yet into that minute space is packed an astonishingly complex structure optimized for one purpose: to deliver male sperm cells to the female ovaries of flowers.

Pollen comes in tens of thousands of shapes and colours, some so specific that trained botanists can pinpoint the origin of grains down to an individual species of flowering plant. Other designs are shared by entire plant families.

This pollen "fingerprint" is what lets researchers reconstruct the climate of eons past from pollen preserved in ice cores or the sediments of lake bottoms.

It is also how forensic investigators can narrow down the season when a victim died, from the pollen deposited on the body.

Yet despite this design profusion, all pollen boasts an airtight outer wall impervious to the vicissitudes of nature encountered as the grains make the perilous reproductive quest borne on the wind or carried by bees and other insects.

This "exine" is made of a carbon-based substance that scientists still have not completely deciphered but which has kept some pollen safe in a mummified state for millions of years.

Pollen can be either dry or sticky, as anyone knows who has ever found their clothes or hands stained yellow by the oily liquid from the pollen of day lilies.

This "pollenkitt" attracts insects, lets the grains stick to such travellers, and even acts as a natural sunscreen to protect the delicate sperm cells against UV radiation.

Each exine has at least one shielded opening, which can be a simple slit in the most primitive plants or a geometric array of multiple openings more intricate than any crystal stuck onto the side of a museum. The openings are critical in the sex act of pollination.

The hot and heavy action begins when a pollen grain lands on the surface of a flower's stigma, the outermost lip of the pistil or female sex organ.

Recognition chemicals signal whether the pollen is compatible with that particular plant. If so, the pollen grain rapidly absorbs moisture from the stigma surface.

The moisture swells the inner layer of the pollen's hard wall, which the authors compare to the marzipan underneath a cake's icing. This cracks the shield behind an outer opening and shoots out as a swollen pollen tube, with two sperm cells near the tip.

The cells of pollen tubes are the fastest growing of all plant cells. They have to be, because the tubes rapidly grow longer and thinner as they race toward the flower's ovaries to be first to deliver their sperm.

As these photographs testify, pollen is very much a union of art and science. It certainly isn't anything to sneeze at.#