It’s spring, the hedges and flowers are sprouting up in the gardens, they can’t help it, as botanists wanted us to believe a few weeks ago. Then the red dust came blown over from the Sahara into the otherwise white-blue Bavaria and settled not only on cars, houses, garages, mailboxes and every little crack that rags, brushes or fine-haired brushes are guaranteed not to reach. The red dust also settled on the grass and the bushes, a kind of natural fertilizer with valuable minerals and trace elements. So at least the plants had fun, people still can’t laugh today. However, the coloring has recently changed: red and yellow, according to color theory, meanwhile result in a bright, summery orange in the unreachable cracks, not dissimilar to the feel-good synonym Aperol Spritz. So thanks to the spruce that puts its yellow pollen on Bavaria.
First one, then the other mess. It’s your own fault, says nature: Man is responsible for climate change and thus also for voluptuous spruce trees whose intoxication with love is piling up. The so-called fattening years with a particularly large amount of pollen like this spring, which experts have been observing for a long time, are occurring more and more frequently. Winters with little snow and an early start of vegetation, for example, favor reproduction attempts. However, there is also the phenomenon of the fear bloom, according to which plants produce more pollen due to water and nutrient shortages. If we get caught, so the spruce’s calculations, at least we’ll breed enough offspring that might survive it all better. Also a survival strategy.
The good news for allergy sufferers is that spruce pollen is too large to cause problems. Maybe one or the other sneezes more, which still causes funny reactions in some places due to the pandemic. And friends of clean cars, window panes or garden furniture can also be happy: the pollen is not nearly as abrasive as the dust from the Sahara. So if you don’t like red, yellow or orange, you can grab a rag and wipe boldly in the near future as soon as the spruce trees have calmed down again. Only the cracks remain colorful. After all, no further color explosion is foreseeable.