THE CYCLE OF LIFE
            Pollen tickles your nose, you sneeze, and you know the summer season is preparing to move on. Not only do higher concentrations of pollen appear as a cycle in the seasons, pollen is a vital part of the cycle of life itself.
            When their marvelous reproductive system puts pollen in the air and makes some of us sneeze, we need to be reminded that all common plant foods came into existence with flowering plants.  Without them there would be no fruit, no morning breakfast cereal, no corn or potatoes, no wheat for flour for bread or pasta, and so on!
            Did you know that there was a time in the history of our planet that green plants existed without flowers?   In 1998 scientists believe that they found fossil evidence in China of the world’s oldest flowering plant – a peapod shaped fruit containing seeds – about 142 million years old.  (reported by Paul Recer, Associated Press, November 27, 1998)
 “Flowers changed the face of the planet.  Without them, the world we know – even man himself – would never have existed.”  National Wildlife April/May 1996 quotes the late scientist and poet Loren Eiseley, a distinguished anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania.  Eiseley explained that the agile brains of warm-blooded birds and mammals demand high oxygen consumption and food in concentrated form to sustain them.  Flowering plants provide that energy.  Each seed contains “fully equipped embryonic plants packed in a little enclosed box stuffed full of nutritious food.”
            Moreover the seeds, resulting from male gametes in pollen and female gametes in ovules in flowering plants, made it possible for plants to travel. Seeds can be carried, sometimes many miles away, by the wind, the fur of an animal, or eaten by birds and passed undigested.  Most important of all, the reproductive system of flowering plants produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before. Some flowering plants provide food directly for butterflies and humming birds.  Bees collect protein-rich pollen to store and eat and when they do this they help to carry pollen from one flower to another.  Birds that come around to feed on the insects that have fed on pollen stay around and feed on other pests that feed on new leaves and twigs and garden plants.
            Pollen is part of the cycle of life that supports life as we know it. When pollen tickles your nose this fall and makes you sneeze, think of the important roles those microscopic particles have to fill. If they could apologize, surely they would express regret that they missed their intended target and had to land in your nose and throat.

Rewritten from an article by the author published in May 2000. More about allergies at National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, www.niaid.nih.gov.
Della Moen, Earth Team Volunteer, NRCS/Stephenson Soil and Water
Conservation District, an equal opportunity provider and employer, 08/06/08/ (for publication on 08/16/08 in the Journal-Standard, Freeport, Illinois).
Della can be reached at info@stephensonswcd.org