Monday 28 May 2012

Choosing the right tree for your city

Let's say someone has come along and bombed the city you live in to hell, and an insane dictator has tasked you with rebuilding it. Eager to not be shot in front of your children, you want to do a good job, so you decide for the sake of general greenery to plant a whole bunch of trees pretty much anywhere there is space. What kind of trees are you going to choose?

If your answer is, "why the hell does that matter? Just give me some trees that grow fast so I can keep my head", congratulations, you have saved your life, but condemned your grandchildren's generation to extreme attacks of hay fever. This is basically what the Moscow town planners did after WWII, and then results can be summed up in one word: пух (pookh). This stuff is currently descending on Moscow like a biblical plague. It can get through locked doors and windows. It defies all attempts to catch it, which makes people look like demented cats scrabbling at ghosts in the air. I have spent the last several weeks looking for a tree with a massive ball of cotton wool stuck on top of it, which is what I imagine the poplar trees that produce this stuff must look like. Apparently no one at the time when they were planted knew that this is what these trees do, which just goes to show what happens when you terrify biologists so much they are afraid to tell you the truth. Poplar trees, incidentally, along with birches, are incredibly popular with Russian writers. I am yet to read a work of literature entirely lacking in both.

In other pollen-related news, another type of tree planted in large numbers around Moscow made the newspapers a couple of weeks ago, when a massive cloud of its pollen approached the city. It apparently looked like a cloud of green smog, and some people thought it was either Armaggedon or from a fire in a chemical factory.

However, according to yet another set of reports (I spend way too much time reading the news), we only have to wait 20 years or so and all these trees will be dead, thus ending the пух's reign of terror. The Moscow authorities are so efficient at picking up dead leaves (and this is true, in the autumn there are marauding bands of men with rakes sweeping up everything in sight) that the trees are beginning to lack in essential nutrients provided by the composting effect of the dead leaves, and will start to die off in a few years. At which point maybe they can plant some cherry blossom trees like in Japan.

3 comments:

  1. Why poplar tree?
    1) It is unpretentious
    2) It is growing fast
    3) It is resistant to air pollution
    4) There are a lot of oxygen
    5) It is capture the dust
    6) It is obogaschatyut air phytoncides

    :)

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  2. My husband is also struggling with the season in Berlin. Unanticipated effects of post-war re-building. Good luck waiting out your trees, we will hunker down here and watch the waving trees.

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  3. Have you ever tried setting fire to the пух? It burns surprisingly well. It reminds me of those biology experiments we used to do in school with a bunsen burner and a straw full of icing sugar. It's also pretty satisfying revenge.

    Liking the blog btw, interesting observations.

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