This is the time of year in Georgia when, after every rain, the puddles left behind are yellow, thanks to an abundance of pine pollen. Some people sneeze at the pollen, some people curse at the pollen, and some people find a great deal of humor in it. Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece is one of the latter. 

Salvation South

 

Coldplay, the rock band from England, has been a big deal for about 25 years now. I’ve never been a particularly huge Coldplay fan, but a certain song of theirs just will not leave my head. Every spring, like clockwork, I hear it. The title of the song is “Yellow,” and every piece of every verse ends with Chris Martin warbling, “It was all yellow.”

Each year, without fail, a morning arrives when I discover pollen blanketing the driveway and my car. I get in, crank it up, and turn on the wipers to rid my windshield of the stuff. Clouds of it billow up, and in my head, I hear Chris Martin:  

It was all yellow. 

I’ve witnessed this phenomenon every year of my life that was lived in the South, which is nearly all of them. And here is what I have learned about our annual yellowing: our region gets yellow because of one thing, pine pollen. I found my favorite description of our annual dusting on the website of Clemson University’s Home and Garden Information Center. Everything gets yellow because of, and I quote, “pine trees having sex at scale.”

Yes, in the winter and early spring, loblolly and longleaf pines produce millions of male cones. And when the weather warms up just enough and the days lengthen just enough, those cones turn loose their yellow pollen. All at once. Again, according to the HGIC, the reproductive strategy of the average Southern pine tree is, and I quote, “spray and pray.” They release billions of grains of pollen, a little of which reaches female cones, but most of which does not. And just between you and me, listener, I’d really like to meet the person at Clemson who writes this stuff. They are surely witty and fun to talk to.

But I think that pine-pollen season poses the biggest challenge to writers of local television news programs. Want to fill up that human-interest minute of the 6 o’clock news in the springtime? Go with the pollen story. Go to YouTube sometime and search for “pollen season local news” and watch the results. You will hear about sheets of pollen, clouds of pollen, even the dreaded “pollenocalypse.”

I found my personal favorite pollen reference a few years ago, and I’m not sure any news writer in our region will ever top it. It went like this: “In the South, it might not snow, but it certainly pollens.”

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