WIND-POWERED POLYFIDELITY

Yesterday at Richard and Shelley's place I made a quick exit out of the ranch-slider door to the garden (Richard was threatening to teach me to play guitar) and stumbled into their olive orchard.

I asked them if they get olives from the trees and received non-plus looks from both. They said that they have never grown olives which kind of defeats the exercise in planting the trees in the first place.

"I don't like olives" said Richard, rather petulantly I thought "and anyway, these trees are just of one sex only - they need a member of the opposite sex to create little olive babies".

This bit of procreative wisdom coming from the 'Nui's version of Dhal Bahadur, Pavitra Prassad and Kumar Kancha was like getting poetry lessons from William Mcgonagall. How the hell he managed to have two children is one of life's mysteries.

When I got home I wondered about the sex-life of trees and in particular olive trees (well, The Old Girl's away you know) and looked up Aunty Google to find out about it.

 

"Welcome to the birds and the bees... and the botany. The "sex education" of olive trees is far more dramatic, promiscuous, and chaotic than anyone realizes.
If you thought human dating was complicated, olive trees are running a literal botanical free-for-all right in our backyards.

1. The Anatomy: They Have "Perfect" Flowers.
Olive trees don’t have time to go out and look for a partner, so they decided to skip the dating phase entirely. Most olive tree flowers are hermaphroditic (or "perfect"), meaning a single, microscopic flower contains both male parts (stamens full of pollen) and female parts (the pistil).
In human terms, they are completely self-contained units. However, because nature loves drama, some flowers are "imperfect" and completely suppress their female parts, leaving them as purely male pollen-launchers.

2. The Hookup Strategy: Wind-Powered Polyfidelity.
You might picture bees acting as nature's romantic matchmakers, but olive trees don't care for bees. Instead, they rely on anemophily—which is a fancy scientific word for "screaming your genes into the wind and hoping they land on someone sexy."
The Pollen Explosion: When spring hits, olive trees release billions of microscopic yellow pollen grains into the air.
The Neighborhood Swinger Scene: While some olive trees are "self-fertile" (they can pollinate themselves), many premium varieties are strictly self-incompatible. They refuse to mate with themselves or their clones. They require pollen drifting in from a completely different variety down the street to actually produce a fruit.

3. The Consequences: Total Respiratory Sabotage.
Because olive trees insist on having unprotected, public, wind-driven relations, humans have to pay the price. The "fluid exchange" of the olive world is done via massive yellow clouds.
If you have ever suffered from intense spring allergies in a Mediterranean climate, you aren't sick—you are just caught in the middle of an olive tree orgy. Your itchy eyes and sneezing are direct collateral damage from millions of trees trying to get lucky all at once.

So, the next time you drizzle extra virgin olive oil onto your salad, remember the sheer, chaotic, wind-blown drama that took place just to make those little green fruits happen!"

Yeah, that figures. I'm not surprised at those goings-on in a street named Willies Grove. What goes on in the suburbs should stay in the suburbs.