The living hell of gardening with hay fever

Forget chirping birds and buzzing bees: the most common sound you’ll hear in my garden is “achoo!”

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Birch catkins: public enemy No. 1

Here we go. Could someone please pass the tissues? And a glass of water. Oh, and while you’re up, do close that window. Yes, I know it’s 20°C outside, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and a light, cool breeze is caressing the back of your neck, but I can’t bear it.

Hay fever. It’s a funny old ailment – and by funny, I of course mean unbearable – because unlike “proper” chronic maladies like diabetes, say, or colitis, the symptoms of which you have to live with and manage on a daily basis, hay fever is, by definition, seasonal.¹ Even the worst sufferers can forget all about their symptoms for a solid six months of the year.

Until suddenly it strikes. 

Yesterday (which is to say Wednesday), it rained heavily. I was helping a garden designer friend plant up a podium courtyard garden (translation: a first-floor terrace built on top of a car park) for one of her clients. Knowing that I would be spending the day working outside, I had prepped accordingly and swallowed a tiny tablet of cetirizine hydrochloride before stepping on-site. Not a sniff of a symptom.

This morning, I was caught off guard. We left the house a bit earlier than normal, taking a minor detour on the nursery run to cast our votes in the local election. The polling station is a 2-minute walk from my house. Before I’d even been handed my ballot paper, my eyes were streaming. The volunteer election officers must have thought me very emotional to be exercising my civic duty. 

I didn’t even need to open the weather app on my phone to check the hay fever forecast² – my face said it all. Wet, itchy eyes; tight, scratchy throat; red, blotchy skin; and an intra-nasal sensation akin to someone tickling the uppermost reaches of my nostrils with a Covid test swab, for minutes on end. Hay fever is horrible. And I’m one of the lucky ones. Generally speaking, a single antihistamine tablet tends to sort me out. Others are far worse off, experiencing puffiness, difficulty breathing, even nosebleeds, and have to rely on a much more potent cocktail of medication to take the edge off their symptoms.

Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think,³ that my passion – gardening – requires me to spend extended periods of time outside, and to come into intimate contact with all manner of allergenic flora?

The thing is, just as I haven’t always had a passion for gardening, I haven’t always suffered from hay fever. In fact, flare-ups of both began around the same sort of time. It’s not that the two are necessarily linked, but it is at the very least an unfortunate coincidence.

If you’ve never had hay fever, and are starting to think that this post is irrelevant to you, don’t get complacent. Research suggests that 1 in 3 people have a genetic predisposition to developing hay fever at some point in their lives, and for large numbers of us, the onset of symptoms won’t start until our 20s or even 30s. I know that was the case for me. 

I remember going on an end-of-year school trip to Camber Sands. I must have been 10 years old, maybe 11. Our bus-load of little Londoners fizzed with excitement as we arrived at the enormous expanse of golden sand. But before we’d even taken our socks off, my friend Simon’s face had ballooned, like a startled puffer fish. While the rest of us spent the day frolicking in the sea, wrestling on the sand, and attempting to dig our way to Australia, Simon sat sniffing and snuffling on the coach, with only the bus driver for company. 

I distinctly recall thinking: “hay fever looks rubbish – I’m glad I don’t have it!” Little did I know what lay ahead.

A street Photinia in full bloom, aka a public health hazard

Hay fever is no fun for anyone. But for us gardeners, it is a real pain in the upper respiratory tract. Any satisfaction gleaned from pulling a weed, or mowing the lawn,⁴ is heavily outweighed by the subsequent hours of sore, bloodshot eyes. Don’t even get me started on birch trees, their paper-white bark glistening under the spring sun, catkins swaying idly in the wind, filling the breeze with their pestilent pollen. 

It is a cruel twist that those of us who most enjoy nurturing nature should be forced to endure such punishment. It’s not just me – I have unscientifically observed that a disproportionate number of the horticultural students on my current course have started to snivel their way through practical assignments.  

Or maybe it’s deliberate: a sort of defence mechanism. Like the natural world’s way of telling us to keep our hands to ourselves. If a zoo keeper was mauled by a caged lion you might unsympathetically say, “Well, if you insist on entering the lion’s den, what do you expect?” It is possible that hay fever is grass’s way of telling us it doesn’t want to be cut. Or weeds’ way of telling us not to yank them from our borders. Or birch trees’ way of telling us… No actually, I think birch trees are just bastards. 

All of this is only going to get worse, of course. A combination of increased air pollution and a changing climate – which are obviously themselves linked – is leading to an increase in the prevalence of hay fever. So as more people than ever are getting into gardening, antihistamine sales are set to soar. 

There are other, non-pharmaceutical ways to stave off the worst symptoms. You could deadhead the flowers in your window boxes whilst wearing your N95 surgical mask and favourite wrap-around sunglasses. Or you could simply stay indoors, close the windows, bolt the doors, and seal off all possible pollen-particle entry points – the garden would suffer, but you wouldn’t. No, there is no practical way to avoid hay fever and spend time in your garden. 

Will that stop me from getting out there and interfering with my plants? Or from inserting my substantial nose into any unsuspecting flower, to deeply inhale its scent? Of course not. We gardeners are gluttons for punishment. But it does mean that my tool bag will have to bear the additional weight of a box of Piriteze and a packet of tissues.

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Do you suffer from hay fever? Has hay fever affected your relationship with gardening and/or plants more widely? How much do you really really hate hay fever? Come on, it’s OK, open up – you’re among friends.

1. There are actually three distinct hay fever seasons. Season 1 is tree pollen. This is the main culprit at time of writing. Birch pollen is often seen as being the worst, though others such as horse chestnut, ash, willow and alder can all be pretty nasty. Season 2 is grass (mid-May to July, usually). And Season 3 relates to so-called weed pollen (mugwort, plantain and dock can be especially bad for hay fever), which tends to run from June to September.

2. A visit to the Met Office website later confirms what I already intuit to be the case: that today's pollen count is officially High. It is due to remain so for at least the next 5 days in London and the South East of England.

3. That I'm a gardener who suffers from hay fever probably isn't ironic in the true meaning of the word, but certainly qualifies under the Alanis Morissette definition, where examples of irony include (but are not limited to): the event of bad weather on your wedding day; being in possession of 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife; or dying in a plane crash.

4. We're not mowing the lawn this month, of course, as it's #NoMowMay. If that hashtag means nothing to you, all is explained in this post from earlier this week.

Header image picture credit: Marina Yalanska on Unsplash