Today I learned that in cities around the world male trees are preferred as city trees, because they produce less “litter” for the city’s personnel to pick up. As many life forms on earth, trees also reproduce by exchanging gen pools. Some trees are monoecious, means they have both “male” and “female” attributes, but usually still need another tree to exchange. However, it turned out, that cultivation of trees can influence these attribute’s existence. In cities around the world city planners use cultivated trees with mostly “male” attributes, in order to keep the streets cleaner for most of the time. While great for the city workers, everyone with a pollen allergy can be heavily impacted by this, since that’s basically all those “male trees” produce, making allergies a lot more intense than they would need to be.

I came across this while listening to the Open Source Security Podcast, which had a brief complaint about this fact. Further research pointed other news articles also talking about this situation.