Whines About The Pines

I’m talking about Pinus Halepensis. Currently it is covering everything with its trademark yellow pollen dust. Everything - cars, swimming pools, terraces and roads. Even Shadow has traces of it on him because he moves so slowly.

It’s just one of several irritants which come out of the sky down here and that includes Eastenders and Coronation Street!

In the summer the Sirocco winds come from the south. They’re lovely and warm – the trouble is that they usually come with a couple of hundred thousand tons of sand in them which is dumped on you when it rains. The sand is worse than the pine pollen because it is heavier and more difficult to get rid of. In your pool, it causes havoc, turning the water a cloudy green colour and can take up to ten days to get out of the filter system. It settles in terrace joints and becomes muddy the next time it rains by which time you’ve forgotten its origins and wonder why everything is dirty. The sandy rain is the single reason I bought a metallic gold coloured car. When it rains sand overnight, cars look as if they’ve been mud wrestling and the car jet-wash stations, which you can find on virtually every corner in France, have queues forming at them. The French may thrash their cars to death but they do like them to be clean when they fall apart!

But back to Pinus Halepensis. I’ve never seen so much yellow dust. I actually marked it in my Outlook calendar last year to remind me this year, not because I’m nerdy but so that I don’t do the annual terrace jet-wash until after the yellow dust has fallen.

Sure enough, the day Outlook said it was supposed to start, it began falling and has been drifting around ever since. This morning was amazing. There was a slight breeze which was just strong enough to lift the pollen into clouds but not too strong that it dispersed it. It was as if there were several fires in the area but instead of the acrid white/blue smoke, there were swirling clouds of golden yellow dust.

Luckily, and very, very strangely, although I am extremely allergic to Cyprus pollen dust, the Pinus Halepenis pollen does not seem to affect me, so that’s one good thing about it. The other is that at this time of year when the oaks have lost their leaves, the pine trees are still green, giving the valley sides at least a 50% covering of vegetation.

I spoke about ‘irritants’ at the start of this blog and Pinus Halepensis is the cause of another, much more severe irritant – the Processionary Moth Caterpillar, so called because just about this time of year, the caterpillars descend from the pine trees and travel in a head-to-tail procession, sometimes 10-15 metres long.  Each caterpillar is covered in 63,000 poisonous hairs which can trigger allergic reactions and conjunctivitis if they are touched. Even if they are not handled, the hairs can break off and be carried in the air. If inhaled, they can trigger severe asthma attacks and in extreme cases, they can even trigger anaphylactic shock. They are particularly dangerous to young children who may pick them up due to their attractive colouring and patterns, and to cats and dogs, who may have to have parts of their tongues removed if they inadvertently touch them with their mouths.

Over the winter, the caterpillars build white, silken nests in the pine trees and this is the clue as to their whereabouts. Cutting the whole branch off, soaking it in petrol and burning it is the usual remedy to kill these pests, although I have taken a nest apart after 30 minutes of fierce flames only to find the innermost caterpillars still alive and thinking, because of the warmth, that spring has sprung!

It may be idyllic down here but we have a variety of problems coming from the most unlikely source.