Host Ellen Kamhi, PhD, RN, www.naturalnurse.com, interviews Thomas Leo Ogren. Mr Ogren holds a Master of Science in Agriculture, with an emphasis on horticulture, urban forests, and plant flowering systems and the connections between landscape plant materials and allergy. Tom started researching allergy-free gardening twenty-five years ago, because his wife, his mother and his sisters all suffered from hay fever and asthma. He is the creator of the Ogren Plant Allergy Scale (OPALSTM), the first and only numerical plant-allergy ranking system in existence, which is being used by the USDA to develop allergy rankings for all major U.S. urban areas.

Tom worked with the University of California Cooperative Extension, to establish community gardens in the Los Angeles inner city, and hosted the popular radio call-in gardening show, “Tom Ogren’s Wild World of Plants.” He writes for Garden Design, California Landscaping, The New Scientist, Organic Gardening, and a host of other publications. On today’s show, we will be discussing, Tom’s new book, The Allergy-Fighting Garden