Speaker 1: Welcome to the crime pace of bonding doesn't podcast a
spate of rambling, disjointed rants and a severely unmedicated ADHD.
How's it going? How you doing? It's what the fuck
is the day today? It is October twenty fifth, only
six days to Halloween. Are you gonna do something spectacular?
You know? I used to not dress up is anything
on Halloween, But now I got this old lady costume
that's left over from Killer al On. I might do that.
And you get a four year old daughter, I gotta
dress up as something. Maybe I'll do that. She's gonna
be a ghost. I don't know. Anyway, I'm back in
South Texas. I'm back here. My life has been all
over the place. I never thought I'd end up living
in Texas, but due to family reasons, I'm here, and
I'm going back and forth frequently between the South and
West portions of the state, which gives me a great opportunity.
Need to give a good long rectal exam at the
hundredth meridian, the point in North America at which the
continent dries out starts drying out. Okay, the driest deserts
are in the west. Of course, the Mojave Desert. That's
where you see the fetti east plaints like bear poppy,
arc tomic con and salviafuneia at a funeral stage. The
Chihuahua Desert is the quote wettest desert, the highest, more highest,
the rainfall desert Sonoran somewhere in between. But you know
that's then you get the Edwards Plateau east of the
Chihuahuan Desert, which is a rise in the landscape. It's
where the more humid regions start the drying out. You know,
I talk about this shit all the time, and you
know you see that satellite imagery color go from green
on the eastern half of the hundredth meridian to the
beij drier western half, and you certainly see that it
reflected in the plant life. So anyway, I came from
West Texas, where the weather is just fucking beautiful right now,
like windy, strong variation in day and night temperatures. Forty
degree temperature drops at night, It'll be eighty five during
the day and then I'll cool down to the fifties,
like even the high forties at night because that air,
remember water vapor holds heat. The less humidity there is
in the atmosphere, the more it cools down. But down
here in South Texas, which is also lower latitude, I
think it's like four hundred feet elevation, so it's got
that going forward to it. Down here in South Texas,
it is still humid as hell and hot. It's like
ninety degrees. I forgot how fucking hot it is coming
down here. And I zip down here because I hadn't
seen my kid in a long I hadn't seen my
kid in like two or three weeks since I've been
teaching general botany. So I just zipped down. I didn't
stop normally I stop. You know, I've got my spots
along the way that I stop and check out, you know,
different plant species I want to look at. Oh, let's
see know this is doing. Let see if there's seed
ready yet. I've been collecting a shit ton of seed
and just sending it to friends that have nurseries because
I want to see this stuff in the trade. Uh.
Sometimes I'll sell it, but you know, most of the time,
it's just like, take this, save me a couple of plants.
I know you're good for it, and uh, and just
grow the shit out of it, because you know, like
many places. There's it's it's so hard to source so
many of these plants, and somebody out there still has
to crack the code on growing the Texas madrone. It's
really the Mexican madrone because the majority of the populations
in Mexico from seed. But of course there's ecotype differences too,
Like I wonder if you were to sequence our Buttis
halapensis from Wajaka and compare it to our budhist halapensis
and on the Edwards Plateau or in some of these
cool little relictual limestone canyons that I was seeing it
seeing them at in the fucking desert, I wonder how
how different the genomes would be man this this, I
guess it depends what fucking gene region you looked at,
you know, what segment of the genome you're looking at.
But eventually they're gonna be able to do whole genome
sequencing pretty quickly on plant species and c where those
DNA barcodes differ. I would imagine the West Texas species
are a lot more drought towering, because that's generally what
you see in a lot of the plants here. I mean,
South Texas is way hotter, but West Texas is cooler
and milder, but also incredibly drier. So the phenotypic differences
you'll see in populations of the same species that grows
both in South Texas and West Texas. And this is
a phenomenon you see in probably at least three dozen
different plant species from Hamatocactus hamatacanthus sometimes called Ferrocactus amatacanthas,
but it's not a ferro cactus, to peyote to Sydney
at tenuifolia, the skeleton leaf GoldenEye, which has South Texas
ecotype with larger, broader leaves not as narrow, and then
a West Texas ecotype that's got extremely narrow leaves. And
I was talking to or Nesto about this too, and
he was like, yeah, man, I see this. I see
the West Texas skeleton leaf the Sydney attenu a folio,
and it's like, it looks like a different species. I'm
trying to figure out what the fuck this is. It's
so noticeable. To jotrophiedioheca eupour bac does the same thing
West Texas. South Texas ecotype looks different. The West Texas
ecotype is actually classified as a different subspecies. You really
gotta gotta get loose sometimes with the delineations and our
understanding of the delineations between our understanding of species, ecotype, subspecies,
et cetera. You gotta get loose with it. It's not
gonna always fit into a nice little box, all right.
There's a lot of fluidity there. What other There's like,
there's a shit ton of other plants that do this
that have the West Texas and South Texas ecotype. West
Texas much drier but not as hot, and South Texas
much much hotter and more human and less variation between
day and night temperatures. And then you got to think
about how that affects plant metabolism when you've got warm
nights instead of cool nights, et cetera, they get a
resting period, that kind of thing. So there's so many
things to study with some of these plants. But the
habitat then I was just in in West Texas before
I came down here that I was exploring. I was
exploring a little tract of private land. It's desert basically,
it's there's fucking okatillo growing out of limestone. I saw
plant affiliation species affiliations. I never would have thought possible
pinion pines growing with okatillo okatillo growing like a mere
one hundred yards from Texas madrones. The madrones, of course,
were like in a narrow arroyo, not a canyon, but
like an arroyo where they could get shaded during the
hotter part of the day and it also collected a
little bit more water. They were kind of on their
way out. I saw a lonisra albaflora growing there too,
also in a like a vestigial spot, like a you know,
right near a wash, like the on the steep wall
of this narrow little wash. Uh. And of course it's
it's fuzzy. It's like a fuzzy honeysuckle, a fuzzy vining honeysuckle.
I could tell it was a little nisra. It wasn't flying,
but the leaves leaves are opposite vining habit like alonisera,
like a honeysuckle. There were just so many cool plants
are saw Petrophytum sayspotosum, which is in the rose family.
They can live for a long time. They kryd of.
They look like a carpet of leaf rosettes that just
creeps along limestone as it grows, sends up a little
peduncle with a cone shaped inflorescence full of tiny rose
acey flowers that was everywhere growing, you know, nested, it
would form these little nests. It was cool, little nests
with selaginal let butt afalo, the resurrection plant. And then
there'd be Escobaria tuberculosa, the cactus nestled in there too,
along with the kino sirius probably Dazzia cantus, but that's
another species. It's so variable. There was a kino serious
treminious there too. I mean cacti, pinion pines, ocatillo, madrones,
and petrophied them sax potosum, which you'll also see as
far north as Washington, you know, and in the high
elevations of Wyoming. All these things growing together was this
clusterfuck of species that normally inhabit vastly different types of
environments like Petrophiedum sax Potosum I normally think of like
is snowy alpine or subalpine regions, you know, and and
then Okatillo is like a desert plant. And for the
most part, you know, okatillo in these cacti. It was
so fucking cool. There was Peridally. They're the rock daisies perrotile.
It was prettily rupestrous variety albiflora because it's got white flowers.
And if you look inside those corollas, the florit corollas
of those sunflower family flowers, those capitula, you'll see that
the floor its only have four corolla lobes, not five.
With that's a diagnostic factor for that genus. Paridally, which
Isaac Lickter an acquaintance of mind, just split up in
a paper he published the two years ago. Isaac is
down in Chile now with his family, their studying Chilean composites,
and I'm fucking jealous. They're not going to be around
here for this this horrible Oh god, your reality in
the United States is just so dismal. Now, I don't
need to get into it. Let's not talk about that,
all right. But what else did I see there? Oh? Scenaria,
which is ruby Ac. It's a genus in the coffee family, Rubyac.
Scenario Niagra Kansas, somewhat common in Central North America. Likes
rocky outcroppings. You find a girl the roadside, not to
be confused with Houstonia. Houstonia is they both have these
what is it? These little four petaled white and pink flowers.
Houstonia is a scenario I think is more common. It's
a little bit taller of a planet. These are both herbs.
But but there's a couple, a couple different types of
a couple different species of Houstonia. They look for the
most part alike. But I think on Houstonia to kalk Slopes,
the sepals are a little bit longer. But I saw
Stenaria puliana. I saw this thing and it was growing
in this little cushion matted form directly out of the
limestone cliff face, right next to Circium turnari are rare
at thistle. God, there were so much good shit at
this site. And uh, I think it was named after
Jackie Pool and the plants just shouldn't fucking be named
it for people. I really get tired of it. But
you've heard my spiel on that already. But I could,
you know, I could tell this thing was rare, probably
stuck on limestone, because there is of course the case
of daphic endemism on limestone, which amazingly not many people
have written papers on so if you're a student out there,
I'm giving these to you. Okay, someone write a paper
on limestone endemism in Texas, which I've never even heard
that word. I've never heard those words in reference in
the literature about Texas botany. It's like the people don't
realize this is the thing here. But of course I
learned botany in California, where serpentine endemism is a defining
characteristic of the flora serpentine. Of course, if you don't
know about it. Serpentine slash ultramafic rocks are very rare
on the surface of the Earth, but you get them
exposed as a result of subduction zone. So wherever there
was a subduction zone, you likely spit up some scraped
off is more like it, some serpentine onto the end
of the Earth's crust. In northern California, from like San
Louis Obispo north, of course, you get belts, entire belts
of serpentine, serpentinite, serpentine serpentinite. You also get jade and
asbestos sometimes in places where there's serpentine exposed on the surface.
But you know, if you look up, like a map
of serpentine in northern California, you'll see these huge deposits,
Like these deposits are so large that they've influenced the
plant life there and they've caused new species to evolve.
You know, it's just what happens. It's an environmental stress.
This soil is extremely serpentine serpentinite rock and the soil
that is produced from it, if you can call it soil,
it's like a bluish color, are so toxic. They're so
high and heavy metals, namely magnesium, iron, and nickel, that
it's very hard for most plants to grow in. But
evolution being what it is, this is a natural This
is a case of natural selection. That's a selective force.
Having this soil, this toxic substrate everywhere, it's a selective force.
It eventually selects for any new phenotypes that may emerge
that can within a population of plants that can tolerate
that that toxic soil, and so they will speciate and
those phenotypes will eventually turn into new species and they
look vastly different from whatever species they evolve from. And
this is going on all the time. Like the genus Streptantis,
which we also get in Texas, has numerous species that
are serpentine obligates. But once you evolve that tolerance to serpentine,
you can't really go back. I mean, I guess you
could evolve back eventually, you know, if your seeds, if
you're growing on serpentine and your seeds make it to
non serpentine soil, and then you know, the ancestor you
evolve from didn't occur on it whatever, that's a whole hypothetical,
but you never really go back. That species is then
locked to serpentine. That species itself that evolves serpentine tolerance
will not grow as well on non fucked up soil
unquote regular soil. And you saw the same thing happen.
The same phenomenon happen. I think it was. I forget
the year. I don't know the details of it, but
due to all the yeah, the toxic the toxicity produced
by industrialization in England, I think what was it slag
piles or forget what there was these dumps created in
England in the twenty nineteenth century, yeah, nineteenth century, and
this is in Jessica Gurvich's Ecology of Plants book. And
these dumps, which were a product of industrialization, produced the
toxic soil, and there was a plant species there, and
there was a whole study done this that eventually started
specializing on this toxic soil. It was a subspecies that
evolved in the span of a few decades to tolerate
this toxic soil that was produced by industrialization and looked
markedly different, measurably different from the species that it evolved from.
It was a fucking remarkable case. You know, all these
creations when they say we don't have proof of evolution whatever,
it's like, it's right there. Fucko, okay, all right. I
found it just so you could look it up yourself.
Download Jessica Gurvich's Ecology of Plants, which I think you
can get on Libden, third edition if you need it.
It's I bought the fucking book because it's worth having.
I always try to support, even though I'm just supporting
the publishing company, you know, I always try. I need
it from my personal reference library anyway. I'm teaching this
shit and referencing it frequently. But you can download it
if you don't want to spend one hundred and twenty
books or give one hundred and twenty books to the publisher.
I doubt the author will give it anyway. Ecology of
Plants right here in page two forty one. This is
in the nineteen sixties. I thought it was nineteenth century. Anyway,
here we go. In the nineteen sixties eighty, Bradshaw and
his students began to study local adaptation of grasses to
differences in soil conditions due to mind waste contamination. In
Great Britain, zinc and copper have been mined for centuries.
The soil left over from the digging and or extraction,
known as tailings, was simply dumped outside the mines. Although
most of the ore had been removed, these tailings still
contain high concentrations of the metals, too low to be
worth extracting, but still high enough to be toxic as
hell to most plants growing on the soil. Some plants, however,
managed to grow on the tailings, in particular the grasses
Anthoxanthum odoratum and agross This tenuus. Although some of the
mines had been abandoned for only a century, probably fewer
than forty generations for these perennial species, the researchers found
that populations of these grasses on the mine tailings were
tolerant of the heavy metals, while populations growing in ordinary
adjacent pastures were not. The tolerance for heavy metals was
achieved by the evolution of biochemical mechanisms that prevent the
uptake of the toxic ions. These differences in the genetic
composition of populations occurred over very short distances, within a
meter of the mine boundary. The abrupt nature of the
genetic boundary illustrates several aspects of the evolutionary process. So
there you go. This is just talking about natural selection.
But the demarcation between normal soil and these toxic mind
tailing piles was only a meter, but seeds were evidently
blowing onto those mind tailings from the non toxic, un
fucked up soil, and many of those seeds germanic just died.
But a couple, due to the genetic recombination and plant
sex and the production of new phenotypes that are different
from the parent, a couple of those phenotypes were able
to tolerate those toxic metals and then grow into full plants.
And then there's the first selection, just like the the
just like just like a human being, breeding plants, right,
growing a bunch of seeds and picking a few noticing
which which which individual phenotypes from that seed patch do
better than the other individual phenotypes and picking those two
and breeding them. So then those two plants growing on
the mine tailings, uh, you know, they bang, pollen transfer,
gene flow occurs, they produce new seeds. Uh, some of
those seeds are not gonna survive because they're still gonna
have the alleles and the similar alleles is the the
parent the original plant that was growing on non toxic soil.
But some of those seeds will also We'll still have
the alleles that code for whatever trait allows them to
grow on the toxic soil. And so this just keeps happening,
and within a few generations you've got you can see
how this goes from just a few individual phenotypes doing
well to eventually a new species being born. Hypothetically, it's
one way that a new species can be born. So
that's what's happened on serpentine, and that's what's happened on
limestone in Texas, but no one's written about it. I
haven't found anything. I mean, there's so many plant species
you find growing only on limestone. Do they need the limestone?
In most cases? No, they don't. They'll grow fine in
cultivation on other substrates. They'll grow in a yard if
it's composed of igneous you know. But again, if they're
growing in a yard, you're likely going in there and
weeding and you know, nurturing them, making sure that they
don't get out, compete or whatever. But in habitat in situ,
these limestone endemics are only ever found growing on limestone.
Peyota is a great example of that. Aerocarpus is a
great example of that, right or on calcareous sandstone sometimes too,
Sometimes you'll see aerocarpus growing on calcareous sandstone, but it's
still a sedimentary rock, much different soil chemistry than volcanic rock.
Limestone is really shitty for a lot of quote normal
plants to grow, and it's very very hard for many
normal plants to grow in and that right there filters
out those quote normal plants from growing on them. Like
in the serpentine belts of California, you rarely have ever
find invasive species. Any of the invasive species you'll find
growing on more normal soil, you'll almost never find growing
in on serpentine, you know, like pampas grass or scotch brooms.
So those are some of the bad invasives out there
are there cases where scotch broom has produced enough seed
and eventually adapted to the serpentine in California or pampas grass.
I wonder, but anyway, the limestone endemism in the flora
Texas is fucking remarkable, and I wish there was more
focus on it because it's such a cool trade. It's
such a cool phenomenon, and it's it it exemplifies. It's
such a great case study of immediate evolution, all right,
immediate in the relative sense. You know, it's very sudden
that this happens and you have a few decades or
you know, or that soil substrates, you know, like in
the case of this these mind tailings in England, that
was in the case of a few decades forty generations
of these plants, which is probably a few decades, maybe six,
six decades or something that this happened. It's pretty remarkable.
So and also if you're looking for plants, you know,
to look on limestone for certain things. Texas perconmon I've
only ever seen growing on limestone substrates. Does it grow
on volcanic maybe man, I was having a great time
eating the Texas per simmons. I guess they give you
the runs, but that's okay. You know, you got to
run to the bathroom or something, get a loose stool.
Most Americans, with the amount of shit they eat, could
probably stand for a loose stool, you know, once in
a while. That's what I heard. They give you a
loose stool, but they leave that brown. They leave that,
you know, when you eat in these Texas percimags diasporas
text in it, it leaves that brown residue around your mouth,
so you look like if you'll recount the scene from
Peewee's Big Adventure, one of the greatest American movies of
all time, where Pee Wee gives Francis and his father
that trick gum that he buys at the magic store,
you know, and it's a wonderful scene. That's kind of
what your mouth looks like after you've been eating Texas percimons.
But you know, you get to eat them in and
spit out the seeds. So that's what I was doing,
collecting seeds. They grow slowly at first, but once they
get going and they're established, they do so much better.
Everything needs to go on the ground. Buck this growing
stuff in pots thing. You know, the moisture levels and
the temperature are much more stable in the ground, the
soil temperature than in a pot. I've said, my peace,
you've heard it here. So anyway, Die was just yeah,
this this spa was amazing. I could have spent more
time there. I saw what was I saw a really
cool milk weed. Fine, what was it? The metis Thelma
Pringli right, And I saw Berkelia limonii conduplicata for conduplicate,
that's folded leaves. At least I think that's the tentative identification.
It's a Berkelia for sure, which is asked the race.
It's in the Upatorium tribe, but had a really unique
look to it, and it was growing on limestone. Anytime
you're on these these stressful substrates like serpentine or limestone,
or especially gypsum or sand dunes, or you also get laterites.
That's another kind of soil that tends to cause the
depic endemism. You gotta look at the plants there and
assume that at least half of them are obligate to
that soil. There's others that will just tolerate it, but
at least half of those plant species are going to
be obligates, all right. Stenaria puliana is another one of them.
Concede is on my iinaturalist. If you want to take
a look Garia goldmannii. Saw that rare oak too. Another
it's it's it looks kind of like Quirkus gravesy eye,
all right. It's in the red oak section. So it's
got those those heavily two leaves, those lob leaves, uh
section lobit low lobit. But it it quote looks different.
It's got a different gestalt from the Quirkus gravesyt that
you see on Ignius. So this is probably a different
subspecies or maybe a different species altogether. The DNA will
have to be looked at from true Quirkus gravesy eye.
But it's not named yet. It's not you know. But
all the oak nerds I talked to are like, this
is different. It's fucking weird. And it was growing with
the ma drones in this narrow canyon on a video
that I have yet to edit. I'm so fucking stressed
in man I'm like, you know, I'm really, I'm really
I've just stopped responding to emails. I respond to text
like two days later anyway. But collected a few acorns,
sent them to a friend the Germany. I think James
Piece is gonna try try growing those pence them en back.
Refolius was there too. It's a penstemen that the leaves
look like a baccharis I guess, I don't know. They
kind of look like a baggers hummingbird and lepidopter and
poll pollination red tube flowers. It's a pollination syndrome for
hummingbird and butterfly pollination. Uh and uh and yeah, it's
only it's frequently growing out of crevices and rock walls
that Circium turnari the flowers weren't open. It's got red
flowers too. That seems to be another hummingbird. Hummingbird obligate
with a narrow distribution, growing out of cracks and limestone.
But you know, this is one of those spots, especially
this one that I was at, where you just keep
going back at the landowner's cool. I know them so
like able to get consistent access, but uh god, there's
just so much there there's so much to study, you know,
take notes, take photos, take a shift ton of video.
It just it, like with anything, always drives me enough.
There's there's not enough people studying this stuff, and especially
not just enough people studying this stuff on their own,
like in their free time. Like if you get free
time and you're able to go out to these places,
do it. But you know, that's the fucking crux of
that's the that's the issue with Texas in generalist there's
so much fucking private land and no access. There's so
many cool things that are hidden, not only from the
general public but from scientists and researchers because they can't
get access to it. So that Garya goldmani. I Garya
is weird. The silk tassels opposite leaves. The stems kind
of look, they've got these weird they look the nodes
have these striations around them, so it looks like there's
like segmented stems. Sometimes it's kind of kind of odd.
But Garia goldmani the silk tassels are wild too. I
who knows how many different species there, I don't know
who's studying them. They're a weird family. Only one or
two genera in that family. But that was there too,
you know, the fucking oh god, there was a cool
setum too. It's nanifolium, or it's Robert seeing them. I
don't even know if I think it's understudied. I couldn't
find a paper on it, a piper in it. It was.
It's in floor of North America. I had Adam Black
look at that one and figure out what the fuck
ah that was. But it's a rare. It's like a
reddish colored seedum with yellow flowers growing on bare exposures
of limestone, not on bear. But you know, I'm sure
there's a little bit of limestone dust in those crevices,
but there's almost no soil. There was ciono this pasta florists,
there cno this genus and the buckthorn family super species
rich in California, of course, there's like eighty species out there.
Some of them are fucking stunners, bright purple flowers, cool
leaves covered in still model wax, so they've got that
white kind of waxy ab axial service to the leave
that looks looks really great, really cool. As you move east,
you get fewer species, but there's still a few out there,
cno this pasta or what was passive florist? What was
the range on this? Is it a paucity of flowers?
Is that why it's at? What is the range? And
ce you know this pastive florist probably goes on up
into New Mexico too, But oh yeah, it's it's in
California as well, apparently, but I'm willing to bet those
look far different. Those species in California look far The
ecotypes in California look far different from the ecotypes in
West Texas. There was also backrist Terronioides that wasn't growing
on limestone. I think that was just not igneous. But
it's a Terronia is a genus in South Africa of
Astoraci that I remember seeing out there. And apparently whoever
named this back ris is coyote bush species thought it
looked like put Terronia with a p so and I
actually I posted a photo of that, and a researcher
who studies back ris, the back risk guy who's in
Brazil and there's a shit ton of back rest down
in Brazil Zil reached out to me and I'm actually
gonna have him on the podcast, uh next week or
the week after, which should be cool, because that genus
is fucking everywhere in the Americas, in North and South America,
the coyote bushes. You know, if you live in California,
you know back Ris pillolaris. There's also back ris what
is it, solicifolia, the Backris neglecta in central Texas, back
Ris Halamafolia on the East coast, even up into New York,
which I saw growing on Newtown Creek, growing naturalizes along
Newtown Creek. I mean it's native to the East coast,
but it's backwards. Halmafoyia is very salt tolerant, I think,
so you get it adapting to saltier environments like the
roadsides of uh, you know, eastern eastern freeways. You know,
if they like use road salt, you know, somebody's It's
kind of kind of an interesting phenomenon that occurs where
some of these plants that you know, grew coastal and
have evolved tolerance to salt spray also end up thriving
on a margin of freeways now and you know, which
is not where they evolved obviously, you know, growing further inland.
But they've got an edge because they can tolerate all
that road salt. Yes, So you say, what, We're written
a paper on road salt, on the use of de
icing road salt in places like Chicago and uh in
the Northeast, and its effect on what plants can grow
in a certain place. Because that's that's a fucking that's
a soil stressor I'll say it's it's a selection pressure.
That's a stressing force that'll cause some species to thrive
and some to not do so well. Another plant that
I saw on the limestone here was a Thelisperma laune apiece,
which is like a subshrubby thelisperma. If you know thelisperma,
you probably know the annual ones. I guess maybe some
of them are. Some other ones are perennial. It's common
in Texas. I've seen it in the deserts too. Uh.
It is what tribe? Is it? Is? It? Is it
in choreopsity? Is it related to choreopsis? I'm pretty sure.
But there's a you know, or it's not. Thelosperma simplicit filium,
Thilosperma philifolium. They're pretty common, but this was one that
was woody. It had a woody sub stem and it's
kind of it's kind of rare. It grows in, it
grows around Tucson. Wonderf it grows in limestone there too.
The fucking limestone floora of southern Arizona is is that's
amazing too. You see a change up if you're in
southern Arizona. Look for the limestone like in the Waterman
Mountains or some all right, or download the app rock
the r C k D, look for the limestone exposures,
learn about the difference between limestone and igneous, and then
of course the two sub types of igneous extrusive in
igneous or extrusive and intrusive igneous. But uh, but you know,
there's there's limestone mountains with different different plant community on them,
and in southern Arizona, whereas most of Arizona, at least
in an area, is volcanic. All that vulcanism, I think
is probably related to the same volcanism that was occurring
in West Texas, et cetera. So you get vulcanism and
lime stone, two vastly different types in Arizona, New Mexico
and Texas. But anyway, oh god, I gotta get into
fucking Oklahoma. Too. That was cool. That was a nice
fucking experience. You know, I've really I've I've I've it's
been a minute since I've done these solo rant podcasts.
I need to keep up on it. It's nice, you know.
It's just just just keeping keeping a lag of events,
uh and making sure that I, you know, am able
to tell people about all the cool ship I've seen
in these different places, like the Wichita Mountains, not the
not the watch watchitah, but the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma,
southwest of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is nice. It's like a kinder,
gentler Texas. But anyway, Yeah, this steel is from a
lone Laune apiece is somewhat rare. I think the majority
of the populations in New Mexico it goes into, it
goes into northern Cohuela, Mexico as well. But it's a
fucking great plant. I collected some of that seed and
sent it to some of my friends that have nurseries
and hopefully they grow it too. I'd love to see
in cultivation. So often it's all the time this happened.
But why is this not in cultivation? Why is this
not in cultivation? Imagine if you went to a fucking
you know. That's my dream, okay, is to go into
like I mean, my dream is for the Shitty Strip
Mall to not exist and to like be walkable instead.
But if you go to the Shitty Strip Mall parking
lot and there's native plants planted there, like you know,
and then all the fucking native pollinators and cool birds
and shit are back, you know too, Like we're seeing
vast insect declines, you know, exponentially decreasing populations of insects,
exponentially decreasing populations of birds. You know. It's the human
population takes more for itself and leaves less for everything
else and has not normalized living with the rest of
the living world or appreciating the rest of the living world.
It was on a panel discussion we talked about that
last night and the vast paradigm shift that's needed within
society at large, even you know, the dominant society, uh,
to help reduce the amount of mass extinction going on,
which will eventually affect us as well. Anyway, Uh, okay,
But to the back to the plants of the limestone
in West Texas, so Dela Sperma longe apes collected seed
of that I need like another little fanny peck, like
a little fanny bag, you know, to clip ont of
the belt to uh to for seed storage, because I
can't keep all the ship in my pockets. Ariogonum harassedy
of fulium. That's another cool buckwheat that would go great
in a fucking garden, bright yellow sulfur yellow flowers. Just
a fucking the buckwheats are so fucking dope. Ariogonum harassed
to folium and Ariogonum lounge of folium are too, uh
harassed to filium. After what is it herasium, which is
a type of it's a chicory. I think apparently someone
thought the leaves looked like horacium. But this is a
little known buckwheat. Uh Ariogonum harassing filium. Of course. Ariagonum
the genus has like three hundred species in it only
get a few in Texas, maybe like a dozen or
so in Texas. But this and an Ariogonum launge foi
in which you get in Oklahoma too. Someone needs to
girl the shit out of them. The seeds, the achenes,
it's a single seeded fruit, so it just looks like
a little onion. The seeds look like a little onion,
and you know the typical buckwheat flower morphology. You've got
an involucar, which looks like a little vase, and then
you've got all these tiny individual flowers or florets. Use
the term floor it when it's a small flower and
it's grouped with a bunch of other tiny flowers, right
like just like an asteraci the capitulum, the floor it's
the tiny florets on the buckwheat are you know, in
volocra will have a number of tiny florets, you know,
and there it's like a flower that's held by this
little stipe and they kind of dump out. Sometimes they're erect.
Sometimes they just kind of dump out arch out of
the vase, right like wilted roses in a vase. But
the flowers are fucking dope. They're they're they lit up
with pollinators. They look fucking awesome in a garden, you know,
when you're trying to create that soothing bit of peace
to come to come back to, you know, and serve
as the antidote to all the things that make you
want a puke that you've just had to experience in
your day to day reality when you've been out in
modern consumer society or at a job you hate, or
whatever you want to it's a good this buck, we
would go great. And that cocktail, that figurative cocktail. It
is a native plant, garden, et cetera. So anyway, but
those each individual floor will have a single seed in it,
and it looks like a little onion. And so I'll
just go and when I see that the flowers have
withered or they're brown, I'll just go, you know, put
my hand around the whole stem, pull up and get
all those things and throw them in a little bag
and then dissect them later. And then I've got this.
You know, I've had to use a microscope on some
of these things to see if the seed is good.
Like you know, I was collecting Leantric's punk toatta seed
roadside and West Texas fucking blazing star that's super drought tolerant,
heat tolerant, forms a little corm in the ground, and
you know, I started cutting the actual not just the seeds,
but the whole involucres open. When you cut the involocro open,
you could see all the seeds inside. You know, a
lot of the liatris in volacars, which is sunflower family terminology.
It's like again, like the vase that holds the flowers.
Think of the involocar is the vase that holds the flowers.
I'd cut the in volacral open in volucre and I'd see,
you know, two like there'd se be like eight seeds
in there. Six would be hollow, and two would have
white endosperm and embryo in them. Of course, it's how
you tell it. The seed's good. You've destroyed the seed,
but you at least know that that plant is producing
fertile seed. And I was doing the same thing with
rust Verians, which has a whole clusterfuck of dan Osage
explained it to me. Of germination. You've got to, you know,
he purees them gently for like pulsing, like he pulses
them in a blender, because that red seed. You gotta
get that red shit off and you've got the little
seed inside and just sift that with water, put it
in water, sift the seed out, and then you've got
to He treats them with like hydrochloric acid for thirty
minutes to eat away at the seed coat forget what
the solution of hydrochloric acid was. I wrote this stuff down.
I should probably reference it now, but I'm kind of lazy,
so I'm not going to. You're eating away at the
seed coat, and this is a way to speed up germination.
Otherwise those seeds would take forever for the seed coat
to get eaten and for the seed to germinate. Because
remember not seed, you know, it's seeds in nature aren't
like seeds you buy at a fucking garden center where
they all the seeds germinated once. Right, that's not evolutionarily
adaptive in nature. It's more it's more beneficial. Some germinate now,
some germinate a year or two from now, you know,
so that if if they all germinate it once in
a catastrophic event like a flood or you know, a
grazer comes by and herbi wore comes by and just
nips everything down, moves on, you know, at least there's
still some seeds backed up in the soil seed bank.
So anyway, but yeah, so I was I was collected
to see that collected seed to that areagona. My Adelphia
Infesta is another cool plant. The god some of the
buckthorn family. Man, there's so many cool buckthorn family members
in the dry areas of North America. Adelphia Infested is
a great one. I would love to uh this acorn
was good. Where did it come from? It was another
one that would be uh great in gardens. It's got
photosynthetic stems opposite leaves, those multi carpoled fruits that probably explosively.
The hiss like pop open, just like a lot of
members of UP four BA do, like the manahats or
the jet Trophia cathartica does. And I had Jetropha cathartica
seeds at my desk once. They were just popping. I
hear these little pops anyway, It's a great dispersal mechanism
for a seed. But I wonder about the buck thorns
like that. How do you remove the germination inhibitors on them?
Some need fire, especially if you're in California like some
of the Cno, this need fire, Some need scarification, or
it could just be the seed coat degrading over a
certain amount of time, et cetera. God, I saw this,
fucking man. I've sent a bunch of nice rattlesnakes too,
like lurking in the road and not dead yet, so
I'll move their asses off the road, because that's a bummer.
I see when I see a rattlesnake that's dead in
the middle of the road, that bums me out. I
don't want to see. It is purely selfish, right, not
doing it just for the rattlesnake. I'm doing it for myself.
You know, it's like the the opposite. I remember, like
how good you feel one like you know you learn
Anthony Scalia died or James Enhoff died, right, real fucking villains, right.
Granted they would have been cooler if they died thirty
years earlier, but you know, I'll take I'll take what
I can get as good as you feel when that appens.
It feels just as terrible when you see a dead
rattlesnake in the road. It makes me feel bad. So
I moved one off. It was a black tailed rattlesnake.
It was crodalist orneatus. I'm not sure if that is
the common thought. I thought black tails are a different name,
but anyway, crodalist ornadis. And then there was another rattlesnake
I saw in the middle of the road that I
thought was black diamond. It was a black diamond or
a Western diamondback. Excuse me, excuse it. I do these
malapropisms all the time. You'll have to forgive me. I
thought it was a Western diamondback, but it was extra spicy,
and it was like striking at me, even though I
had this stick. I was like, Jesus, fuck, it settled down, man.
Uh and uh, I should have known that just because
I had that black and white striped tail doesn't mean
it's necessarily a Western diamondback. It was. This turned out
to be Crodalist Scoot of Latest the Mojave Green, because
I guess in some some of the populations are slightly green.
Crodalist Scoot of Latest the Mojave Rattlesnake, which are known
for not only having hemo toxic venom, but neurotoxic venom
as well. I I've only seen it a few times
before in the Mojave Desert, but you actually get them
out here in West Texas and they're they're also very aggressive,
like behaviorally, they're just super fucking aggressive. So you know,
that made sense why he was so spicy. Like we
drove away and the thing was still rattling. It's like
Jesus Christ settled down, buddy, all right, take it easy.
I should mention too, if you have a native plant
nursery in Texas. I'm not just talking about backyard growers.
It's you know, much respect to them. But unless I
know you personally or senior operation, I don't. I just
I want to get the nurseries first. But if you
have a native plant nursery in Texas and you're looking
for seeds of a specific species, send me an email.
Crime pays about and he doesn't a Gmail. Can't promise
you I'll respond anytime soon, but I will make a
note of it. Especially the shorter you keep it the better,
the more chance it'll get read. But just you know,
say hey, I'm looking for species or seeds of this
species or whatever, and I will try to collect it.
I'll make a mental note to collect it, so you know,
let me know, and then i'll whenever I collect it,
I'll eventually write your back and I'll send you a
We could work something out, you know. I can't believe
that there's not like a large wholesale nursery located centrally.
Probably it'd have to be somewhere around Austin or some
for Texas natives, you know, like the the Joe the
Jack Pizzo equivalent, who's a grower in a for the prairies,
for the prairie basically for Illinois. But Sen's prairie plants everywhere.
Uh you know, just grows species a ship done a
species in a large scale like for restoration, like a
wholesale I think, I think Pizzo Native nursery is mostly
mostly wholesale. But we need something like that in Texas.
I mean every region really needs that, you know. But
I guess you'd be limited because you couldn't grow some
South or West Texas stuff in Central Texas or there
would be there'd certainly be obstacles because the climate is
so different. But someone should at least try down in
South Texas. There's a number of growers for fish and
wildlife contracts, but uh man, we always need more of them.
I sent the bu bunch of Prudence taxane is seed
to James Lovegrin. I don't know if he got results.
I sent some to Heap. They tried cracking them open
and they didn't use a vice, so I think they
ended up killing a lot of the seeds. But I
sent so many seeds that so many different people, and
I'll be selling seeds next year too, that surely many
people will have luck. Mine just germinated. It took six months,
but I guess you could speed that up, you know,
by slowly cracking the seed code open with a vice.
You know, the vice is key because it gives slow
build up of pressure versus just like cracking them in
a set of pliers where you might damage the embryo.
But mine are up and now I've got to go
put them in the ground because they've got that long
ass root, that long tap root. You know, it'll be
two inches Prudence taxana, which produces fucking delicious fruit and
is just so sun and heat tolerant. And I can't
believe there's not someone growing an orchard of these, because
there should be. They're restricted mostly to the Texas sand Sheet.
You get. There's a there's a population up by Lano too,
but I don't know how extensive it is. There's only
a few roadside, and then there's the rest of the
populations on private land. But I can't believe nobody's growing
this in mass because the fruit is fucking delicious. It
tastes like apricots, but anyway you got to get you know,
the ceilings will be two or three inches tall, of
the taproots nine to ten inches deep. And that's their strategy.
When you grow on a hot place, you said, you
spend a lot of you send a lot of the
carbohydrates and other photos photosyntheates down to the roots. You're
trying to build up that root system, that storage system
that you can dive back to if you know it
doesn't rain for two or three months during a prolonged drought.
But remember monocots don't generally produce tap roots, only dye cootstill,
so monocuts generally have a fibrous roots system, and of
course the grasses have C four photosynthesis, et cetera. You
know where they use those bundle sheath, the bundle, the
vascular bundle sheath, the sheath around the escar bundles. That's
where they do the the majority of the photosynthesis where
there's there's not much oxygen for the RuBisCO to UH
bond with, you know, and because ribisco has an affinity
for the oxygen, not just the carbon dioxide. And at
higher temperatures especially UH, it'll you'll get that whole photo
respiration thing. So the monocatch I got that sea four
photosynthesis just a quick, just a quick you know, primer
or or or refresher rather so anyway, Dahlia righty eye
was grown on the limestone too. It's a it's a
cool little dahlia with fuzzy, fuzzy leaves and yellow flowers
and got it, just a fucking gray plant, but the
seeds are not quite ready yet. Saw Sclepia scaposa too.
That's another rare one, a rare milkweed with escape. And
there was also Circlecarpus breviflorus there, which is a kind
of a rare species of mountain mahoganies. The mountain mahoganies
are in the rose family Rose. I see, there's so many.
I fucking hate roses. Not true, not the genus Rosa,
but just horticultural roses. I can't fucking stand them. You know,
they symbolize the same cult that brought you the lawn,
brings you the the overly bread and deranged horticultural roses,
and I hate that. That's what most people think of
when they think of, you know, a flower or a
flowering plant. But anyway, I digress. Rosece is a cool family.
Talk about Polylepus, the one of the highest I think
the highest growing tree thing that can be considered a tree,
the Polylepus growing at fifteen thousand feet in northern Chile.
That's rose family too, Rosece. But Circocarpus breviflorus another plant
that needs to be grown actively in native plant gardens.
It's like a desert mountain. Mahogany grows in central and
southern Arizona and the mountains grows in Albuquerque, grows Albuquerque
through southern New Mexico. Uh, it grows in northern northern
Mexico and Co and Chihuahua. And it grows in West Texas,
especially like Davis Mountains. And I saw it a little.
I saw it in a near marathon. But there are
some great fucking uh you know. And they get those
curly que seeds. It's like a little it's in a keen.
A single seeded fruit looks like a grain of rice.
Then it's got this this long tail on it that's
like two inches long in some cases for wind dispersed,
so a little plumost curly cue. Uh. So I collected
some of those seeds too. They were probably just maturing.
I think for a lot of seeds you can you
can collect them before the tissue around it has you know,
fully died and turned brown. I mean, because that's what
seeds do. The fruits die and then the seeds stay alive.
The tissue dies, and that's when it is fully mature,
is when it comes off readily from the plant. But
I think you can collect it just before then because
at embryo is already formed, it probably just needs time
to mature. But uh, anyway, I don't know. I fucking
hope so. But anyway, so let's see, I think that's it.
Was it? What else was there to talk about? Uh?
In West Texas? I think it's mostly it. So I was. Yeah,
so I I went up to uh Oklahoma City for
the Fungus Fair. You know, the mycology people always tend
to be a little bit more fun than the plant people.
No offense to the plant people, but the plant people
tend to be a little timid and a little bit
more you know, submissive and not as crazy in a
good way, whereas the mycology people tend to be you know,
I don't know if because most of them got their
their starting psychedelics and then then expanded their broadened their
interest thank god to uh, you know, mushrooms in general,
not just the psychedelic ones are what, but the mushroom
people are always kind of fun. The fungus fairs are
always kind of fun. Uh. It was. It was a
fucking good time. So I appreciate them having me an outsider,
a botanist, a plant person at their fair. And I
went to uh that night, I got invited to some party.
I went to the party. I don't go to party
as much. I get fucking bored, especially if people are drinking.
I can't stand fucking alcohol. God, it makes people fucking annoying.
You know this, This this substance that numbs you to
everything you should be feeling or thinking about, makes people
think their conversations are more important than they are. That's
coke too, though, But anyway, Uh, I get annoyed. No
offense to anybody who drinks, obviously, I just don't care
for it. It's fucking it intends to be annoying. But
but it was like a weed party. I think I
feel like it because Okay, weed's legal in Oklahoma City
and I haven't smoked weed in probably a year, maybe
a year and a half. I just I just can't
get into it, and it mess with my memory. Even
when I'm not stone, I end up being just more forgetful.
It just gums up the gears of the mind. But
it was so pleasant being at a party, comparatively being
at a party like a weed party. Uh it was outdoors.
It was like more of like a weed party slash expo,
these like grow bros and shit there and people whatever.
But it was so much more pleasant than being at
a party where people are drinking, you know, and there's
like people are fighting or there's someone puking or you know,
being exceptionally loud, but not like in a good way.
It was so laid back. It was it was you know,
it was a pleasant experience overall. I still didn't want
to stick around longer than forty minutes because I get
incredibly bored, but you know, it was cool and then
I ended up. It was funny at the at the
Mushroom convention, there was this gentleman who looked he was
a fucking Cowboy's like this big you know, looked like
I kicked the shit out of your redneck, like six
and a half feet tall, big dude wearing a cowboy hat,
and I talked to him later at the party. Ended
up being one of like the nicest people I've met,
super laid back veteran. He's a cowboy, but he got
into growing and breeding silassaby Hubenzi's primarily on animal ship,
which is what it evolved for. It didn't, you know,
Lospi kubensis didn't evolve for brown rice flour or grain
spawn or any of that. It evolved decomposing plant material cellulose.
It's already been partially decomposed by bacteria in an herbivorous gut,
and so, uh yeah, it was cool. It was cool
talking to him, you know, and just I guess he's
like really well known in that community too for for
growing and breeding, and uh yeah, it was It was
you know, it was surprising because you know, you see
someone You're like, oh God, this is this guy. Might
you know I can get along with the redneckt theyve
got a couple of redneck friends. But you know, it
looks like someone who would not be you would not
presume them to be growing it's psychedelic fungi, uh in
any large capacity or breeding them et cetera. So, you know,
props to him and power it to him, and we
need more people like that, especially from that demographic. It
was fucking great. Uh, just a just an overall good
dude too. On the drive up the Oklahoma City, I
stopped at in a little town called law in Oklahoma
because I wanted to go to the Museum of the
Great Plains. And I rolled up to the museum in
the Great Planes like half an hour before they closed,
but didn't go in because it was like a ten
dollars fee and I was like, I'm only going to
be here for half an Hour's not really worth it.
I'll just look around. I'll see if they could potentially
let me in for free. They weren't having it, uh,
And I just checked out their gift shop and you know,
shot the shit with the people there a little bit,
the lady running the desk whatever, and then left. But
it was funny because outside, uh, there's like this little
park and uh, you know, at like a mode lawn
and some trees and stuff. Very olmsteadying Frederick lolmes that
in that park there were some of the fattest prairie dogs,
the healthiest prairie dogs, I've ever seen. It was so
funny man, and they were not afraid of people. I
had the dogs out that my dogs don't chase them,
and they responded to voice command, but I do. I
only let my dog only it's only Louis. Really, Jack
doesn't want to chase anything. But I let Louis chase
you know, cats and and squirrels, which I think is good.
Keeps the cats on their toes and the squirrels too.
The squirrels are have an overabundant population and most human
u within the boundaries of most human infrastructure. So but
she didn't chase the prairie dogs and we just walked
around and they were, you know, they were definitely on alert,
but they were not afraid, and they looked so healthy.
And then I found out later that they're I guess
at the refuge nearby and the Wichita Mountains they're having
issues with with prairie dogs dying, but here in town
they're doing great. And there was another one that was
like there was another prairie dog town behind the fucking
shopping center. I had like seventy or eighty of these
fat little bastards in it. It was so hilarious. To see.
It was great. They were eating as scleepist on, not
the roidies fruits, which was weird to me, but I
guess they could do it. So but they were. They
were everywhere. And then afterwards I went to the Wichita Mountains,
which is a you know, I could see them from
thirty miles away when I was as I was driving
towards the law and I said, holy shit, those mounains
look amazing. But there's some cool stuff up there, some
cool plant species that you don't get in the lowland
flatter areas. And sure enough there were. There was a
really cool cactus, a kind of serious Reichenbachie. I think
it's subspecies Bailey BAILEYI. But it doesn't look like the
kind of series riking back at it we get on
the Edwards Plateau in Texas. It has got longer spines,
more of an orangish red color, really really cool. There
was Myrioptrus rufa up there, Artemisia phili folia, which again
is another great plant that should be in cultivation more
native plant gardens. Heterothecas theenophyla was up there as well.
Perinikia james I. Of course, it's not surprising that things
things love, That thing loves growing on rocks with only
a paucity of soil present. The Selaginella peruviana. I don't
know if that was truly the speed she's I guess
it's a pretty widespread species, but it was one of
the spike mosses, so not a true moss that has
a vascular system. Remember, it's a lycophyte related to uh,
related to the uh lepidodendron, which was that those monstrous
bastards growing in the carboniferous that whose dead dead bodies
composed most of the the coal beds from that time period.
But that spike moss was everywhere, so Laginella was everywhere.
It's like a looking like a dirty carpet someone threw
out on the rocks. Crotophytous cholaris the uh the collar
the common collared lizard got it sn nice one big,
like eight inch long guy with a nice with a
nice orange and black collar around his neck. Uh. There
was a cool oak that I assumed was just regular
black jack o Quirkus marilandica, but Adam Black later told
me it's a subspecies ashy eye, which I think might
eventually get the get put into its own species. You know,
it might be might become its own species, so who knows.
But it did look a little bit different from regular
black jack o quirk quirks Martlandica, which is again is
one of those species that you would expect to see
in a rockier area and god in West Texas. Before
that I stopped inside, I knew I've seen quirkus have rdii,
which is like a knee high oak. If that that
forms these massive colonies that can that are long lived.
I've seen it in Monahan Sand Dude State Park before,
which is also a great place to see Uploka convolvulasia,
which is a fucking moth pollinated uploka. It's in boragin Ac.
It's got these little white radar disc flowers that smell
incredible bloom at night. Collected some seed of that where
I had seen it growing roadside. But anyway, I've seen
quirkersa have alrd I there. But I didn't realize I
passed by a couple of fields that like agricultural field.
It was that the landowner had just let go, you know,
just kind of abandoned north of there. En route because
I took this route from Alpine to to Oklahoma City,
and there were whole fields where this oak had taken over.
It was. It was that spiny grass CenTra spin effects
that the fucking dogs hate. I hate, kind of hate
it too, all right. I guess I'm just more amused.
I find it funny because it's a native species, that grass,
But God, it's really fucking brutal. Those sharp seeds, those
sharp fruits go in you. But there was that, and
there was a yucca and some onathra, of course, but
there was this quirke as Havardi. I was fucking everywhere
like just forming. You know, a thicket like eighteen inches tall.
If that, I dug one up for an erbarian aboucher,
and you know, it's basically got this underground stem and
it spreads laterally. It's such a cool oak, and it's
such a cool adaptive strategy. I wonder how old it
is as a species and what it evolved out of.
But uh, you know, I've heard they some get three
or four feet tall sometimes. I didn't see any of
that here. They were all sixteen inches tall. But they
can live for a long time. I put a post
up on Instagram and some guy who's studying at commented,
It's a fascinating fucking out because you normally think of
oaks as being these large trees, right, but this thing
never rarely gets taller than eighteen inches, but just forms
these massive clonal colonies. So it's got multiple stems that
are all the same individual. That was a great thing
to see. It was really cool to see, you know,
almost as cool as like Quirkus said, Leriana out in
northern California in Sisku County, it's like this relic oak
that grows in the Siscu Mountains, right, one of those
cool so many relict species and the Sisque Mountains in
northern California. Picea Brewery on a Brewers spruce that was
one of my favorite plants for a while. I grew
a couple seedlings. I donated one to UC Berkeley Botanic Garden.
I don't know if they ever planted it out or what,
but they're probably pretty hard in cultivation. I think a
lot of this stuff is hard in cultivation, you know.
I guess it just depends, especially if they need microhise
like Arbutis hellapensis needs mico rise. They've got those ar
buttoid microhise which are ectomycorhise that actually penetrate into the cells,
the cortical cells. I wonder if they go deeper than
the root cortex, but they penetrate into the cell. So
it's an ectomycorrhizol plant that associates with fungi that are
ectomych rhyzol. Right, they generally don't penetrate the cells, but
just form that sheath around it and go in between
the cells. But I guess in the case of our
many are butoid fungi, the ectomichaelhise behaves endomcorhiseley and actually
infects the cells. And I just know the roots on
that madrone that might be part of the reason, because
they've got their own they've got this weird fungal association
that's pretty unique, and that they've also got as a resalt.
The madrones have this unique root structure, like the very
hairy roots, you know, to provide more service area for
these micro riise a to effect. And if they don't
get the micro riise a, which not only helps the
plant get nutrients but probably protects it from pathogens, they
don't get the micro rise and they end up succoming
the fucking deer just killed a two year old madrone.
The deer in West Texas just killed a two year
old madrone. I'm so pissed. The fuck the deer. Fuck them,
they're overpopulated. They hang out in town because they know
the mountain lions aren't going to get them, aren't going
to go into town. They know people aren't going to
shoot them, and they just they're just like hoofed locusts,
like hooved rats. They just destroy everything, you know, And
let us not forget the famous experiment of the Kaibab Plateau,
the unintentional experiment where all predators were eradicated and then
the deer populations took off. They nibbled everything down, just
destroyed the landscape, the plants and the landscape, and then
their population crashed anyway, because of course deer don't self
regulate their population. Those species does, and so they all
starved or died a disease while acting is tick farms
and you know, killing every plant within within nibbling length,
within nibbling distance. Yeah, they've done so much damage. They
just killed them a drone. They nibbled it down. I
grew this thing for two or three years. It was
looking great. They nibbled it. I figured out, I'll just
re sprout, but it re sprouts, it re sprouted leaves
and then the leaves just shriveled and turned black and died.
I don't know what the fuck. And I talked to
Dan host agent. He said, yeah, that's just that's what
madrones do if they get pruned or cut. You know,
if they have all their leaves nibbled off within the
first few years of life, because they're still absorbing water
through the roots, but they are not transpiring it through
the leaves, and so they end up I don't know
if they end up, you know, it ends up becoming
a fungal issue where the fungi can now thrive because
there's no transpiration going on. Maybe I don't know. That's
my guess, that's my hypothesis. But it happens, and it's
a fucking bummer. So if you're growing Texas madrones, protect
the protect the seedlings from the deer. Better, yet shoot
the deer with the suppressor on your rifle if you
can get away with it, all right, don't shoot your
neighbor's house. I'm just kidding. I'm totally just kidding. I
would never recommend anybody taking out deer that are overpopulated,
because that would be illegal, and then you're going to
run into issues discharging a firearm as well. So maybe
I would never in a million years recommend that maybe
just shoot them with a BB gun or a pellet gun.
But I can't understand people who are against hunting. How
fucking disconnected do you have to be from reality to
be against him? I can totally understand being against factory farms,
even against regular meat consumption more than once or twice
a month, because you don't need to be eating that
shit unless you're running a marathon. It's been like the
ass cancer anyway. Right, I'm not anti meat, I'm just
anti frequent meat consumption. I think it's fucking disgusting the
way that Americans eat meat, especially beef. But and what
it supports, I mean, cattle destroys so much holy shit. Anyway,
But I just can't understand people who are against hunting.
That's nuts. It's fucking nuts, man. I just I can't
take someone seriously, what this shit? Else? What else was
going on? Oh? Yeah, I saw two tarantuls banging in
West Texas. That was nice. Blefari Dacne big a lov
I super cool grass, one of the coolest grasses desert grass,
the beautiful blue color. Definitely got hit up by my
friend in Belgium who grows all these nerd He nerds
out about creating habitat recreations of the various cacti that
he grows, and so I think he hit me up
about that species as well, and also jo Tropha dioeka.
He wants these things to grow and it's little to
you know, like his little living dioramas of cacti, which
I think is really cool. You know, it's like you're
creating a recreating a native ecosystem. I don't have time
to do it, but I applaud those who do. Oh,
Tacoma stands. That was another species that I'm really going
all over the place here. Sorry. Tacoma stands is another
species that it's common in horticulture, but the sources from
ust the horticultural plants probably come from Florida because they've
got really broad leaves. But this is another plant that
is a great example of the South Texas West Texas
ecotype divide, where the ecotypes in West Texas look way
different than the ecotypes in South Texas. So much. So
it's just like with skeleton leave with Sydney attenua folio.
You see it and you think it's another plant because
the leaves are so thin. It's fucking remarkable. Man, it's
so cool. So so be aware of that. Tacoma stands.
If you grow, if you live in West Texas, you're
gonna want the West Texas ecotype. That's going to be
more resilient and more forgiving in terms of drought in
those drying winds. The winds, especially in West Texas are
so drying. I mean, you don't need that heat almost
when the ambient atmosphere has that little water vapor in it.
It's it's that arid, and you've got those winds on
top of it, so fucking windy all the time. In
West Texas. The wind is the season. It's the spring
Oheliantis cil airs. I saw that too. Where was that?
That was between Oklahoma City and Alpine, So basically Northwest Texas.
A lot of good stuff up there, man, a lot
of good stuff. Not enough time to stop. I saw
Xanthima texanum Xanthima with an excanthisma is a kind of
like a common weedy composite species. Yellow flowers, but this
was a different species. It was a weird variation on
the theme that was great to see. I saw. I
got off at one spot to take a leak along
the freeway. What was it the ten, No, it wasn't
the ten, the twenty whatever runs diagonally between Dallas and Alpasso.
One of the most hideous stretches of freeway. It's just
like oil rigs and fucking truck or piss bottles and
just built. It's it's it's it's equivalent to the I
five corridor in the Central Valley of California. Just fucking
hideous and just like just human garbage, like so much garbage,
you know, the from the fucking billboards to just all
the ugly infrastructure to the the got it. I can't get.
I can't explain. I can't emphasize enough how ugly portions
of this section of highway. But I got off to
take a leak, and I looked at this slope that
was next to the roadside, and it was all fucking gypsum.
It was so cool. It was all selenite crystals and
there was an onnatha hertweggi I growing out of it
and really cool shrubby evening primrose with obviously moth pollinate.
It's got yellow flowers still, but it's got that long
floral tube and they bloom at night. I mean all
half of those, not the rough species, bloom at night
and the flowers are withered by ten or eleven am.
The next morning I saw I think it was croton
diahekus there too. Nictagenia capatada growing out of pure gyps.
I mean, know that red flowered Nictanginia. That's not common enough,
nowhere near as common as it should be in cultivation.
But due to how well it can tolerates sun and drought,
it is somewhat weedy as a native, which is great.
But yeah, anyway, back to the Wichita Mountains. I was
there till sunset, just having a blast, just having my
mind blown. It was such a pleasant spot. And it's
that whole mountain range is all roughly five hundred million
year old granite. So it's got that large grain size
in the rock, you know, larger crystal size. You could
look at the texture of it. It's got a larger
grain size versus something like AsSalt or Ryleye, which is
a small grain size and it's primarily what you're looking
at when you look into rocks, texture, and like maybe
color a little bit as well, but you know, it's
all that rock. All the whole Mountain range is all
mostly the same age. It's just cooled very slowly on
the ground. That's how the grain size got so big.
Those crystals had time to grow. It probably took a
million years to cool, but then it was later uplifted
through tectonic forces. The other thing I wanted to mention,
if we can go back to Monahan's Sand Dunes State Park,
which it sucks. You can hear the freeway so loud
from that that place. It's like the the fucking oil
and gas development everywhere around there is just like these
herpes sores on the landscape. It is so anyway, it's
a great spot though, And there's a ton of endemic
plants at that site, you know, like Snicio Riddelli I,
which you also get growing on sand. That's a sand endemic.
So chalk that add that to your list of edaphic endemics.
Soil endemics. Again, someone needs to start talking about dapphic
endemism in Texas. Some of these soil endemics, really cool phenomena.
But at Monahan's uh at Monahan ste Park, I saw
amo palmatis. Monaghan instance, Ammo pealmads. How to fuck you
pronounce it? Amma palmatis. I don't know. It doesn't matter.
It's Latin, it's a dead language. Pronounce it whatever you want.
The Jerusalem cricket, which is this really weird, cool looking bug.
But this is a species that specialized on the sand dunes,
and there weren't that many photos of it on our
Nationalist I got some decent ones. I should have got
video too, but you know, I'm really stretched in lately,
as I've said, So that was that was really fucking
cool to see. I didn't know there was a species
that had specialized on the sand. I wonder what how
extensive are those and beds in uh in western northern
northern western Texas like north of the ten. You know,
it's because you get a lot of cool endemic plant
species and probably some other cool you know, and very
notable affiliations. Ah, there needs to be and there needs
to man, there needs to be more books on this
ship too. There's so much that did. More books on
just this Texas. These Texas affiliations of different plant communities
and and dephic endemism phenomena and uh ecological UH affiliations.
You know, like there's a ship ton for California. There's
numerous books on it. They're great and they're they're like
meant for lay people to read. I mean, I wish,
I wish Texas had more of that too. It's so cool,
But you know, it's it's it's hard to get people
to use fucking Latin names, you know, binomial names in
many parts of Texas. Like even just learn a genus,
like there's the common name. Thing just drives me fucking nuts.
It's like, man, these again, It's just it's just impractical,
you know, it's so impractical. The common name is in
many cases more complex than just the genus name. A
genus might only be composed of seven letters, versus a
common name. The dwarf the dwarf desert peony's not related
to the penies at all. I've heard my friend Steven
say that because he's a he's an entomologist, and I
heard I heard him say that. I was like, don't
ever say that again. In my presence. It was a
fucking half it was only half joking. It's like, that's
the dumbest fucking name. This is just this is a
species dwarf desert peenie. The dwarf desert peenie. The dwarf does't.
It's it's a species of a Cordia. It's a Cordia nana.
And there's a Cordia ritii, and there's a Cordia A
run sonata, and there's a there's like six different Accordia species.
They're all fucking cool. There all are very different variations
on the theme. You learn one of them, you'll learn
all this might be in a Cordia too. It's got
those you know, if you see another Accordia species and
you've never seen it before, you'd know by looking at
the flowers what it is. It's got those mutissoid flori.
It's those like those you know, floric corollas. It's is
asteraci that look different from the floric corollas, and a sunflower,
for instance, which have five lobes. The floric corollas are
grander and showier in Acordia, and in all the mutissoids,
and they've got two lobes. It's bilabviate it's like a
zygomorphic instead of radial. You know, it's bilatteral symmetrical zygomorphic
instead of radially symmetrical like you'd see in other members
of the sunflower family. So that whole subfamily that's the
diagnostic trait for the mutissoids. It's got a bilattery symmetrical
floric corolla. So you learn. And the genus Acordia is
markedly shorter than dwarf desert peony, which is not a
pony at all. Again, so don't the fucking common name thing.
Come on, come on, guys, just just learn a genus.
It's nice. It's like learning the name of a new friend.
Then you'll see other species in that genus and know
what they are once you learn the genus name. So anyway,
uh yeah, So Oklahoma City was fucking cool. And then
I went and checked out Brian's nursery from Brian who
does this, showed up to the mushroom Fair, gave me
a plant that I went and checked out as nursery,
which is a native plants nursery in Oklahoma City. And
he grows a ton of cool shit, like tons of
fucking dope grasses and sylphium and all that, you know,
that Southern Plains stuff. So that was fucking cool. He's
got a morphic connissance too. He grows a shit ton
of amorphic connissance in these deep pots because they send
those roots down deep like most prairie plants do so
deep rooted prairie plants. So that was a cool nursery
to see. I'm glad there's people. I'm glad there's more
native plant nurseries out there, there's more availability, you know,
it's it's so important. You know, people start off as
backyard growers or just really loving native plants and then
just start growing a shit ton of stuff. And I've
got to create a nursery directory still, which I meant
to do a year ago, and I had a bunch
of people write me, I kill your long forty four
at gmail dot com and send me you know nurseries
that they knew, and I started compiling it, but I
got to put that back on my to do list.
I've got it like half full, but it'd be a
great directory for native plant nurseries within the United States,
you know, state by state listing, kind of like a
book your own fucking life, which was like a pre
Internet days of the punk scene. It's like a listing venue.
You have a venue, a listing venue, listing of native
plant venues, native plant nurseries, source material. So we still
need someone to form like a massive wholesale native plant nursery,
wholesale and to the public, open to the public native
plant nursing where they just grow like a flat, like
a fifty plug flat of all kinds of native plants
from different regions of Texas for restorations. So anyway, I
think that's it. Do I have anything else I want
to tell you? No, I covered a lot. That's an
hour and fifteen minutes. There you go. I'm going to
be in Chicago this weekend tomorrow. I've got to fly
later today. I'm not looking forward to but it's southwest
so it won't be as painful. And I'm going through
me and all are doing a presentation. I'm lawn killing
tomorrow and then I'll be in the barrier at the
Ententeagen Expo with more of those mushroom geists on November. Fuck,
when is it the twelfth? I don't even know what
it's the weekend before the twelfth, I think I don't
know I don't even know what date is anymore. I
just go to tell me. They say talk here, and
I say, I'll fine, I'll go and talk, and uh,
you know they I need to be let around. I'm
like a confused dajing grandpa when it comes to anything
not related to plants. When it comes to logistics, I
don't plan anything. People ask me to plant stuff. I say,
I don't do that stuff. You know, sometimes I do
all like a week out Max, I'll notate it in
the calendar. I don't fucking plan. Alan Rockefellers really do
that either, So I don't feel so bad. You know,
I guess he plans. He plans events. He does a
shit ton of speaking events. I don't plan. I'm not
good at planning. I can't. You know, I don't know.
Just call me the day before, let me know if
you're free, you want to do it, Just try spur
to the moment, Just try keep trying me anyway. Okay again,
If you're a native planetsere in Texas, want me to
collect special seeds of a certain species, let me know.
Email me. Crime pays it bo and he doesn't email.
Keep it short, Please fucking keep it short. Otherwise I
will be inclined to not read it. When I open
it and see it, it's like six paragraphs, and uh yeah,
I'll make a mental note of that species and I
won't forget and if I see it, I will collect it.
But we need more people growing shit, so and if
you're just growing shit in your backyard, keep that up too,
Keep it up. Remember, humidity induces germination. Germination inhibitors, such
as hard seed coats either need to be slightly scarified,
which you could do with a dremal. You can do
it in between two sheets of rough grid sandpaper. There's
multiple ways to just scarify level. You can do hot
water treatment, et cetera. Try everything you know, Fuck around
and find out that's how it goes. Anyway, that's all.
I gotta have aggressor they go fuck us up by