Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of the Crime Pace. About any
Speaker 1: dozen podcasts? I really, I'm gonna be honest with you.
Speaker 1: I haven't wanted to do this, and just the thought
Speaker 1: of sitting down for two hours and doing a podcast
Speaker 1: has seemed so unappealing to me. I'm just fucking done
Speaker 1: with it. I'm not done with I just need a break.
Speaker 1: I got so much other shit going on, got stuff.
Speaker 1: I got a draw I'm going to this aeroid conference
Speaker 1: in uh September. They want me to draw something for them.
Speaker 1: They're getting they're getting charges, of course, right, And I
Speaker 1: was just in fucking where the fuck well, I didn't
Speaker 1: even know where I was. I don't even know where
Speaker 1: it was anymore. I don't know where I am. I
Speaker 1: don't know where I am now. I could be in
Speaker 1: my office here in South Texas while it's one hundred
Speaker 1: and four degrees outside hotter, because you know, the city
Speaker 1: I live in, they hate trees. It's part of the
Speaker 1: culture down here. We'll get into that later, but uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't even know where I am anymore.
Speaker 1: I was in where'd I go? I was in Chicago,
Speaker 1: did a show in Chicago and a show in Milwaukee.
Speaker 1: Then I did. Then I came came on down the
Speaker 1: Louisville Uh, did a show there for almost two hundred people. Fuck,
Speaker 1: it was a lot up was it two hundred? Maybe
Speaker 1: it was two hundred? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Then I did this is all like short notice too.
Speaker 1: Then I did a show. I was at Callowe, North
Speaker 1: Carolina for their Native Plant Conference, which I thought. I
Speaker 1: thought they weren't gonna be fans. I thought there because
Speaker 1: it could you know, you never know, right and see
Speaker 1: it instead of college you see, I'm not making any judgment,
Speaker 1: but they ended up loving the ship out of it. It
Speaker 1: was good, the fun presentation show people cool plants from
Speaker 1: all the world talk some shit ship ship all over
Speaker 1: modern horticulture and uh and landscaping and and then uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and then where'd I go from that? And then I
Speaker 1: went to Columbia, South Carolina, which they just invited me
Speaker 1: on a whim and it worked out. That was fun.
Speaker 1: That was a nice stayed with some wonderful people there,
Speaker 1: uh who put me up for two nights. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then in between after Callowe, between Klowe and Colombia, I
Speaker 1: got some time with Adam Black and Lily to go
Speaker 1: look at some rare plants in Appalachia, went up to
Speaker 1: like six thousand feet, which on the east coast is
Speaker 1: pretty high, and saw, god, the pipeline swaltails were everywhere.
Speaker 1: They were hitting these lilies on the road. Lilium's superbum
Speaker 1: and I forget where we went what was a blue
Speaker 1: Ridge park where so it was fucking beautiful. We went
Speaker 1: up into the red spruce zone. They're not going to
Speaker 1: be there much longer, probably another one hundred years if that.
Speaker 1: Climate change is definitely gonna take those out, and they
Speaker 1: can't go any higher, right, the spruces, but they can
Speaker 1: go higher latitude, I guess, but I suppose there are
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with that species. There's probably a bunch
Speaker 1: at higher latitudes. But it was cool to see those
Speaker 1: the whole I mean the whole fucking time. We were
Speaker 1: seeing incredible stuff. We went to one of those vertical bogs,
Speaker 1: got to check out the Triantha glutenosa, which is a
Speaker 1: carnivorous plant that wasn't known to be carnivorous until recently.
Speaker 1: Suppose I mean Triantha occidentalis, the one that they did.
Speaker 1: They did researchers did nitrogen isotope testing on to make
Speaker 1: sure it was actually consuming via with you know, with enzymes,
Speaker 1: consuming the insects that it trapped on. Its sticky pedugles,
Speaker 1: sticky sticky peduncles could be are safe word know what
Speaker 1: that means? Huh you filthy fuck? Just kidding, there's no
Speaker 1: shame here.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: But but Trianthon glutinosa, and then there's another Triantha in
Speaker 1: Florida I forget the name of. Then there's one in Japan.
Speaker 1: The Japanese one may not be carnivorous, who knows, they've
Speaker 1: probably been separated for a long time, but triantheic glutenosa
Speaker 1: and Triantha accidentalis both are. I don't I don't think
Speaker 1: glutenose has been confirmed with again nitrogen isotope, But for
Speaker 1: fox sake, they're sticking its there, you know. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that's inherited. I'm sure it wasn't just Triantha occidentalis that
Speaker 1: evolved the capacity to digest insects. I'm sure glutenos is
Speaker 1: doing it too. You know, you got to get some
Speaker 1: guys in there with the nitrogen isotopes and stuff to
Speaker 1: tell them about the knie frogeniotopes. Don't tell them about that.
Speaker 1: Tell them what you tell them what it does, and
Speaker 1: you know all that stuff, you don't explain it to
Speaker 1: them like you explain it to me. Nice. I put
Speaker 1: a post up on face crook and some guy was like,
Speaker 1: actually the paper with the boat. Try at the octaden.
Speaker 1: Get the fuck out of you take how you take
Speaker 1: a hike, buddy, hah.
Speaker 2: And uh.
Speaker 1: And then so the fucking blue the Appalachian Mountains were beautiful.
Speaker 1: It was fucking incredible, even though we were just like
Speaker 1: doing car botany right, like driving from point to point
Speaker 1: step and getting out. Got to see buffalo nuts, not
Speaker 1: to be confused with buffalo scrotum, which is the name
Speaker 1: for Callicanthus, which Callacanthus the genus is. It's a you know,
Speaker 1: they make flowers that are like a deep burgundy red
Speaker 1: smell like port wine. There's an East Coast species and
Speaker 1: a West Coast species. The West coast species is known
Speaker 1: as California spice bush. But if you call this one
Speaker 1: spice bush, because of how stupid common names are to
Speaker 1: begin with, people think you're talking about lindera. I think benzoin,
Speaker 1: which is in the avocado family low race. These are
Speaker 1: both more basal angiosperms, and by that I mean earlier
Speaker 1: branching lineages. Okay, more like ancestral lineages, not very derived
Speaker 1: but but but anyway, but we got to see that.
Speaker 1: But it's funny. The fruits and Callicanthus floridas look literally
Speaker 1: like a scrotum. It's very impressive, right, like a pair
Speaker 1: of like nasty old man truck nuts that you might
Speaker 1: see some rednecks hanging off the back of our take truck.
Speaker 1: Not's still a thing the people still do that. I
Speaker 1: haven't seen it in a while. A friend of mine
Speaker 1: told me about some neo Nazis he saw in Phoenix
Speaker 1: with a pair of truck nuts. I wonder if those
Speaker 1: dudes have gotten shot yet. Possibly possibly could be. You know,
Speaker 1: the rages in our society, the rages never directed where
Speaker 1: it belongs. It's always just it's it's misdirected, right, it's
Speaker 1: just just entropy just goes everywhere. Right, if you directed,
Speaker 1: it's not as bad anyway. Good job Luigi anyway. So,
Speaker 1: but as I was saying, the Calacanthus fruits really truly
Speaker 1: do look like a scrotum. It's one of the most
Speaker 1: fascinating things I've ever seen. And then buffalo nut, which
Speaker 1: is oh god, I'm already forgetting the name. Let's look
Speaker 1: up Santa Laci. Here's why I need ainad. It's like
Speaker 1: an old man, old man who can't remember names of shit.
Speaker 1: He has to write everything down. Pyrollaria pubera, which is
Speaker 1: buffalo nut, which in Santa Lacey. The sandalwood family is
Speaker 1: of course parasitic, but it's hemiparasitic. It's got chlorophyll in it,
Speaker 1: and it's doing photosynthesis, but it's it's also got hostorial
Speaker 1: roots through which it taps into host plants, and Pyrolaria
Speaker 1: pubera definitely does that, and I guess it's not it's
Speaker 1: not edible, though there is an edible species in India.
Speaker 1: I love thinking about that, these lineages that are so
Speaker 1: how fucking old do you have to be to have
Speaker 1: a species in the same genus in India that uh
Speaker 1: as the as the same genus as the species that
Speaker 1: grows in the two different species same genus, but you know,
Speaker 1: separated by ten thousand miles. Ones in uh North Carolina
Speaker 1: one is in ones in India? What is it is that?
Speaker 1: Where is that where Edgela is from? Let's you know what.
Speaker 1: Let me look at this because I want to give
Speaker 1: you a bad dopier. Let me look this up. Pyrolaria,
Speaker 1: the buffalo nut. What is the Indian species? Oh shit,
Speaker 1: not India, Bangladesh, It's into Himalayas. Damn that's wild and
Speaker 1: you got you got some in unn So it's I
Speaker 1: would guess it's more of a you know, that's interesting too,
Speaker 1: because that's more of the the uh temperate Asia slash
Speaker 1: Eastern North America. This junction, which is the thing really
Speaker 1: fucking fascinating. Yeah, Pyrolaria edgeless only five observations on igh naturalist.
Speaker 1: It's higher elevation Himalayan species. You know those Himalayas. They're
Speaker 1: really uplift and quick. There you could see, I love it.
Speaker 1: You could see the fucking convergent plate boundary on a
Speaker 1: topographic map. You could see where India is literally ramming
Speaker 1: into the ramming into Asia. Just pounding it hard, daddy,
Speaker 1: and uh but much. But this is the thing, the
Speaker 1: Eastern North America slash Asia disjunction. How many genera have
Speaker 1: occur in both places but with different species, right, and
Speaker 1: of course this is a disjunction. Asa Gray talked about
Speaker 1: this was Asa Gray prick. I wonder if he was.
Speaker 1: I bet he was a little bit of a stiff.
Speaker 1: I bet he had a little I bet he sniffed
Speaker 1: his own farts a little bit. Right, he was part
Speaker 1: of that like aristocratic uh you know, white society back
Speaker 1: then very you know, very esteemed very But but maybe
Speaker 1: he was on a level too. You know, if you
Speaker 1: if you could go back in time and those asa
Speaker 1: gray like you could both go eat mushrooms toget are
Speaker 1: in a woods or something, you know, would you have
Speaker 1: whatever be them? Wud he just start freaking out? Or
Speaker 1: would what would it be like? You know, or would
Speaker 1: it be he'd be expounding on different philosophical points, he'd
Speaker 1: be pontificating. I wonder you know you got because I
Speaker 1: bet some of those people back in the day, if
Speaker 1: you got them loose and got them to, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of be aware of their own bullshit. Little bit
Speaker 1: of self awareness is what psychedelics are good for. Maybe
Speaker 1: they'd loosen up, they'd unclenched. They'd be fun to hang
Speaker 1: out with, right, you know, maybe they would let go
Speaker 1: of the classism and and cast ideology that they they
Speaker 1: cling to as part of the you know, we're the
Speaker 1: esteemed class, and you know, maybe they'd let go a
Speaker 1: little bit of that and see that we're all connected.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I sure wish people where
Speaker 1: I live would do that. You get the self hating
Speaker 1: Mexican thing that here, Okay, we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1: Let's keep going and self hitting Mexican American thing very important.
Speaker 1: They're American, They're not Mexically, They're Mexican American. They want
Speaker 1: you to okay, by by day, I'm talking about the
Speaker 1: dominant culture. All right, let's we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1: All right, So uh, and we'll talk about how that
Speaker 1: plays into native plants and shit too, because it certainly
Speaker 1: fucking does. It's very, very frustrating to work with, right
Speaker 1: It's it's like a friend of mine always says, you know,
Speaker 1: inability to love yourself is responsible for a lot of
Speaker 1: the pain and suffering cause in the world. But before
Speaker 1: we get into that, you know, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: get all Eastern philosophy and here, let's just talk about
Speaker 1: the disjunctions. So the Eastern North America Asia disjunction, the
Speaker 1: theory being, and I presume how this happened because those
Speaker 1: places are on opposite side of the opposite sides of
Speaker 1: the globe. Is that you know, probably during warm before
Speaker 1: the Ice Age, warmer times, right, maybe Miocene. I think
Speaker 1: it really when did it? I wonder when you know,
Speaker 1: climatically the Earth really started to cool off significantly to
Speaker 1: the point that you know, sixty degrees latitude north for instance,
Speaker 1: was no longer warm and temperate, and when it started
Speaker 1: to be uh, you know, freezing and too cold for
Speaker 1: and tundra basically. But anyway, the point I'm getting to is,
Speaker 1: before you know, the higher latitudes farthest away from the
Speaker 1: equator started to freeze and turn into tundra, there was
Speaker 1: there were forests up there there We know this. There
Speaker 1: were Metasaquoia forests up on axel Heiberg Island in the Arctic. Antarctica,
Speaker 1: of of course, wasn't always an ice box it was.
Speaker 1: There's micro fossing on the South Pole. There's micro fossil
Speaker 1: pollen of na though vegas and many potocarps which are
Speaker 1: now which are tropical conifers temperate in New Zealand but
Speaker 1: mostly tropical in other places. Tropical conifers warm warm climate conifers.
Speaker 1: There's you know, the fossil record on an arcticle's abundant
Speaker 1: and it's always been where it was, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: always sealed off from the warmer ocean currents and the
Speaker 1: rest of the world by that circumpolar current that it's
Speaker 1: got now that keeps all the warm waters away and
Speaker 1: keeps it so chilly. But anyway, back to the northern
Speaker 1: hemisphere at a certain time, probably fifteen million years ago.
Speaker 1: Same thing with chestnuts, right, there's Chinese chestnuts, there's American chestnuts.
Speaker 1: Chinese chestnuts, of course, are resistant to blight and it's
Speaker 1: only a mild pathogen, but the chestnut blight to the
Speaker 1: north American chestnut is deadly. So anyway, so there's this junction,
Speaker 1: and of course you go to sixty degrees latitude, it's
Speaker 1: much less distance required to go around the entire globe, right,
Speaker 1: because you're at the circumference around sixty degrees latitude at
Speaker 1: the globe is much smaller than the circumference at the equator.
Speaker 1: And so there were forests up there, and many of
Speaker 1: these lineages likely were up there. And then as the
Speaker 1: climate began to cool and the freezing points what became
Speaker 1: tundra lowered in latitude, and so you know, now you
Speaker 1: only had to get really really cold you only had
Speaker 1: to go to like say, forty degrees latitude instead of
Speaker 1: sixty degrees latitude. That sealed off that if essentially isolated
Speaker 1: these forests from each other, right, the and the and
Speaker 1: the plant lineages there, like East Asia from North America, right,
Speaker 1: And so then they speciated into different species and so
Speaker 1: with the same ancestor if you go far enough back.
Speaker 1: So that's why there are so many different versions of species,
Speaker 1: different versions of genera in the form of species between
Speaker 1: eastern North America and Eastern Asia, which is really interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at another one right now, Diphilias diphilia the
Speaker 1: genus d I p h y l L e i A.
Speaker 1: It's in the Podophylum tribe of the Podophylum subfamily of
Speaker 1: Berbera dec. So what is that? What is potop phylum?
Speaker 4: Is that?
Speaker 1: May apple? Is that the you know, the the Berberous family,
Speaker 1: the Mahonia family. But it's let me make sure I'm
Speaker 1: getting this right here, Potophylums may apple. I want you know,
Speaker 1: you get people correcting common names. Oh, that's stupid, it
Speaker 1: doesn't it doesn't matter with you. I know someone would
Speaker 1: do that though, well, actually, pull you it's not potophilem
Speaker 1: is not made apple. It's the different it is. So
Speaker 1: I just had to check anyway. So Podophylum's uh, you
Speaker 1: know the may apple plants which you get in the
Speaker 1: the understories of woodlands in the Midwest and eastern North America.
Speaker 1: It's in that it's in that clade Diphialaia and that
Speaker 1: was another plant that we've seen in apple Atchia elephant
Speaker 1: ear not very creative of a name, or was it
Speaker 1: umbrella leaf? It's umbrella leaf is the common name. So
Speaker 1: in Appalachia you get Diphilea d I p h y
Speaker 1: l e I A. Again, I don't know to pronounce
Speaker 1: how what you want. I don't know how you I
Speaker 1: don't know how you pronounced it. I'm saying Diphilia diphileya whatever,
Speaker 1: we get dif which is known as umbrella leaf. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very very creative on it named. And then in the
Speaker 1: East you get two other species, Diphilia gray eye from
Speaker 1: Japan and Diphileas sinensis, which I believe I would assume
Speaker 1: is from China. Right, But this this pattern repeata. Liquid
Speaker 1: ambars you got, you know, East, you got Asian and
Speaker 1: Eastern North America liquid ambar sweet gum trees right leriodendron,
Speaker 1: same thing, and presumably there were these you know, Western
Speaker 1: North America had many of these plants to these these lineages,
Speaker 1: you know, fourteen to fifty million years ago. There are
Speaker 1: fossils of many of them. But then of course Western
Speaker 1: North America started drying out. When did Western north America
Speaker 1: really start drying out ten million years ago? I think so,
Speaker 1: because you know, you could find you could find coniferous forests,
Speaker 1: fossil coniferous forests that are about twelve million years old
Speaker 1: east of Reno, where now it's just like you know,
Speaker 1: fucking mounds of barren lava with desert scrub high desert
Speaker 1: scrub in them. Same thing with southeastern Oregon, northwestern Nevada,
Speaker 1: like and massive you've seen massive Metasaquoia stumps. I saw one, God,
Speaker 1: it was a photo I saw one of my photos
Speaker 1: i'd taken, like I think it was twenty nineteen of
Speaker 1: just these massive, like four foot diameter Metasaquoia trunks in
Speaker 1: this barren area, this high desert area of northwestern Nevada.
Speaker 1: That and it was beneath the cap of twelve million
Speaker 1: year old basalt, like there was a little mesa with
Speaker 1: the twelve million year old basalt, and that we were
Speaker 1: at the base of the of the mesa and that's
Speaker 1: where these massive stumps were just coming out of what
Speaker 1: was basically a massive ash flow deposit. So they had
Speaker 1: been permenalized some of these some of the wood hadn't
Speaker 1: even been perfectly permeneralized, like it was still woody and fibers.
Speaker 1: It was fucking crazy. I put photos up and someone
Speaker 1: was like, that's not that's what That's not a fossil,
Speaker 1: that's wood that you split. I was like, man, this
Speaker 1: is at the base of a It's just like it's
Speaker 1: thirteen million year old wood. It's at the base of
Speaker 1: a of a massive trunk of metasaquoia that came out.
Speaker 1: It was some of the craziest shit I've seen, Like
Speaker 1: some of the wood like to be able to touch
Speaker 1: thirteen million year old wood that hadn't even perfectly permineralized.
Speaker 1: The cells had not filled with silica yet, and of
Speaker 1: course the silica all came from the volcanic ash above.
Speaker 1: It really fascinating stuff. So we got the eastern North
Speaker 1: America and East Asia disjunction. You can tell there's these
Speaker 1: species are related. They share a common ancestor. They're very
Speaker 1: closely related, but they've been, you know, through ten million
Speaker 1: years of isolation, after the higher latitudes cooled and each
Speaker 1: each population got separated on its respective continent. They have
Speaker 1: since gone their separate ways and become different species. Right,
Speaker 1: which is a very important to note too, with what
Speaker 1: happened with chestnut blight. Chestnut blight and Chinese chestnut evolved
Speaker 1: together in an evolutionary arms race, tit for tat, you know,
Speaker 1: the pathogen evolving more virulence, Chinese chestnut evolving more resistance,
Speaker 1: back and forth over ten million years. And of course
Speaker 1: in that time, Chinese chestnut gained resistance. The fungus, if
Speaker 1: you want to think of it, like this basically bred
Speaker 1: resistance into it. But because the fungus didn't evolve over
Speaker 1: that ten million years with American chestnuts, right, you bring
Speaker 1: that fungus over here, it's like that ten million years
Speaker 1: never happened. Now you've got a hyper virulent fungus strain
Speaker 1: which has evolved ways to get around all the defenses
Speaker 1: of the host plant, the chestnut that it evolved within
Speaker 1: its Chinese chestnut that evolved within its home ecosystem. It's
Speaker 1: like that didn't happen here, and so now it's got
Speaker 1: It's way more virulent than the East. You know, the
Speaker 1: North American chestnut can tolerate, and it's the North American
Speaker 1: chestnuts have no resistance, and so it basically causes a
Speaker 1: functional extinction. Okay, moving right a long. So got to
Speaker 1: see that diyphilia. That was really interesting. That was a
Speaker 1: new plant for me. Saw tons of stuff I had
Speaker 1: never seen before. There was also I believe it was
Speaker 1: Euphorbia porpoia. It was like a four foot tall euphobia
Speaker 1: that was growing in the understory, and it was it
Speaker 1: was reminiscent of like euphobias that you'll see and yeah,
Speaker 1: it was purpoia euphobias that you'll see or that I've
Speaker 1: seen in higher elevation mountains of Mexico. And so that's
Speaker 1: another interesting thing to think about too, is how these lineages.
Speaker 1: I mean, god, it was so weird for me to
Speaker 1: see to see a relative of that Eastern North American
Speaker 1: shrubs Stiphilia excuse me, staphilea, not Stiphilia. Get a confused.
Speaker 1: Stiphilia isn't eric Cale's. It's like a southern hemisphere member
Speaker 1: of eric Casey, the blueberry family. This is Staphilea priningly
Speaker 1: i in the order A cross as so Mautlees. That's
Speaker 1: a fucking weird one in the family Staphele. But I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, to see a STAPHILEA pringly eye and this little,
Speaker 1: you know, refugeal canyon in south of Monterey, in Nuevo Leone,
Speaker 1: in an area that's surrounded by desert, but it's hiding
Speaker 1: in this much more wet, humid little canyon with a
Speaker 1: bunch of oaks and other lineages of plants that you
Speaker 1: might find. And it felt being there, felt like being
Speaker 1: in parts of like lower elevation Appalachia. It was crazy.
Speaker 1: You can definitely see the connection. And so it makes
Speaker 1: you think about how these plants have moved, you know,
Speaker 1: over the last however many thousands of years, millions of years,
Speaker 1: et cetera. I wonder if there's an Eastern if there's
Speaker 1: an Asian Staphilea. Ah, Indeed there is. Yes, there's seven
Speaker 1: species in China, Staphilea japonica that looks like that's probably
Speaker 1: used ornamentally because the the bladder nuts are red. American
Speaker 1: bladder nut is the name for Stafilea trifoliata, which is
Speaker 1: the one you'll get in in the east, and then
Speaker 1: stapha Lea pringlii in Nuevo Lao, Mexico. And then yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like seven species. Yeah, I could see the being.
Speaker 1: That's why this this East Asia North America its junction
Speaker 1: is also why so many species from Asia are so
Speaker 1: fucking invasive in eastern North America, right, because it's such
Speaker 1: a similar climate, Like they're so it's climatically very similar,
Speaker 1: but without any of the checks and balances, you know,
Speaker 1: so you'll have different There's so many you know, like
Speaker 1: euonymous think of that one. Like, there's so many Eastern
Speaker 1: Asian versions of genera species that we get in the air,
Speaker 1: native to the east coast of North America, and those
Speaker 1: are always what get planted in horticulture, which again is
Speaker 1: like this weird, it's part of this God, I loved
Speaker 1: attacking horticulture. It's just it's just so fucking again, they
Speaker 1: were broad over because they're exotic and they're more pretty.
Speaker 1: I don't know why. I don't know why you would prefer,
Speaker 1: you know, a nine thousand miles away version of a
Speaker 1: plant that you've got here of a native plant you've
Speaker 1: got here, which is adapted to the ecology. Right, it
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. It's fucking weird, but that happens
Speaker 1: all over the world. That's just what people do when
Speaker 1: they have when they when horticulture is done. And that's
Speaker 1: part of the whole problem with it, is like this
Speaker 1: tie in between just planting for beauty and the tie
Speaker 1: in between like wealth and horticulture too. Got there's so
Speaker 1: much fucking classism tied into all these shit. The more
Speaker 1: think about it, I was at, Okay, we'll just get
Speaker 1: into it now. I was at this meeting last night
Speaker 1: in the city for the city council here to get
Speaker 1: this native plant ordinance passed, and I was not going
Speaker 1: to the monthly meetings they were having. My friends were.
Speaker 1: I kind of I didn't bother with the city because
Speaker 1: you're starting from square one and everyone. I'm just so
Speaker 1: used to people everywhere being indoctrinated into the crape myrtle
Speaker 1: and oleander landscaping, the horticultural atrocities, you know, the shit
Speaker 1: that just to me looks gaudy and goofy and ridiculous
Speaker 1: and very anti nature. And then I think, in many ways,
Speaker 1: of course, indoctrinates people to hate nature, which it totally does,
Speaker 1: and to think nature's messy. And that's something I've learned,
Speaker 1: especially being down here in the borderlands in South Texas.
Speaker 1: But the tie in between cultural shame mixed in with
Speaker 1: native plants and kind of the self hate, which is
Speaker 1: again this is like a Tejano thing, right, you get
Speaker 1: a little bit of Mexico too, because of the result
Speaker 1: of the Spanish, the Spanish influence, right like the and
Speaker 1: me and my friend Carlos talked about this on the
Speaker 1: podcast we did together a couple months ago, right like,
Speaker 1: and especially in the north where a lot of the
Speaker 1: indigenous culture was wiped out, but it was kept alive
Speaker 1: in the south, right Like you go to Wajaka, they
Speaker 1: embraced the shit out of native plants there. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of room for native plants. There's there's art with
Speaker 1: fucking cacti and agaves and lots of appreciation for up here.
Speaker 1: Though in the north of Mexico it's very different. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of more of that what I call the
Speaker 1: abwe leah landscaping derisively so because it's like the Spanish abuelita,
Speaker 1: like you know, the manicured gardens. Everything's got to be hedged.
Speaker 1: What happens if you don't hedge it? If what if
Speaker 1: you don't hedge it? A bush to look like a
Speaker 1: fucking horse moll er? What happens to it? Does a
Speaker 1: little garden a little garden troll come out and spank you?
Speaker 1: You know that kind of stuff, The oleanders, the pretty flowers,
Speaker 1: like rediculous stuff that looks ridiculous, like plants you would
Speaker 1: never encounter in nature. They look gaudy, they look goofy,
Speaker 1: like the same way you'd never encounter a fucking poodle
Speaker 1: or a pug in nature. No offense to poodles or pugs.
Speaker 1: They look fucking ridiculous though, right, You never you never
Speaker 1: encounter as a nature. There are things that have been
Speaker 1: bred by people with because nature's not good enough. Nature's messy,
Speaker 1: you know. And so we they were my friends were
Speaker 1: going to meet with these people that run the city
Speaker 1: once a month, and you know, there's and but this
Speaker 1: has been two years in the making, and it's the
Speaker 1: progress has been made as much as you can make.
Speaker 1: There's some people that are real just not they're real thick.
Speaker 1: They're not going to get it. Like one guy, one
Speaker 1: guy at the city council is trying to say, you know,
Speaker 1: we should only limit plants to being thirty percent of
Speaker 1: someone's yard. The rest needs to be turf grass. Fucking crazy,
Speaker 1: just like you know. And this is the guy who's
Speaker 1: responsible for a lot of decisions that get made in
Speaker 1: the city. Like I don't know if a tree fell
Speaker 1: on his cousin or something or what. He's got something personal,
Speaker 1: But the guy hates plants. He hates plants, he hates trees.
Speaker 1: I don't know what his deal is. It's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's literally this insane, unthinking bias towards mode bermuda grass
Speaker 1: that's half dead anyway, because it's so hot here, you know,
Speaker 1: and even if you water, I mean, you would have
Speaker 1: to have the thing on a constant drip, basically be
Speaker 1: growing it hydroponically in the ground to keep it green.
Speaker 1: It's just so fucking hot, right, It's one hundred and
Speaker 1: five degrees for six months out of the year and
Speaker 1: then it's summer for eleven months out of the year.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is, but he wanted it
Speaker 1: to be thirty percent native plants. This is the guy
Speaker 1: that's responsible for why the drainage canals are always getting scraped.
Speaker 1: They go in there with a back home, completely devoid
Speaker 1: of any thought or practicality, not realizing that roots are
Speaker 1: what prevent the soil from sloping, these really steep slopes
Speaker 1: from eroding. Right, if you don't have plants there, they're
Speaker 1: going to erode. I think it's this thought that, like,
Speaker 1: we need to keep the drainage canals clean, right, But
Speaker 1: they're not going in there and scooping out dead plant material.
Speaker 1: They literally scoop the sides of the canal, which again,
Speaker 1: every time you do it, it widens the canal and
Speaker 1: makes the slopes steeper, and so the ground starts eroding.
Speaker 1: You get a twelve foot tall slope that's just you know, subsiding. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's fucking crazy, man, Like it could be. It could
Speaker 1: have trees along it to shade the canal, you know,
Speaker 1: hold the root, hold the prevent the sides from eroding. Whatever,
Speaker 1: that would make too much sense. Again, it's just this
Speaker 1: idea that the native plant are messy and bare. Concrete,
Speaker 1: bear asphalt and mode turf grass are clean. That's really
Speaker 1: all it is. It's so hard to understand if you're
Speaker 1: not if you don't live down here, like if you
Speaker 1: haven't experienced it, and it ties into the culture too,
Speaker 1: because it's crazy. It's again, it's ninety eight percent Mexican American.
Speaker 1: The only time you see white people down here, it's
Speaker 1: almost always Mormon. I mean, there's a sprinkling of Caucasians, Caucasians,
Speaker 1: there's a sprinkling of Caucasity. But anytime you see white
Speaker 1: people down here, it's like anytime I see white people
Speaker 1: in my neighborhood, they're fucking Mormons. It's like there's like missionaries,
Speaker 1: you know, they're like the fresh faced, young pink boys
Speaker 1: and girls coming here to spread the good word of Jesus.
Speaker 1: But of course leaving out all the important class issues,
Speaker 1: leaving out his hatred for the rich. He didn't hate anybody,
Speaker 1: but you know what I mean, his distaste for the rich,
Speaker 1: his distaste for those who wanted status in and uh
Speaker 1: and to be seen as elite amongst their community and
Speaker 1: hold power over others. Right, it's you're never hear'm talking
Speaker 1: about anything. Okay, that's a that's a diatribe. But it's
Speaker 1: really hard to imagine if you've never been down here.
Speaker 1: Every other I've been in Mexican neighborhoods, Mexican adjacent neighborhoods
Speaker 1: my whole life. Right, then, there's always been you know,
Speaker 1: colorful murals, there's always been a strong there were brown
Speaker 1: pride movements in the sixties and seventies. None of that
Speaker 1: happened here. None of it happened here. And so it's
Speaker 1: a really peculiar place to study this effect, which is
Speaker 1: this weird shame that gets associated with with with I mean,
Speaker 1: so many elements of the culture, but especially with having
Speaker 1: like nopal or mesquite in your yard. Right, it means
Speaker 1: like you're you're messy, you're poor, you you you didn't
Speaker 1: escape the rancho like it's these severely fucking toxic ideologies, right.
Speaker 1: And of course down here you get parents that don't
Speaker 1: teach their kids Spanish. I mean, you get parents down here.
Speaker 1: And I know this because this is the case with
Speaker 1: friends of mine, parents who tell their children not to
Speaker 1: go out in the sun because they will brown. Don't
Speaker 1: use the natural melanin that you got. That you're you're
Speaker 1: fucking gifted by inheritance, which prevents skin cancer and prevents
Speaker 1: you from burning, Okay, and of course is adaptive at
Speaker 1: lower latitudes, not adaptive at higher latitudes you want need
Speaker 1: sixty latitudes, sixty degrees latitude. You know, you got to
Speaker 1: take vitamin these supplements if you got too much melanin
Speaker 1: or something right. But down here it's adaptive and there's
Speaker 1: just this is just science. It's just good biology behind this,
Speaker 1: how it works. It's just different ecotypes of humans essentially,
Speaker 1: that's all. That's all it is. It's just melanin. But
Speaker 1: the cultural baggage that's associated with all this bullshit is
Speaker 1: what focks people's heads up. And so it's it, you know,
Speaker 1: And of course it's I'm not a sociologist, I'm not
Speaker 1: a fucking anthropologist. But my ball my ballpark is native plants.
Speaker 1: And when I see people hating their natural heritage because
Speaker 1: of how they've been taught to hate their own fucking cult,
Speaker 1: it's it makes me pissed off. It makes me sad,
Speaker 1: and then it makes me mad. And so I don't know,
Speaker 1: there was never there was never like a movement down
Speaker 1: here that said, fuck you, you know, we're proud, fuck
Speaker 1: you were Mexican. All this shit, you know that that
Speaker 1: is so important and vital to other areas of the
Speaker 1: United States. There was never that, you get this weird
Speaker 1: and and the classism it's associated with this too, like
Speaker 1: you're poor if you have the native plants, you're a bum.
Speaker 1: You're not trying toward one of the guys afterwards, he
Speaker 1: was a nice guy. So the really nice guy, really
Speaker 1: nice to handle dude spoke up after the end and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, I don't I'm obviously outnumbered here,
Speaker 1: but you know, I think you know, there's a house
Speaker 1: around the corner from me that's got you know, the
Speaker 1: plants growing right up on on the street right, he's
Speaker 1: got cactus in there. And I was the first I
Speaker 1: was like, oh shit, is he talking about me? Because
Speaker 1: it's it's like that sounds like my house. But but
Speaker 1: you know, but there was a street that was that
Speaker 1: that the a house that's you can't even see the house.
Speaker 1: I was thinking my head, I'm like, why do you
Speaker 1: want to be able to see the house? Why are
Speaker 1: you obsessed with seeing the house? Why is someone gets
Speaker 1: a fence in front of her yard right at which people?
Speaker 1: Do they want privacy? Why do you need to see
Speaker 1: the house? Do you need to be looking in their
Speaker 1: windows or something? You're like, you want to check on
Speaker 1: what people are doing. You want like, why does it matter?
Speaker 1: That's weird? Number one. Number two, people don't maybe they
Speaker 1: don't want to see the bleak parking lot across the street,
Speaker 1: or they want, you know, they don't want the road
Speaker 1: noise coming or whatever. We to forget about whether you
Speaker 1: could see the house. A weird point. But that's been
Speaker 1: that's the third or fourth time it's been brought up.
Speaker 1: And so anyway, this guy, you know, nice guy, nice
Speaker 1: enough guy, but just a little brainwashed and unaware that
Speaker 1: he's been brainwashed, you know. But he said this thing
Speaker 1: when he was talking about it, and later on too,
Speaker 1: I asked him because I went up to talk to
Speaker 1: the guy, you know, and I was really nice, because
Speaker 1: I here's who I want to talk to the most,
Speaker 1: Like I want to hear what he is to say
Speaker 1: so I can understand this weird, deranged ideology. But I
Speaker 1: didn't say it like that. I was really nice to him,
Speaker 1: you know, no shame, so I'm not trying to shit
Speaker 1: on the guy. And and he told me the address.
Speaker 1: Later I went and looked at it was a fucking
Speaker 1: dope house. It was a dope yard. It looked beautiful.
Speaker 1: But one thing he said after he said, you know,
Speaker 1: take some pride where you live, you know, which is
Speaker 1: so indicative of a problem to me that you think
Speaker 1: that that mean that that person doesn't have any self
Speaker 1: respect for themselves. That's how heavily you've been bamboozled. You
Speaker 1: think the person that that has a really nice garden
Speaker 1: that's obviously well maintained, like the edges were cut. There
Speaker 1: was even three feet of mode turf grass between the
Speaker 1: street and the line of plants. Like it looked good.
Speaker 1: It looked better than my yard. And I saw it
Speaker 1: and I was like, damn, that's a good looking house.
Speaker 1: That person about whoever lives there is probably cool. But
Speaker 1: they're not a knob. They're not some fucking stiff that
Speaker 1: you know has been britting no offense to this guy,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, But that that site takes
Speaker 1: some pride in yourself. And the whole time I'm thinking,
Speaker 1: I'm like, buddy, this person evidently takes pride in themselves.
Speaker 1: They take pride in the place. It's that their culture
Speaker 1: has been using for thousands of years. Sounds like you
Speaker 1: got to take some pride and who you are because
Speaker 1: you've been taught to have all this shame and associate
Speaker 1: the plants with it. And I didn't say that to him,
Speaker 1: of course, because we're not on that level yet. We
Speaker 1: were just talking outside a city hall afterwards, after he
Speaker 1: said all this stuff, but you know, it was it
Speaker 1: was weird to his name is Romeo. He said Romeo, right,
Speaker 1: that anglicization, which is anohing you get done here, right,
Speaker 1: Jeseus becomes jesse All. It's fucking so weird, man, it's
Speaker 1: so fucking weird. I mean it's it's not weird, it's
Speaker 1: we know why it happens. But I mean, there was
Speaker 1: a fucking white's only section of my town, the town
Speaker 1: I live in, up until you know, the sixties, right,
Speaker 1: dominant populace here as Mexican American, and they got up
Speaker 1: the there was a there's because there's no white people
Speaker 1: here anymore. You don't see him anymore. I think they
Speaker 1: all moved out. I don't know what happened. I don't
Speaker 1: study the demographics of what happened here, but there was
Speaker 1: a white's only section at one point. There's not anymore,
Speaker 1: but the populace is forgotten that that's the way it
Speaker 1: used to be, right, And yeah, you could talk about
Speaker 1: you know, you hear some college kid with blue hair
Speaker 1: and accept them ring. It's colonization, yeah, yeah, a little bit,
Speaker 1: a little bit, But it's a little bit more than that,
Speaker 1: because you see this shit in Mexico two. You see
Speaker 1: it all over It's it's classism, it's a caste system.
Speaker 1: You see people all over the world. This is I
Speaker 1: don't know what this is tied to, what causes it,
Speaker 1: but any excuse humans can have to feel superior to
Speaker 1: each other and feel higher than one another. This is
Speaker 1: the kind of shit that comes out, you know, the
Speaker 1: hierarchies to create the social hierarchies. See chimps doing the
Speaker 1: same thing too, right, It's one thing to create hierarchies
Speaker 1: of you know, someone to lead and someone whatever designate
Speaker 1: the designate responsibilities to different members of a of a group. Right.
Speaker 1: But but the weird caste system that I'm better than
Speaker 1: you ideology, that's some fucking poison right there, and you
Speaker 1: I see it all over the fucking world. It's some
Speaker 1: toxic shit. So yeah, he's a colonialism, yeah a little bit,
Speaker 1: there's a little bit of that, But also this is
Speaker 1: just some sick shit that people do to each other.
Speaker 1: What's the root cause of it? Alienation from the living world,
Speaker 1: lack of humiliate. I don't know. I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: all cultural shit. I don't like I said, I don't
Speaker 1: study culture. I just talk shit. I don't study culture.
Speaker 1: That's not what I do. I don't. To be fair,
Speaker 1: I don't think sociologists really study culture too. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of them are sniffing their own parts anthropology
Speaker 1: right when you're studying it more from like a human
Speaker 1: and animal behavioral way of looking at why humans behave
Speaker 1: the way they do the same way animals behave the
Speaker 1: way they do. Maybe I give that a little more credit, right,
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I don't know. I just I know,
Speaker 1: you know, some kid with blue hair and accept them
Speaker 1: ring lecturing, Like lecturing this old guy on how he's
Speaker 1: been colonized is not gonna work if you start talking
Speaker 1: to him and you kind of get that cause I
Speaker 1: feel like you could reach people like this, you can,
Speaker 1: And that's why I want to talk to this guy.
Speaker 1: I was like, hey, sir. Afterwards, I was like, can
Speaker 1: you hey?
Speaker 3: I really?
Speaker 1: I know we disagree, but like, I don't care about that.
Speaker 1: I just want to hear what you like, what you feel,
Speaker 1: because I see yards that are filled with the plants
Speaker 1: that evolved here, and I love them. But I go
Speaker 1: out into nature a lot, you know, And maybe that's
Speaker 1: my biases. I know what nature looks like here, and
Speaker 1: that's why I love this stuff so much. Maybe you
Speaker 1: don't know it. I didn't want to say it that
Speaker 1: way because I don't want to make the dude feel defensive,
Speaker 1: you know, But maybe you know people who haven't been
Speaker 1: exposed to what the nature is here, the stuff they
Speaker 1: call monty, which literally just means scrub. It's like a
Speaker 1: derisive term for nature. Clear the monthay right. And I've
Speaker 1: never lived in a place that hates their native plants
Speaker 1: more than the Rio Grand Valley does. It's crazy. I mean,
Speaker 1: the way people treat the land here is fucking insane.
Speaker 1: It's like a It's like they got a snuff fetish
Speaker 1: for the native plants, bulldozing it, scraping it, just destroying
Speaker 1: the shit out of it, scraping it just for the
Speaker 1: sake of scraping it, cutting down trees even though they're
Speaker 1: not in the way. You don't need to build anything there,
Speaker 1: Scraping land even though you're not going to do anything
Speaker 1: with it. You're not gonna I mean, it's it's really weird. Shit,
Speaker 1: it's crazy. But uh, you know, I don't know, but
Speaker 1: it But so I said that to him, I said, I,
Speaker 1: you know, I've been studying the plants done here. They're amazing,
Speaker 1: They're incredible. We got incredible stuff on here. Doesn't go
Speaker 1: anywhere else the United States. Maybe it's just my bias
Speaker 1: versus yours, you know, whereas like you're used to seeing
Speaker 1: yards with the nicely hedged oleanders and crpe myrtles and stuff,
Speaker 1: and you know, but at the end of the day, sir,
Speaker 1: this is all subjective. So I just wanted to hear
Speaker 1: like it doesn't matter, it's totally subjective. There's there's pragmatism
Speaker 1: keeping plants out of walkways and preventing fire. Like I
Speaker 1: if vegetation is dead, you have to remove it, you right,
Speaker 1: Living plants don't burn unless they've got resinous oils in them,
Speaker 1: like eucalyptus or you know, takaate Cyprus, both of which
Speaker 1: involved with fire. But but dead plants will burn, so
Speaker 1: you gotta there's you know, that's a pragmatic thing. Keep
Speaker 1: the dead plants the brush out of the way, you know. So,
Speaker 1: but I want to how you think about this, and
Speaker 1: he he he seemed to loosen up a little bit,
Speaker 1: and he just explained, you know, it just looks messy.
Speaker 1: I don't like the way that it looks. It's gonna
Speaker 1: drive down property values. And I said, well, that's again,
Speaker 1: this is really subjective. There's no way to measure that,
Speaker 1: because you know, it's one thing to just let our
Speaker 1: yard go because you you don't care about it. When
Speaker 1: we had photos of that too, we had some photos
Speaker 1: who have people who just obviously didn't give a shit.
Speaker 1: They weren't native plant gardens. They just didn't weed whack,
Speaker 1: they didn't mow. They had trees that were half dead
Speaker 1: in their yard with a bunch of invasive bullshit spreading
Speaker 1: up on that. So we had examples to be like, look,
Speaker 1: this is a obviously cared for yard. Here's one that
Speaker 1: someone just let go. But you know, he seemed to
Speaker 1: loosen up. He was even like, well after hearing some
Speaker 1: of the stuff you guys said in there, because during
Speaker 1: the meeting we talked about the heat Island. You know,
Speaker 1: the guy that hates plants, the city manager didn't give
Speaker 1: a fuck. He would look like he would have much
Speaker 1: rather been somewhere else. Had no effect on him, just
Speaker 1: totally out the launch. Doesn't care. He's not gonna there's
Speaker 1: no way to change him.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Lets you throw a bag over his head, give him
Speaker 1: some psilocybin mushrooms, take him to a van, you know,
Speaker 1: take him out to the desert and force him to
Speaker 1: see the beauty in it for six hours. Even then,
Speaker 1: it probably won't work. He'll probably just you know, call
Speaker 1: the cops and file kidnapping charges on you, which is
Speaker 1: a totally understandable reaction. I get it. So but this guy,
Speaker 1: this this old guy, got to loosen up. But again,
Speaker 1: you know, when I even asked him, I was like, what,
Speaker 1: oh what is your name? He told me of rome Romeo?
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh Romeo. You mean Romeo right,
Speaker 1: He's like yeah Romeo, Like yeah, see that's again. That's
Speaker 1: how you that's you get it. That's how you get it.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's weird. The two guys that that shot that the
Speaker 1: two ICE agents that shot that murdered that guy in Minneapolis,
Speaker 1: Uh Preddy Alex Preddy. They were from here, right, same thing,
Speaker 1: Jesse Jesse not hejeseus Jesse Right, it's this weird shit man.
Speaker 1: And I understand where it comes from. It's because the
Speaker 1: honky doth go. Now I'm talking about culturally honky. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: this is not an anti white person thing. I'm saying
Speaker 1: culturally white. You could be and as I know more
Speaker 1: than anyone else, you can be Mexican and be culturally white.
Speaker 1: You could be very culturally white, right, Mexican in melanin
Speaker 1: content only or maybe not even. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: of really obnoxious white passing Mexican Americans, many of them
Speaker 1: that many of them don't like me to hang out
Speaker 1: in expensive coffee shops and whatever, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: But you know, so this is I don't know. It
Speaker 1: was just it was a weird thing. But I feel
Speaker 1: I feel better now understanding it a lot since I
Speaker 1: understand a lot better and also seeing like, man, if
Speaker 1: that's all it is, all you got to do is
Speaker 1: teach people how dope the plants are here and how
Speaker 1: fucking cool they are, and how to take pride in
Speaker 1: them and lightly, lightly imply that maybe they've been duped,
Speaker 1: maybe they've been bamboozled a little bit. Right, then maybe
Speaker 1: you can start to change things. Right, don't fucking go
Speaker 1: lecture them and shit on them and oh you just
Speaker 1: the colonies, but you know, you just.
Speaker 3: Maybe this happened.
Speaker 1: You know, why do you hate the nature here? Why
Speaker 1: do you hate mosquites? You know, they're actually they're an
Speaker 1: edible tree. They're hearty as hell and drought in full sun.
Speaker 1: They're really cool plants. You go to Tucson, south south
Speaker 1: southern Arizona, a lot of cities use mosquits. They embraced
Speaker 1: their Look at what Brad Lancaster did in his neighborhood, right,
Speaker 1: he created like a native food for it. Really cool stuff. Right.
Speaker 1: Why do you hate mosquites? Well, they're invasive and they
Speaker 1: suck up all the way. Well, they don't really suck
Speaker 1: up all the water. They're free out of fight. So
Speaker 1: they send roots down really really deep, and they've got
Speaker 1: some wonderful adaptations for surviving drought. They basically go drought deciduous.
Speaker 1: They lose all their leaves. They also bring water up
Speaker 1: from way deep and give it to their feeder roots
Speaker 1: to redistribute it into the soil around their feeder roots,
Speaker 1: which are shallower, more lateral roots. And then that also
Speaker 1: basically brings up water to anything that's around them. And
Speaker 1: so they're kind of like a water pump that can
Speaker 1: benefit the plants around them. They're really wonderful trees. And
Speaker 1: also yeah, they're edible. They were really important food source
Speaker 1: for native people lived here in fifteen thou twenty thousand years.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe the reason that people don't like them
Speaker 1: is because they come so they become such an abundant
Speaker 1: tree due to their resistance to being eaten by cows
Speaker 1: once you've overgrazed a spot and not done rotational grazing.
Speaker 1: So maybe the reason the mesquites are so abundant and
Speaker 1: thriving is because the cattle weren't rotated, right, same thing
Speaker 1: that happens with prickly pair right. And also, mesquites lose
Speaker 1: those two inch long spines when they get tall. You'll
Speaker 1: never see long spines on a mature mesquite. You don't
Speaker 1: see them because they're a way of energy to produce.
Speaker 1: There's no point in producing something if you're already tall
Speaker 1: enough and big enough that herbivores can't reach your foliage anyway, right,
Speaker 1: you start laying it on the same thing like uh,
Speaker 1: my friend Red would do when he was doing labor
Speaker 1: organizing in Chicago, right, he would he would work with
Speaker 1: obviously racist, obviously racist white dudes, white working class guys
Speaker 1: on the South Side, And he would be going in
Speaker 1: there trying to organize a fucking switchman's union or engineers
Speaker 1: or whatever. And he would go in there and they'd
Speaker 1: say some, they'd drop some, they'd say some. You know,
Speaker 1: racist shit is tends to happen on South Shide of
Speaker 1: Chicago and white neighborhoods about blacks or whatever the fuck
Speaker 1: whoever they've got a beef with, probably just mostly blacks
Speaker 1: and and And rather than going, oh, wow, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna wig with you, yikes, he would just you fucking
Speaker 1: ignore it. He'd talk a focus on organizing them, and
Speaker 1: then later on, when he got to know him a
Speaker 1: little bit more, he would imply, well, you know, they
Speaker 1: want the same thing that you do. They want the
Speaker 1: same you do, and there actually you got a lot
Speaker 1: more in common with them than you deal with the
Speaker 1: people up top right, and a lot more in common
Speaker 1: with your brothers and who are also working on the ground,
Speaker 1: risking their lives out here and moving heavy equipment, and
Speaker 1: a lot more in common with them than you do
Speaker 1: with the people that run the company. So you know
Speaker 1: you want similar things. Man, and it would work. It
Speaker 1: would fucking work. Holy shit, it would work amazing, right, amazing.
Speaker 1: That's how you organize people, that's how that's how you
Speaker 1: get people. So anyway, that's the reason I was talking
Speaker 1: to this guy, was like, I want to recruit you
Speaker 1: over to our side because I've never I've done sixty
Speaker 1: of these fucking yards for people, and I've never once
Speaker 1: have I gotten someone who said, you know what, this sucks.
Speaker 1: That'll I wanted to go back to turf grass lawn.
Speaker 1: I want to go back to spending five hundred bucks
Speaker 1: a month watering Bermuda and Saint Augustine grass so I
Speaker 1: can have an open expanse that doesn't get used for anything, nothing,
Speaker 1: a useless crop. I'm not eating it, nothing else is
Speaker 1: eating it. It's just out there to look pretty in
Speaker 1: front of my house. So that when I passed by
Speaker 1: it for twenty seconds pulling into my driveway at the
Speaker 1: end of the day, it looks green. I can say
Speaker 1: I have a nice lown and most importantly, most importantly,
Speaker 1: what my neighbors think of me is really really important,
Speaker 1: much more than it probably should be. And so I
Speaker 1: want them to see my yard and equate that with
Speaker 1: my societal status. Right. I've never had someone say I
Speaker 1: want to go back to that. It's quite the opposite.
Speaker 1: I get people who had no interest in plants or
Speaker 1: birds or any of that shit texting me being like, man,
Speaker 1: all this cool shit I saw coming out, this is incredible.
Speaker 1: I saw a fucking kiskedi in my yard. I got butterflies.
Speaker 1: What is this thing? What did you plant? I didn't
Speaker 1: even see this when you planted it, But now it's,
Speaker 1: you know, two years later, and it's large and flowering
Speaker 1: and it looks incredible. Right, That's what I get. So
Speaker 1: this stuff is addictive, and it's coming. Whether the city
Speaker 1: likes or not, this stuff's coming. I just did tours.
Speaker 1: I spoke to four hundred people in fucking Atlanta about
Speaker 1: native plants, cool plants from all over the world, native plants,
Speaker 1: and shitty landscaping. This shitty oleander landscaping. This stuff that
Speaker 1: is the equivalent of a woman who thinks she's not
Speaker 1: beautiful enough, who's got to put lip injections and fucking
Speaker 1: gobs of sticky makeup and and butt implants in right,
Speaker 1: and botox right like that. This is what that's literally
Speaker 1: what this is. This is what it's like, it looks weird.
Speaker 1: This landscaping shit looks weird. It looks unnatural. It looks
Speaker 1: the range. Why do the bushes have to be hedged
Speaker 1: into molars? Why does the fucking oleander? Why are you
Speaker 1: planting oleander there? It doesn't it's from nine thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: It's a dead zone. Why you know, I never see
Speaker 1: dragonflies hanging out, and you never see all the cool
Speaker 1: I walk to my I walk outside my front door.
Speaker 1: I'm getting there's dragonflies, all kinds of cool. Butterflies chasing
Speaker 1: each other trying to fuck. Wouldn't say that, end up
Speaker 1: meeting with the city, but that I presume it's what
Speaker 1: they're doing it. Look, look they're having a really good time.
Speaker 1: Got you know, whiptail lizards chasing each other around, keeping
Speaker 1: the roaches down. Got anoles? I got Carolina knowles and
Speaker 1: the cuban of noles, those invasive ones. I got these
Speaker 1: Texas spiny lizards. I saw a spiny lizard the signs
Speaker 1: of a hamburger the other I mean, fuck man, it's amazing.
Speaker 1: Why would you not want that? Why would I don't
Speaker 1: understand how you know, and you start to show people
Speaker 1: this and you don't do it accusatory, and you don't
Speaker 1: talk it like it's a flaw their character. You know,
Speaker 1: you just show them lightly. It can change and it's happened.
Speaker 1: It's happened, whether the city I live in like said
Speaker 1: or not. And that's what something. That's what a lady said.
Speaker 1: The lady said, it was actually pretty cool, said this yesterday.
Speaker 1: She's like, people are already doing this, like this is
Speaker 1: like regulations or not. People are already doing this. So
Speaker 1: what do we do?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, here's what we have to think about.
Speaker 1: But more importantly, why are we doing it? So that's
Speaker 1: how we structured the presentation. If you're trying to do
Speaker 1: this in your city structure, what is this and why
Speaker 1: are we doing it? Why are we doing it? Well,
Speaker 1: the heat island is a big thing. I had pictures
Speaker 1: of the little temperature gun out there, a temperature of asphalt,
Speaker 1: temperature of turf grass which was still one hundred and
Speaker 1: twenty five degrees fairnight. Thank you Kyle Weiberger from the
Speaker 1: Native Habitat Project. We I had my launch cause flooding
Speaker 1: diagram out there. If you're feel free to use that
Speaker 1: diagram right you can email me for it. Don't be
Speaker 1: fucking wordy because I'm not going to respond or read it.
Speaker 1: Just get straight to the point. I don't have then
Speaker 1: to read emails anymore. I'm sorry. I'll send you the
Speaker 1: launch cause flooding diagram. How the soil beneath the perennial
Speaker 1: shrubs or prairie is like a dry sponge, and how
Speaker 1: the soil beneath turf grass is like a brick. If
Speaker 1: you pour water on both, which is gonna have a
Speaker 1: puddle around it? Faster? Think about it. That dry sponge
Speaker 1: is to get completely saturated before it runs off and
Speaker 1: starts forming a puddle, right, exact same way that the
Speaker 1: soil and the soil in the groundwork. Instead's what a
Speaker 1: bioswale does, right. The only reason they need retention ponds
Speaker 1: around all these hideous mini mold and mini malls and
Speaker 1: suburban subdivisions that they build is because it's all turf
Speaker 1: grass and asphalt, which leads to massive runoff. The water
Speaker 1: literally can't make it into the fucking ground, and so
Speaker 1: it runs off. You get massive flooding, and so they
Speaker 1: have to just drain it away. They wouldn't have to
Speaker 1: do that, and it certainly wouldn't have to do it
Speaker 1: as much if they had native plants, native prairie plants,
Speaker 1: lots of porosity in the soil. It's crazy, though, I mean,
Speaker 1: the pragmatism behind this. It's not just feel good to
Speaker 1: use it, you know, use a paper straw. The pragmatism
Speaker 1: behind this is what it's all about. Because the way
Speaker 1: we're doing things now is literally killing us. It's fucking ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I was at my buddy Jose's three days ago. We
Speaker 1: were planting. You know, he's got a barren front yard,
Speaker 1: not anymore, but he did, and so we were planting
Speaker 1: stuff there and just being out there. Man, the fucking heat,
Speaker 1: because you know, the street in front of his house
Speaker 1: is pretty wide, and then all the asphalt and the
Speaker 1: driveway and there's no trees, and you could just feel
Speaker 1: the heat coming at you.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: It was fucking we were sweating our asses off. Right.
Speaker 1: The sun's already down, it's dark out where. We're planting
Speaker 1: shit by flashlight, and it is just fucking miserable. We
Speaker 1: are roast thing. It feels like you're sitting on top
Speaker 1: of a heat mat, which you are, right, So how
Speaker 1: do you what do you do about that? Right, you
Speaker 1: plant shade trees, plant trees along the street. It's where
Speaker 1: they need to go. Luckily, we have all the legumes, right,
Speaker 1: not oaks, because oaks put roots out laterally. The oaks
Speaker 1: are great trees, they're not really native down here, and
Speaker 1: they put lateral roots out that really fuck up sidewalks
Speaker 1: and streets. But we've got all these you know, legumes right,
Speaker 1: like Havardia, palins, paalo Verde, mesquites, ebonies that send roots
Speaker 1: down super deep. Right. You can see this when you
Speaker 1: grow them, they get four inches tall, the roots will
Speaker 1: be three feet deep already. They're massive. I mean they
Speaker 1: get these massively, extremely long, deep roots and they don't
Speaker 1: really go out, and you can grow them in PVC
Speaker 1: tubes and see this. So you plant those along the streets,
Speaker 1: which of course you rarely see here unless it's a
Speaker 1: poor neighborhood, a poorer working class neighborhood, and then that
Speaker 1: those are the only places that keep their their native trees.
Speaker 1: Where you can find native trees, maybe you'll find a
Speaker 1: Mexican olive and a wealthier neighborhood, but mostly what you're
Speaker 1: gonna find in the wealthy neighborhoods are oaks and crape
Speaker 1: myrtles and hideous garbage like that. That's totally regionally inappropriate.
Speaker 1: So you plant the native trees, which are so cool
Speaker 1: and so embraced in places like southern Arizona, which have
Speaker 1: you know, same genus, different species as Sonoran desert species
Speaker 1: instead of a time of leaping thorn scrub version of
Speaker 1: that genus, And you plant those and get you get shade,
Speaker 1: You get a nice canopy to walk through onto the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: It's pleasant outside. When they flower, it smells really good,
Speaker 1: and you don't have to do anything to them except
Speaker 1: maybe pruna branch here and there. Whenever a storm blows
Speaker 1: one down. I had to just take a branch off
Speaker 1: a Tepawai. Hey, we got a killer thunderstorm here three
Speaker 1: days ago. It came in like nobody's business. I was
Speaker 1: in the fucking gym. I was looking outside. I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna come. I'm checking the radar every fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: and suddenly it just fucking pisses and there's lightning right upside,
Speaker 1: and I'm just fuck, yeah, I'm just so so excited,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm like, fuck because it's so hot. I
Speaker 1: mean already three days later. The soil is basically already dry.
Speaker 1: It's been baked a shit, especially if there's no vegetation
Speaker 1: or covering on it otherwise, and it dries out like
Speaker 1: a brick, a brick of fucking clay. But I was
Speaker 1: out there. I ran outside and I was just screaming.
Speaker 1: I was, you know, I got a little too giddy.
Speaker 1: I was excited screaming, and then a big lightning you know,
Speaker 1: the reminder that oh this can actually still be dangerous.
Speaker 1: This big lightning crash went off right above me. I
Speaker 1: was like, oh shit, fuck Jesus Christ, get in the truck.
Speaker 1: You know he's insulated. You're off the ground at least.
Speaker 1: But uh, but yeah, it took down a couple branches
Speaker 1: here and there. The winds just get intense and whatever.
Speaker 1: You got a chainsaw, keep a chainsaw on you. I
Speaker 1: learn how to, like, I get electric chainsauce, so you
Speaker 1: can also use it the vandalize crape myrtles at night
Speaker 1: without making a lot of noise. It's a really important thing.
Speaker 1: I hope there's kids out there doing that. I hope
Speaker 1: there's kids out there vandalizing crpe myrtles and nanthena and
Speaker 1: olean there, just go cut it down. Public property, private property.
Speaker 1: I'm just kidding. I would never advocate something criminal. But
Speaker 1: if I were joking around, which I certainly am, I'm
Speaker 1: just joking. If I were joking, I would say, go
Speaker 1: out there and just start vandalizing horticulture atrocities where it
Speaker 1: makes sense to do so. Right shopping Center. I got
Speaker 1: some crape myrtles. They look like shit. Anyways, they're dead.
Speaker 1: Maybe it would be a good idea to go cut
Speaker 1: them down if they're especially if they're like infested with
Speaker 1: crape myrtle bark scale, and then go plant something nice
Speaker 1: in the place of it. Right, don't even rely. You
Speaker 1: gotta keep the land, keep the landscapers away from the land.
Speaker 1: Don't let them work on any of that. They're they're
Speaker 1: gonna fuck it up. They're horrible. Unless they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: unless they've got you know, if they're people who spend
Speaker 1: time in nature, who have an ear for this stuff,
Speaker 1: I understand how it works. Right, those are okay, But
Speaker 1: nine out of ten, they're gonna they're gonna hedge things
Speaker 1: into molars, They're gonna make it look weird. They're gonna
Speaker 1: poodle dog tail all the tree. It's weird. The butt
Speaker 1: plug pruning on the trees. Everyone wants to have a
Speaker 1: kN of fur that looks like a butt plug. I
Speaker 1: don't know why. It's more of that latent repression. Probably
Speaker 1: I would assume, I don't know. It's weird. Shit. It's
Speaker 1: not good for you. It's bad for you. It's bad
Speaker 1: to be exposed to it's bad to have to be
Speaker 1: exposed to it and see it. When you go out
Speaker 1: to cash a check at a Bankwe everyone does mobile
Speaker 1: deposits now. But you know what I mean. You gotta
Speaker 1: go pick up a prescription at the drug store. You
Speaker 1: have to look at this filth, this trash, right, and
Speaker 1: that's what it is. It's this landscaping, horticultural atrocity. Shit
Speaker 1: is garbage. It's poison. It's poisoned for the land. There
Speaker 1: are always dead zones. Get rid of it. Okay. If
Speaker 1: an electric chainsaw is going to feel you more emboldened
Speaker 1: to do that because it doesn't make a lot of
Speaker 1: noise at ten o'clock eleven o'clock at night in a
Speaker 1: parking lot, by all means, go ahead and do it.
Speaker 1: But again I'm just joking. I would never, sincerely, you know,
Speaker 1: intend for anyone to go vandalize horticultural atrocities, cultivars of
Speaker 1: plants that evolved nine thousand miles away before they were
Speaker 1: bred for color by some knob in a greenhouse over
Speaker 1: the last century. I would never I would never advise
Speaker 1: someone to do that anyway. So by that was in
Speaker 1: our presentation, not vandalizing crpe myrtles, of course, but using
Speaker 1: street trees as infrastructure, using shrubs to help water infiltrate
Speaker 1: ground the evapple. We even explained the avappo transportive effect
Speaker 1: of you know when water goes from a liquid to
Speaker 1: a gas state when it leaves a store model poor
Speaker 1: opening on an under side of a leaf goes from
Speaker 1: liquid to a gas state and requires heat to do that,
Speaker 1: and it pulls that heat from this around the same
Speaker 1: way a swap cooler works. We explain this to them,
Speaker 1: even the city manager that looked thoroughly bored and unimpressed
Speaker 1: the whole time, and you could tell he'd already made
Speaker 1: up his mind before the the program even started. We'll
Speaker 1: get to him one day. We're all recruiting one day.
Speaker 1: There's there's no uh, there's no avoiding it. So and
Speaker 1: that was the other thing we explained. We're saying, look, this,
Speaker 1: this is different from what people have been told is
Speaker 1: what a yard should look like. But there's a way
Speaker 1: to do this right too, and so it's all a
Speaker 1: learning process. You guys will learn, you know, instead of
Speaker 1: mowing lawns, you just you hedge. You keep shit out
Speaker 1: of the walkways. You hedge the sides so that plants
Speaker 1: don't grow into the you know, you got to prune
Speaker 1: a branch here here there so it's not too dense
Speaker 1: or so it doesn't you know, fall over or spill
Speaker 1: into a neighbor's yard or hit the delivery truck when
Speaker 1: they come by. Just practical stuff like that. And that's
Speaker 1: stuff that you learn as you do this. But this
Speaker 1: is coming, whether you like it or not. It's already here,
Speaker 1: you know. And I told him that too. I was like,
Speaker 1: I just did a tour around the country. We were
Speaker 1: in la where I was in Atlanta. People are doing
Speaker 1: this everywhere. It's coming. This is what people want. People
Speaker 1: know that it doesn't make sense to have turf grass
Speaker 1: and Saint Augustine grass and trees that require lots of
Speaker 1: irrigation because they evolved nine thousand miles away, especially when
Speaker 1: you live in a desert, that doesn't make sense anymore.
Speaker 1: It's this doesn't work. So it was a good turnout,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, it was. It was all I think
Speaker 1: I was the only white dude there. Well, no, Allen
Speaker 1: was there too, Alan Williams. But it was you know,
Speaker 1: it was like it was regional. It was all my
Speaker 1: friends from the region. My buddy Eric was there, who
Speaker 1: looks like he dresses really nice, but he does look
Speaker 1: like he just got out of prison. He's super swollen,
Speaker 1: he's got shaved head. You know, he's like fifty, really
Speaker 1: fucking nice guy. He just got in the native plants
Speaker 1: last couple of years. He didn't know anything about it.
Speaker 1: He was just in the kind of into gardening and
Speaker 1: then realized how cool all the all the time a
Speaker 1: leaping thornscrub stuff. Was got really into it. He was there.
Speaker 1: He's got a really big, deep voice. So it was
Speaker 1: you know, it's good. Maybe it'll get some of the
Speaker 1: the people that have been in the mostly men. It
Speaker 1: was most the people that spoke out against this that
Speaker 1: didn't like it. It was mostly men. I was surprised
Speaker 1: it wasn't It wasn't a women. It was mostly it
Speaker 1: wasn't surprised. But there's I know, there's one lady in
Speaker 1: a city hall who really hates my yard. Maybe she
Speaker 1: loosened up a little bit. She wasn't there, but anyway,
Speaker 1: the mayor told me she watches my videos. That was
Speaker 1: kind of funny. I was like, oh shit, Like gosh,
Speaker 1: she's like, I watched your videos. Go christ you're a fan.
Speaker 1: No tell me that you're gonna make me self conscious
Speaker 1: about what I say. No more dildo jokes for for
Speaker 1: me anyway, But uh, I don't think of me. You know,
Speaker 1: I've I've kept the recent videos pretty pretty PG but
Speaker 1: proud of myself. Right, it's a I've made it for
Speaker 1: a more appropriate audience, trying to reach a more appropriate,
Speaker 1: more a broader audience. But yeah, but most of the
Speaker 1: resistance came from like these dudes, Like there's like like
Speaker 1: two or three, like thee Hano dudes like Dine in
Speaker 1: the wall. You know, probably if I were to go
Speaker 1: out on a limb and guess people's ideology, I would say,
Speaker 1: maybe they associate plants and native plants some of them
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you know, with something like being gay. Who knows,
Speaker 1: which of course is fucking fine. But you know, in
Speaker 1: a heavily machismo culture, it's it's looked down upon. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know, the weird cultural associations people make.
Speaker 1: But all that starts to vanish when you realize you've
Speaker 1: been bamboozled and you realize how cool the living world
Speaker 1: around you is. All that shit starts to taper off
Speaker 1: and you realize how ephemeral and goofy it is, and
Speaker 1: you'd start seeing what's real. So you know, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't fucking know, but it's it's weird, man, it's weird.
Speaker 1: You just meet these people who just are again and
Speaker 1: you can see him grasping its straws to find any
Speaker 1: reason that they can just mental gymnastics, reaching for anything,
Speaker 1: to find any reason, just to hate any reasoning, just
Speaker 1: to hate, hate on and try to limit the native
Speaker 1: plant thing, you know, because it's messy. It's messy, and
Speaker 1: the concrete's clean, and this is a status thing. If
Speaker 1: you've got you know, nepals and mesquites in your yard,
Speaker 1: you're poor and you don't take pride and where you live,
Speaker 1: don't you want to hedge it into a butt plug
Speaker 1: shape or maybe a molar shape and make it look clean, right,
Speaker 1: it's fucking weird stuff. It's like Spanish colonial gardening style.
Speaker 1: It's fucking weird right down here. It's a Spanish colonial style.
Speaker 1: People aren't really going for the Victorian England look. Well
Speaker 1: maybe a little bit. Maybe, you know, they're trying to
Speaker 1: do some of that that shit you might see up
Speaker 1: in Virginia. You know, I've seen some really hideous shit
Speaker 1: I've been on the road. I would have filmed more.
Speaker 1: When I was in South Carolina. I saw some wonderful examples.
Speaker 1: I almost wanted to do another episode of Spiritually Depraved
Speaker 1: the misery inducing Landscapes, but I didn't have the time.
Speaker 1: I've been really stretched for time. Time is one thing
Speaker 1: I have not had. And also it takes me three
Speaker 1: times as long to do anything, probably because it add
Speaker 1: the unmedicated add I haven't been taking my meedge lately,
Speaker 1: been trying to avoid it because it, you know, foxed
Speaker 1: with me for sleeping at night, makes it harder to
Speaker 1: sleep at night. So instead I just medicate with coffee
Speaker 1: and green tea and the occasional cigar. But yeah, that man,
Speaker 1: South Carolina had they did some real They're doing some
Speaker 1: real good work out there in terms of creating bleak
Speaker 1: artificial horticulture, it's incredible stuff. Saw so many crpe myrtles,
Speaker 1: Bradford pears surrounded by asphalt parking lots, just you know,
Speaker 1: dead on the inside landscape, nothing to live for. Its
Speaker 1: just cultural pain spirit but you will pain and suffering,
Speaker 1: all right. Anyway, the little change up on subject matter.
Speaker 1: I finally got to see Echinaesia tennessee ensis, which is
Speaker 1: that endemic ecinaceous species. There are so many endemic species
Speaker 1: in Tennessee. It's it's wild man. Ariagonum harparai is another one,
Speaker 1: which that's a monocarpic buckwheat lives for like four to
Speaker 1: five years, flowers at the end, kind of like the
Speaker 1: genus phrase zero, which is unrelated, can get six feet tall.
Speaker 1: Once a flowers, it dies, That's what being monocarpic means.
Speaker 1: And it grows on these I guess limestone rocky areas
Speaker 1: along some of the rivers there, And I got a
Speaker 1: couple points from friends. I mean, you could probably find
Speaker 1: if you knew what county was in you looked at
Speaker 1: a satellite map, you could look for areas where, you know,
Speaker 1: just look for the bedrock at the surface but you know,
Speaker 1: all the orbarium specimens, all the locations are obscured, which
Speaker 1: is fucking stupid. Man. No one's gonna go poach a
Speaker 1: fucking buckwheat. Man, They're not right. No one's gonna go
Speaker 1: try to rip a buckwheet. Why were you gonna Why
Speaker 1: are you gonna gatekeep that? It's kind of silly. It's
Speaker 1: not like an orchid or some cactus or something of
Speaker 1: the transports easily. Oh well, you'd beat spri I don't know,
Speaker 1: or like a carnivorous plant. People will definitely post a
Speaker 1: shit out of carnivorous plants. But no one's gonna go
Speaker 1: post a six foot tall monocarpic buckwheat. But I guess
Speaker 1: it's in the Ariagonum launge of folium complex and I
Speaker 1: I only became aware of its existence after Adam Black
Speaker 1: texted me after I had already passed. It grows like
Speaker 1: between Nashville and Knoxville. I was like, really, you told
Speaker 1: you know, you could have told me this a day ago.
Speaker 1: I drove right by the fucking thing on a highway
Speaker 1: but didn't stop because I didn't know it was there,
Speaker 1: you know. But I was also really excited to see
Speaker 1: conrad Den ever tissilata, which is a scrub mint. The
Speaker 1: rest of the genus is in Florida has a really
Speaker 1: cool ecology. Fire dependent scrub is what the rest of
Speaker 1: the genus, and Florida grows in really cool bilaterally symmetrical flowers.
Speaker 1: It is in the mint family lamy ace soo zygomorphic flowers.
Speaker 1: But this is a species that conray Dena vertissolada grows
Speaker 1: on these rivers in northeastern Tennessee where I guess there's
Speaker 1: a relict population a Thuia occidentalis, you know, to eastern
Speaker 1: arbor vity which that is fucking wild. That's weird because
Speaker 1: that plant grows on like the shores of Wisconsin. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's not something you would associate with the Cumberland Plateau.
Speaker 1: But Cumberland Plateau is kind of high in the elevation
Speaker 1: there was like eighteen hundred feet two thousand feet, So
Speaker 1: I can see how there would be an ice age
Speaker 1: relict that got stuck there, landlocked there and these little
Speaker 1: river canyons. But that's fucking wild to me. Arbor vite
Speaker 1: thuya or thujia if you if you prefer to pronounce
Speaker 1: the jay, not silently, but anyway, so conra a Deena Vertissolada.
Speaker 1: I was going to look for it, and there's it's
Speaker 1: on either side of this river. The side I drove
Speaker 1: to is the harder to access side. I had to
Speaker 1: basically ford my truck across two feet of water, which
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure was going to make it, but it did.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 1: Knee height at least on me is about what you
Speaker 1: can drive a Toyota Tacoma through. And that's pushing it.
Speaker 1: You know, that's like you don't want to be in
Speaker 1: there long. You want to drive into it fast enough
Speaker 1: to get out, with enough momentum to get out. But
Speaker 1: it was harry for a second versus like on the
Speaker 1: other side of the creek that you can reach, and
Speaker 1: the creek is the bridge is destroyed. You can walk
Speaker 1: across it, but you can't. You certainly can't drive across it.
Speaker 1: It's fucking out. And so I guess what the ecology
Speaker 1: of this cool Conradina, this scrub mint, is that it
Speaker 1: grows in these river canyons and it grows on these
Speaker 1: these floods scoured every time it floods. That's the disturbance
Speaker 1: necessary to create the clearing and eliminate any tall, super
Speaker 1: tall growing vegetar that might otherwise shade this plant out.
Speaker 1: So I made a video on it. I don't like.
Speaker 1: It's not a very it's not gonna be very good video,
Speaker 1: but there's some cool footage in it. At least it's
Speaker 1: like a forty minute maybe it's twenty minute, thirty minute.
Speaker 1: And I was walking through poison ivy. I didn't get
Speaker 1: any I don't know how, me and Louis both. She
Speaker 1: was being very good, just sweating my ass off. It
Speaker 1: wasn't even that hot. But I'm in this river, gorgeous,
Speaker 1: humid as a nutst just oh my god. I was
Speaker 1: dripping sweat, just crawling through. We got a couple of
Speaker 1: ticks crawling on me walking through the brush. Really cool
Speaker 1: habitat selliatris. What is it? Micro god? I forget the name,
Speaker 1: Thank God for iat because I forget the species names.
Speaker 1: It's a good way, you know, if if you have
Speaker 1: in at, it's like writing them down so you can
Speaker 1: study them. What did I see? What was that liatris?
Speaker 1: I saw on such and such, So it's mostly what
Speaker 1: I use ininet for. But microcephala, yeah, micro head. So
Speaker 1: I got that there was that every There were some
Speaker 1: fucking cool plants. There are tons solid aggos. I stopped
Speaker 1: in a beautiful savannah before that, which I still need
Speaker 1: to make a video on that beautiful Tennessee savannah. Just
Speaker 1: fucking gorgeous, man, just I mean a true savannah, like
Speaker 1: three foot tall four foot tall scrub with oaks scattered intermittently.
Speaker 1: Just a beautiful fucking sight. And I saw this die
Speaker 1: ernold sphinx moth out hitting all these plants. Fuck, it
Speaker 1: was so cool. Let me look up the species name
Speaker 1: so I can give it to you if you want
Speaker 1: to look it up that you know that savannah was
Speaker 1: a hold on, let me put up. God. Moths are
Speaker 1: so fucking dope. They're so cool. God damn it. Harvest
Speaker 1: durance through that's a separate conversation. But if you don't
Speaker 1: like harvesturance, you're an asshole. I've been going around to
Speaker 1: different fire ant mounds and killing them either with boiling
Speaker 1: water or with this poison that they supposedly sequester into
Speaker 1: their nest. I think boiling water is the best way
Speaker 1: to go, though. Go heat up. I got a one
Speaker 1: gallon thermos. I'll fill it up with with boiling water
Speaker 1: and then go pour it on the nest. I hate
Speaker 1: those fuckers fire ants. Plus they kill the harvest dants.
Speaker 1: Harvest dants are cool. They're big, they're red. They're scary,
Speaker 1: the Texas harvester rant. But unless you're standing on a nest,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna bite you or sting you. Rather right,
Speaker 1: they'll just totally ignore you, and they're they're just cool.
Speaker 1: I fucking love ants, and they're important food source for
Speaker 1: many of the lizards, especially the horned lizards. But you know,
Speaker 1: the invasive fire ants fuck all that up. You can
Speaker 1: also tell what's a fire ant. The fire ants are
Speaker 1: very small, they're red. I don't need to tell anybody
Speaker 1: in the Southeast at of course they're familiar with fire
Speaker 1: ants that gets stung by them. But you know, you
Speaker 1: can tell a fire by the kind of nest that
Speaker 1: makes just like these, like these mounds, like you know,
Speaker 1: mounds of soil versus the harvester ants just create those
Speaker 1: little crater holes and then they clear everything around them.
Speaker 1: I don't know what happened to the leaf cut I
Speaker 1: had leaf cutter ants. I think my neighbor killed them.
Speaker 1: She was I met her when she moved in. She's
Speaker 1: an old lady. I don't speak a word of English,
Speaker 1: and she was, you know, she was telling me. She's like,
Speaker 1: what do you do? And she's like, I'm killing the
Speaker 1: ants and like, but these, she's like, they're coming inside.
Speaker 1: I'm like, those those are leafcutter ants. Man, They're not
Speaker 1: coming inside your house. There's no reason for There's nothing
Speaker 1: for them in there, right, there's there's that's like, uh,
Speaker 1: it's like catching like a daddy bear going into like
Speaker 1: a straight porno shopper. So there's no there's nothing for
Speaker 1: him in there. Well maybe I don't know. I guess
Speaker 1: you could be great whatever. Anyway, the point is, the
Speaker 1: point is the leaf cutter ants aren't going in your house.
Speaker 1: And so but then she's like, okay, well you want
Speaker 1: some you want some of this poison to kill you.
Speaker 1: I just like no. And then after that, these magnificent
Speaker 1: colonies of leaf cutter ants, which I liked, just disappeared.
Speaker 1: I didn't see him anymore. So, uh, hopefully there's still
Speaker 1: a lot, you know, I imagine they're still alive. They
Speaker 1: they maybe they're just dormant, dormant feeding their fungus. They're Uh,
Speaker 1: I'd love to see that fungus fruit. I wonder what
Speaker 1: species of fungus. Okay, I'm getting distracted here. Let's go
Speaker 1: back to this. The diurnal sphinx moth in the oaks
Speaker 1: Savannah was himarus thisby fifby? What is it? What's the
Speaker 1: common and kind? What a beautiful fucking moth. It's like
Speaker 1: bay beige, uh, top half of the body with reddish
Speaker 1: kind of translucent wings. Really cool. I had no idea
Speaker 1: what this was. It looks and it looks like a hummingbird.
Speaker 1: It's got a little beak. I wonder if that prevents
Speaker 1: it from getting eaten. Maybe I don't know, but it was.
Speaker 1: It sure was love on att mo Narta. How many
Speaker 1: different Pygnanthemum species did I see? How many different Pygnanthemum
Speaker 1: species did I see?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 1: In the East coast, let's see did I during this again?
Speaker 1: Louisville down to North Carolina, South Carolina, eastern Tennessee. There's
Speaker 1: Pygnathumum everywhere. They all are fucking I had no idea
Speaker 1: that was such a species rich genus. Oh my god. Okay.
Speaker 1: Three species in Tennessee Orticellatum, tenuifolium and Lumythia loomis Loomis.
Speaker 1: It's the street in Chicago. I also saw some uh,
Speaker 1: some good stuff in oak Ridge. I went and visited
Speaker 1: my friend Jacob, who teaches at Knoxville. He's the let's botanize,
Speaker 1: Let's botanize that guy. He does the Let's botanize page.
Speaker 1: Really nice guy. Him and his friend whose name I forget.
Speaker 1: I'm really sorry. Fuck, I feel like a dick now.
Speaker 1: But I went and visited him at the school that
Speaker 1: he teaches at. Saw his amazing moss or his amazing
Speaker 1: fern poster alternation of generations fern poster. He's got his
Speaker 1: own office and shit, man, it's real nice up there.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm telling you. He's a Czechoslovakian interior designer. Okay, sorry,
Speaker 1: Sopranos Reverend. He's His bookshelf is fantastic. So I didn't
Speaker 1: get I didn't get anywhere near enough time to google
Speaker 1: the books that he had. But we went down to
Speaker 1: the lab. Showed me some of the work. He's doing
Speaker 1: cross sections of fern stems for you know, doing looking
Speaker 1: at vasculature around him, met all the kids in his lab.
Speaker 1: It was cool, it was cool, it was a nice
Speaker 1: nice I didn't have enough time. I only had like
Speaker 1: an hour to stop in because I had to be
Speaker 1: where the fuck was I going. Was I doing Louisville
Speaker 1: that night? No, I had to be in Kulowie. Louisville
Speaker 1: is on the other side of the state. I had
Speaker 1: to be in Kulowe the next day. So, and Kulowe
Speaker 1: is always nice, but they're there. It's like the Native
Speaker 1: Plant Conference, but they're doing it in someplace. To say,
Speaker 1: Oh God, you know where I was? I forgot that much.
Speaker 1: I was in Chattanooga too. I did a show in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
Speaker 1: which is such a fucking wonderful town. You know. The
Speaker 1: first time I ever blew into Chattanooga was on a
Speaker 1: freight train around two thousand and three. Used to be
Speaker 1: a big punk scene there. I think there still is,
Speaker 1: maybe punkin or whatever. Anyway, and so I hung out
Speaker 1: there and it's got a really nice vibe, really like
Speaker 1: old school, you know, buildings, kind people, pretty fucking chill. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: it's Chantanooga's nice. I forgot about that. Yeah. So anyway,
Speaker 1: so Chattanooga Memphis on the way back, hung out with
Speaker 1: habitat Harry. I don't know if you know him, really
Speaker 1: fun guy, kind of looks like a young hazel Ankins.
Speaker 1: And we went out to this Arkansas prairie. Afterwards, I
Speaker 1: was just sweating my balls off. God, it was fucking
Speaker 1: brutal there, man, it was so hot. I got to
Speaker 1: see a lot of cool stuff though in this prairie,
Speaker 1: this well maintained prairie that's burned, became I became much
Speaker 1: more in the last month, much more solidified in my fire,
Speaker 1: my respect and admiration for how important fire is to
Speaker 1: the ecology of the Midwest and East Coast. Absolutely imperative
Speaker 1: that these places burn at a reasonable interval, you know,
Speaker 1: and that people study the fire ecology there and how
Speaker 1: important it is. It was because before you know, I think,
Speaker 1: before Native Americans started burning, which they did for a
Speaker 1: long time, you know, megafauna and storms were of course
Speaker 1: the big disturbance event that these landscapes got right. And
Speaker 1: so that's what I mean, disturbance is what keeps these
Speaker 1: spaces alive, right, just like the Conrad Dean of Urtisslada
Speaker 1: growing and the river is in northeastern Tennessee, beautiful Morgan County, Tennessee.
Speaker 1: What river was this too? It was in the Catosa
Speaker 1: Wildlife Management Area. Just like they need disturbance in the
Speaker 1: form of floods. All those plants need disturbance, mostly in
Speaker 1: the form of fire. Oh yeah, it was on Daddy's creek.
Speaker 1: I forgot Daddy's creek. Come on down the Daddy's creek.
Speaker 1: That was weird too. I know this is all over
Speaker 1: the place. I apologize for the disjointed nature of this rent.
Speaker 1: The subject matter is scattered throughout, just shotgun throughout this
Speaker 1: last thirty minutes of the podcast, like ping pong balls.
Speaker 1: But what was said was I was on that creek.
Speaker 1: I was on Daddy's Creek in Morgan, Tennessee, northeastern Tennessee,
Speaker 1: on the Cumberland Plateau looking for conrad deina vertissolada, this disjunct,
Speaker 1: this Florida disjunct right or disjunct of a Florida genus,
Speaker 1: and I only found Holy hell, I think like four
Speaker 1: plants maybe right opposite leaves. It looks like a It
Speaker 1: looks like a member of astracy, a purple flowered, a
Speaker 1: purple ray flowered member of astracy that grows in the
Speaker 1: same habitat. But of course Conradina, being in the min
Speaker 1: family lamy Ace has opposite leaves, not alternate leaves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that Conradina grows with Ionactis Linaria folia, it's and it's
Speaker 1: which has again arochoid leaves, which arochoid again after the
Speaker 1: genus Erica, which is in South Africa, or with this
Speaker 1: this morphological general shape came from, uh, you know, narrow,
Speaker 1: thin leaves, reducing surface area, obviously in adaptation to more
Speaker 1: sun exposure, uh, dealing with temporary drought, et cetera. That
Speaker 1: ionactus was wild, though I thought it was a cynthio
Speaker 1: tricum or something. I did not have ionactus on my
Speaker 1: fucking Bingo carden. So yeah, so that was but so
Speaker 1: and they it's you could see that they have a
Speaker 1: similar shape, probably because they grow on these rocky areas
Speaker 1: in floods, scoured areas of the river. And again you're
Speaker 1: in this like deep. I think it's metamorphic rock, this
Speaker 1: deep canyon. What is the range on this ionactus? By
Speaker 1: the way, God, it was a fucking cool one. I
Speaker 1: bet it's small, is it not? It says it's scattered throughout,
Speaker 1: scattered throughout the east dud suppose Eader someone Wisconsin. I
Speaker 1: bet the habitat is always the same though like somewhat
Speaker 1: rocky sun exposed Applealachia. Suppose so you get some in
Speaker 1: New York. It's a great fucking species. It'd be a
Speaker 1: great species to go up against the sidewalking like a
Speaker 1: native plant garden in Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina. Shit, great,
Speaker 1: great plant. From what I know about, it doesn't get
Speaker 1: that tall, tops out of eighteen inches, which is about
Speaker 1: what Conradina tops out at. But I only saw four
Speaker 1: or five Conradinas despite searching for them for two hours.
Speaker 1: One was growing in shade. There's a lot of other
Speaker 1: cool stuff though. And again there's like boulders scattered throughout
Speaker 1: this habitat. So it's a it's a river, but there's
Speaker 1: boulders scattered throughout the sandy banks. There was yucca growing
Speaker 1: on the sandy banks. It's it's a fucking cool it's
Speaker 1: a cool place. Daddy's Creek. Come on down to Daddy's Creek,
Speaker 1: come on down to the Morgan County Daddy bear party
Speaker 1: here down here on Daddy's Creek. I don't know, whatever
Speaker 1: the fuck you know, that's what that's where my imagination goes.
Speaker 1: So God, but uh oh, there was a weird white
Speaker 1: flowered u trochium. I saw two. It didn't identify that
Speaker 1: Helianthus hersutis pas anonyma. I suppose is that what that is?
Speaker 1: Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: I guess so, yeah, pakra ananima sylphiusterecus. But yeah, but
Speaker 1: oak Ridge was dope. There was and Jacob pointed those
Speaker 1: spots out to me. In oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is
Speaker 1: kind of close to Knoxville, and he's like forty five
Speaker 1: minutes away. There was some prairie areas or they were glades,
Speaker 1: and I saw a massive blooming of man fraid of Virginica,
Speaker 1: which was fucking great to see.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: I mean, as you've got this you know, herbaceous agave basically,
Speaker 1: so it's got a bull that can dive back to
Speaker 1: the leaves are succulent and juicy, but don't have the
Speaker 1: sharp spines, and they're not caraceous and stiff like a
Speaker 1: gave leaves are. But the flower is basically the same.
Speaker 1: They get these four or five foot tall inflorescences with
Speaker 1: these really ornate or they're not ornate, but large moth
Speaker 1: pollinated flowers on them. Bees will hit it too. I saw,
Speaker 1: you know, bumblebees hitting it. But you could tell this
Speaker 1: thing evolved with moths, but probably stays open during the
Speaker 1: day to ensure it gets hit. And so they were
Speaker 1: like god, fifty or sixty of them going out in
Speaker 1: this little glade area near a junior high But man,
Speaker 1: it was there was not much left, you know, there
Speaker 1: was not much of this land left, of this habitat left.
Speaker 1: Most of it had been developed or due to fire suppression,
Speaker 1: had been overgrown. So and you can really see that again.
Speaker 1: That's another thing you see. You could see throughout the
Speaker 1: East Coast and even the Midwest. You suppress fire and
Speaker 1: things just get smothered out. They get light starved, They
Speaker 1: gets too dense. It turns into a fucking mess. You
Speaker 1: get the shitty woods and prairies disappear, they get woody encroachment.
Speaker 1: I mean this stuff Kyle Ibarger showed me in Alabama,
Speaker 1: you know, beneath the power line, but beneath some massive
Speaker 1: high voltage power lines where it's the power line. The
Speaker 1: power line company comes and clears it mechanically, which is disturbance.
Speaker 1: It's not as good as fire, but it's still disturbance.
Speaker 1: There's still all these cool plants, pedio mealiums, prickly pairs
Speaker 1: in Alabama. But then I'm growing on top of this
Speaker 1: thin soiled carstick limestone. But then on either side of
Speaker 1: the power line is meant. The only thing that changes
Speaker 1: is you're not but you're not beneath the power lines
Speaker 1: meant anymore. In the power line companies no longer mowing
Speaker 1: and mechanically removing the woody encroachment, and the junipers on
Speaker 1: the sides of that where they're not doing anymore, you
Speaker 1: get junipers just springing up, and it becomes thick quote cedar,
Speaker 1: because it's not really seedar, they're junipers, but they call
Speaker 1: it cedar woodland. And so everything gets light starved, and
Speaker 1: the diversity just disappears, and it looks like shit, and
Speaker 1: it's super dense and looks like shit, and you gotta
Speaker 1: get tons of ticks, so you got to burn it.
Speaker 1: The how resistant some people are to the idea that
Speaker 1: fire is important to the psychology, I will never get
Speaker 1: over right. I mean, I do understand it. These are
Speaker 1: ecologically illiterate people. They just need to become literate. They
Speaker 1: just need to understand the landscapes some more time nature
Speaker 1: and think about it. Huh, why is it different? Why
Speaker 1: is it so different here? Versus here. It's a it's
Speaker 1: not this way. What's changing. What's the one element that's changing? Okay,
Speaker 1: mechanical removal or control burning? Huh, all right, shout out
Speaker 1: to Dave. Shut out to Dave Coulton in Ah. What
Speaker 1: is the name Woodfield where I forget the name of
Speaker 1: his town, suburb of Chicago. He's been burning his yard.
Speaker 1: He's got beds of prairie plants separated by what are
Speaker 1: efficiently effectively fire breaks of mode turf grass paths that
Speaker 1: he just still mows. And uh, but he just has
Speaker 1: the turf grass only in places where there's a path
Speaker 1: separating these beds, which again acts as an effective fire break,
Speaker 1: and then he lights the beds on fire in spring.
Speaker 1: He does it in spring. Jerry Wilhelm doesn't in fall.
Speaker 1: Also living in a suburban neighborhood at the end of
Speaker 1: a cul de sac where your neighbors might call the
Speaker 1: cops on you, which they did, But he still burns.
Speaker 1: He's been doing it thirty years now. So Jerry's been
Speaker 1: burning forty years. You can see the video I just
Speaker 1: put out two days ago on August third. So but yeah,
Speaker 1: but so Dave burns these beds the fire takes five
Speaker 1: minutes to burn all the brush down. There's no woody
Speaker 1: material because these are all arebaceous perennials. These are native
Speaker 1: prairie plants, so it's not dense wood that's burning. It
Speaker 1: burns pretty quickly, and he was using an actual drip torch,
Speaker 1: which means you can burn even when it's still pretty
Speaker 1: wet out, or you can at least get the fire going,
Speaker 1: which is probably safer. But Jerry doesn't use the drip torch.
Speaker 1: He just lights it with a match. So yeah, really
Speaker 1: cool stuff. Anyway, So back to Tennessee. So I was
Speaker 1: looking for this Conradina only found four or five plants.
Speaker 1: Really cool habitat, saw a bunch of other cool shit. Regardless,
Speaker 1: none of the conra deenas were flowering. I don't know
Speaker 1: when they do. I would assume maybe it's in spring,
Speaker 1: maybe fall, I don't know, but yeah, but it was
Speaker 1: a really fascinating habitat Oakridge, Tennessee. Lots of cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Two prairies there. One is kind of next to some
Speaker 1: old train tracks. I think it's some old railroad bed,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure if you go to if you're in Oakridge,
Speaker 1: you could look at the I naturalist app and just
Speaker 1: see where all the plant observations are, and you'll see
Speaker 1: it a lot of cool stuff there in both of
Speaker 1: those sites in Oakridge, Tennessee. Then the Nashville Glades. I
Speaker 1: think I went to Couchville Cedar Glade. Dope spot well maintained.
Speaker 1: You can tell they do seasonal burning too. There was
Speaker 1: a roos Aromatica air that I could have sworn was
Speaker 1: poison ivy. Looked just like it, but of course poison ivy.
Speaker 1: That distal leaf, the furthest most leaf on a branch,
Speaker 1: has a petiole on it. But damn, that was a
Speaker 1: I mean, russ Aromatica has so many different ecotypes. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it's considered a species complex or what,
Speaker 1: but it's there's ecotypes all over it. Six thousand feet
Speaker 1: in the Sierra Mandre of Nuevo Leon to uh, you know,
Speaker 1: ecotypes I've seen in Mohave County, Arizona, to this weird
Speaker 1: one I saw east of Nashville at the Couchville Cedar Glades.
Speaker 1: It's there's so many different variations on it species and
Speaker 1: I don't really understand it. It's like, why isn't it
Speaker 1: just evolving through a different species. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the constraints are on it genetically, but
Speaker 1: it looks different. I mean, the flowers still look the same,
Speaker 1: but the leaf shape, the different populations just have such
Speaker 1: a drastically different leaf shape that it'll fool you into
Speaker 1: thinking it's a different plant. But those Coulchville Cedar Glades
Speaker 1: was Echinasia, Tennessee Census, some really cool limestone. There was
Speaker 1: a there was a seedum there, the seedum pulchellum, a
Speaker 1: lot of really interesting stuff and aglinis little blue stems
Speaker 1: sky Zachrum scoparium, as well as a lineum species, a
Speaker 1: flax species growing on those thin soils. You forba corolatta too,
Speaker 1: And it looks like in places the ground's literally been
Speaker 1: paved with limestone. It's a really really cool site. If
Speaker 1: you live in Nashville. First off, I'm sorry to hear
Speaker 1: that in my regards, but second, you got to get
Speaker 1: out to Couchville Cedar Glades or any of the other
Speaker 1: limestone glades east of Nashville to look at some of
Speaker 1: the cool shit that's growing there, because it is fucking dope.
Speaker 1: Does manthis Illinois insist, which is that plant suppose he
Speaker 1: has DMPTY in it. You know, that's a good way
Speaker 1: to get the drug, bros In. Get people who just
Speaker 1: are into like growing psychoactive plants at first, get him
Speaker 1: interested in the colgy, tell them something's got d empty
Speaker 1: in it. Just start making it up, eh, psychoactive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, you could use the roots or something to
Speaker 1: make sure it's not a poisonous plant. But you know,
Speaker 1: just to get them excited about it. It makes them
Speaker 1: maybe they'll start looking at other stuff in that habitat too.
Speaker 1: All right, anyway, I fuh making it through this podcast slowly.
Speaker 1: I'm doing shows in Albuquerque. Got a show coming up
Speaker 1: in Albuquerque, New Mexico on August twelfth. I'm doing a
Speaker 1: show at Denver Botanic Gardens. You can buy tickets at
Speaker 1: their website just typing Denver Botanic Gardens Joey Santori. I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess it's how you would look for it. That
Speaker 1: seems reasonable. And then I'm doing another one at High Dive,
Speaker 1: which is a bar or a brewery, one of those
Speaker 1: two in Denver on August eighteenth. And then I'm head
Speaker 1: of the fuck home and I'm gonna relax for like
Speaker 1: a month, or try to. I've also got I got
Speaker 1: a third book coming out next year that we're finishing
Speaker 1: up right now, a lot of interesting plants from all
Speaker 1: over the world. It's going to be a photo book.
Speaker 1: It's like a nice coffee table book. And that should
Speaker 1: be let's see, that should be out. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: when it's coming out. I think next spring or fall.
Speaker 1: I think next fall. And then I've got these little
Speaker 1: mini photo books that I just put together myself. Limited run,
Speaker 1: only a few hundred copies. You could buy those from
Speaker 1: me on tour, or I might do mail order. I
Speaker 1: might have think I might get like one more run
Speaker 1: printed and do them on mail order. They're only eighty pages,
Speaker 1: they're not that long, but they got a lot of
Speaker 1: cool shitting. I'm just a little six inch by six
Speaker 1: inch square, cool plants, cool photos, and uh descriptions of habitat.
Speaker 1: And I'm really proud of the captions, very very educational captions,
Speaker 1: jam packed with information. So I got that going on,
Speaker 1: and then uh, yeah, I'm gonna I'm going to Bolivia
Speaker 1: in late September, and I think we're planning a Peru
Speaker 1: trip in November. Me and Allen souh. Yeah, we'll be
Speaker 1: selling tickets to that too. Come come join us in Peru.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go look at Trico Sirius and Habitat and
Speaker 1: then go to the We're gonna be in the dry
Speaker 1: side of the Andes. We're gonna go look at the
Speaker 1: Puya Rimandi I and then we're gonna go to some
Speaker 1: of the wet areas of the Andes as well to
Speaker 1: go look at cool mushrooms. So it should be a
Speaker 1: good time. Yeah, and so yeah, come join us. I'll
Speaker 1: be posting that on social media as in promoting it
Speaker 1: as I get as I put start putting together. But
Speaker 1: it's gonna be I think November eighteenth, for like past Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be like nine or ten days. But you'll
Speaker 1: miss Thanksgiving with your family if you come on this trip.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's not a good idea, but you know a
Speaker 1: lot of people they got shitty families or they don't
Speaker 1: do anything for Thanksgiving anyway, So those are the that's
Speaker 1: the target audience. Yeah. So anyway, another cool spot I
Speaker 1: was at that I want to talk about was South
Speaker 1: Carolina and some really cool oaks savannahs. Fire maintained oak
Speaker 1: savannahs also dominated by what I think was a like
Speaker 1: a metamorphous sandstone. I think it was quartzitic maybe quartzitic
Speaker 1: sandstone or it was just like a thick, but it was.
Speaker 1: It was outside of Columbia. What what where was this exect? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it peach tree Rock, which has really interesting geology
Speaker 1: on it. And they they had just done a burn
Speaker 1: and all these arochoids like Vaccinium staminium were coming up,
Speaker 1: were re sprouting, just robust as hell, you know. And
Speaker 1: that's when you can really see like when this, especially
Speaker 1: the aircacious stuff, after a burn, it comes back so
Speaker 1: robust and vibrant because it's got these massive root systems.
Speaker 1: It's resprouting from all the competition has been cleared, it's
Speaker 1: gotten some rain, and it just takes off. It's really
Speaker 1: really interesting to see. But it was a long leaf
Speaker 1: pine savannah and they they burn it. There was galasacci
Speaker 1: A demosa as well, another member of eric case Lyatrius
Speaker 1: tenuifolia wasn't blooming yet, but really really narrow spiriform like
Speaker 1: a spire three to four foot tall. Iatrius species uh
Speaker 1: Pitiopsis aspera, which is the grass leave. It's a it's
Speaker 1: I forget the name of it. It's like it's basically
Speaker 1: like a daisy relative that has very linear leaves, narrow
Speaker 1: leaves the whole genus Pitiopsis. This was Petiopsis, aspra Casmanthium laxum,
Speaker 1: cool grass species, sea oats inland sea oats, tons of hypericombs,
Speaker 1: pence them. In Australis Tafrozia virginiana Nitis skullus stimulosis was there,
Speaker 1: so you get a little bit of this element from
Speaker 1: like the Florida sand sand scrub growing there as well.
Speaker 1: There was man afraid of Virginica. Of course. I was
Speaker 1: hoping to see some timber rattlers but did not come across.
Speaker 1: Some Cleatoria was there. Everybody loves cleatoria, of course, how
Speaker 1: could you not with a name like that around an
Speaker 1: area tecta bamboo relative Tragia urines and then Cyrilla rasima flora,
Speaker 1: which was growing like out of bare rock. Tell me
Speaker 1: a box of folio was there too. Kalmia one of
Speaker 1: the the other plant known as mountain laurel that doesn't
Speaker 1: grow in the mountains and has no relationship to laurel.
Speaker 1: Just the ridiculousness of common names, right, contrary to what
Speaker 1: is known in Texas as Mount Laurel, which is Dermatophylum
Speaker 1: secunda florum from a completely unrelated family. So uh. Anyway,
Speaker 1: but it was growing with cyrilla like at this rocky area,
Speaker 1: and I guess Peachtree Rock it was called because there
Speaker 1: was the way that this rock eroded. It looked like
Speaker 1: a peach tree. It was like a you know, a
Speaker 1: trunk with a canopy above it. It had that kind
Speaker 1: of shape, and I guess some jackass knocked it down.
Speaker 1: You always people are wont to do just mindless performative destruction.
Speaker 1: But there was a lot of good stuff there, and
Speaker 1: it was hot as balls, but we were in the
Speaker 1: we were in the shade the whole time. It was
Speaker 1: like ninety five degrees nine ninety degrees maybe a little
Speaker 1: bit more, but with really high humidity. But we were
Speaker 1: in the shade the whole time, so it was it
Speaker 1: was pleasant, it was cool, you know, and of course
Speaker 1: you got that burned understory. Yeah, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of good stuff there.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: Clethra tomentosa do you know the clethras? Do you know?
Speaker 1: You know Clethra order eraic Hayley's They're common in the tropics. Oh,
Speaker 1: and there was Tipularya discolor there too. That is a
Speaker 1: it's an orchid that I think has chlorophyll in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it just breaks up flowering. I don't think
Speaker 1: it's a micoheterotroph, but it's micro rhyzell for sure. What
Speaker 1: is the common name of Tipularia, this scullar, the crane
Speaker 1: fly orchid. Yeah, the leaves were not out, really interesting
Speaker 1: leaves on it. The leaves weren't out, but it was
Speaker 1: flowering like two feet tall in the shade dope spot
Speaker 1: and just yeah, man, just seeing all the burn and
Speaker 1: then there was that they had that like cort cidic
Speaker 1: sand too, that sugar sand where it's white, you know,
Speaker 1: which was really interesting, really interesting. Bright white habitat reflects
Speaker 1: a lot of ultraviolet back up, like eighty percent eighty
Speaker 1: five percent reflectance of ultraviolet light back up at you.
Speaker 1: So that obviously creates a more stressful environment for plants,
Speaker 1: which creates more selection pressures determining what can grow there
Speaker 1: and what evolves there and et cetera. It's really really
Speaker 1: really cool stuff. Sylpium composite them sylphium with pendant flowers
Speaker 1: Vernonia angustafolia and iron weed and gustafolia than leaves. It's
Speaker 1: what a gustafolia means. And then there was another spot
Speaker 1: in South Carolina I went to that I don't want
Speaker 1: to name because someone's going to try to poach the
Speaker 1: picture plants that grow there. But it was Saracenia jonesy eye,
Speaker 1: which is a rare granite bald. It grows on granite knobs.
Speaker 1: Saracenia species pictuer plant that grows on these these basically
Speaker 1: these seeps on these massive granite domes. And that was
Speaker 1: a really cool spot. That was a dope spot had
Speaker 1: some rare Pacara is on at Pakara millifolium. It was
Speaker 1: Crowton michoe i, which, of course you're gonna encounter anywhere
Speaker 1: there's sand, uh you know, sander or a dryer habitat.
Speaker 1: Krowton machoey I always likes it like that sla Janella tortapyla,
Speaker 1: which you know is a desiccation tolerant spike moss looks
Speaker 1: like someone threw out a shag carpeting and it's like
Speaker 1: an old shag carpeting when it's uh dry, when it's
Speaker 1: dry and dormant and you get some water on it,
Speaker 1: comes back to quote comes back to life unquote within
Speaker 1: you know, thirty minutes to an hour, starts photosynthesizing and
Speaker 1: metaboli and metabolizing again. These granitebald habitats are really fucking cool.
Speaker 1: I saw another one in Georgia, in eastern Georgia that
Speaker 1: we stopped at. It was a Heggi's Rock, which is
Speaker 1: a nature conservancy site, and uh, this gentleman, Malcolm, took
Speaker 1: me out there. Shout out to Malcolm, thank you, sir,
Speaker 1: And uh, that was a really fucking dope spot with
Speaker 1: this rare isohetes, which is a relative of Silaganella. You
Speaker 1: know they're in the their lycopods, but Isohetes, of course
Speaker 1: is known as the quill warts. And you know there's
Speaker 1: isohetes in Costa Rica. I just saw one up in
Speaker 1: the Paramau at ten thousand feet, you know, always growing
Speaker 1: in either shallow shallow pools or ephemeral pools. And that's
Speaker 1: what Isoetes ta geeda foremans was growing in, which is
Speaker 1: a really narrow local andemic only grows in like six
Speaker 1: spots in Georgia. And they're all on top of these
Speaker 1: granite balds, right, and they can tolerate you know, ephemeral
Speaker 1: drying out, like drying out for a little bit, but
Speaker 1: it can't go for like a year or two without
Speaker 1: those ponds filling up with water. And one of the
Speaker 1: sites I guess was destroyed for a quarry. And so
Speaker 1: when it was destroyed for a quarry, they moved the
Speaker 1: population in onto the other granite bald and I guess
Speaker 1: they but they did it by like they had to
Speaker 1: create these little pools top of the bald, so they
Speaker 1: had to like chisel out rock. I don't know how
Speaker 1: they did it. They chiseled out like a six by
Speaker 1: six inch little you know, three inch deep pool for
Speaker 1: water to pool up in. And it works, but it,
Speaker 1: you know, it looks square. It looks it's super square
Speaker 1: because the way they had to cut it looks kind
Speaker 1: of weird. But it's cool that they did it, but
Speaker 1: it's nuts that it was even able to happen in
Speaker 1: the first place. Like, really, they just just the Corey granite.
Speaker 1: There's not like a less impactful way to do it
Speaker 1: that they're not gonna destroy this rare plant or that
Speaker 1: you know, whatever private entity there was. There's no protection
Speaker 1: for this stuff. There should be protections, right now, what
Speaker 1: they're doing for Big Bend. I mean, it's all just
Speaker 1: you know, part of Trump, the Trump agenda, the performative cruelty.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're destroying all this shit in Big Bend
Speaker 1: to put up a fucking border wall when the landscape
Speaker 1: itself is the border wall. It's such a harsh desert.
Speaker 1: No one's crossing there. Man. By the time Trump's done
Speaker 1: with a country, no one's gonna want to come in
Speaker 1: here anyway. The fence is gonna be meant to keep
Speaker 1: people in. I still can't believe people got suckering into
Speaker 1: voting for this con man, especially here. There was a
Speaker 1: big Latino mega contingent down here in the Rio Grand Valley,
Speaker 1: right goes right in with all that that shame and
Speaker 1: that weird cultural disassociation and wanting to be you know,
Speaker 1: wanting to emulate like the lamest aspects of quote white
Speaker 1: culture or whatever that even is, Texan white culture. You
Speaker 1: know whatever. We don't have to agree it. You're listening
Speaker 1: to this, you're offended. I mean by all means, it's
Speaker 1: totally fine. Actually, if you're a friend, I don't really
Speaker 1: give a shit, but just disagree. You don't need to
Speaker 1: agree with me. But you know, goddamn is it just
Speaker 1: it's it's the bamboozle element is so and you get
Speaker 1: people to vote against their own interests like that. I
Speaker 1: don't know, and I know how the left got so
Speaker 1: fucking annoying still are in many cases, but at least
Speaker 1: in the US, identity politics was a sy up. So
Speaker 1: uh anyway, alright, so back to this. So this uh,
Speaker 1: this ice o wheaties was really cool. This and this
Speaker 1: granite bald. It was The interesting thing too, was the
Speaker 1: granite is pink, but the whole bald is black from
Speaker 1: all of the biofilm on it, from all the living
Speaker 1: material that's on growing on this rock. So you know,
Speaker 1: if you were to like chip it and chip that
Speaker 1: stuff away, the rock would be whitish or red. But
Speaker 1: that black material, obviously heats causes the service of that granite.
Speaker 1: The heat up immensely. It's amazing that all the different God,
Speaker 1: there were so many different liking species too. Malcolm the gentleman,
Speaker 1: I went out there with studies liking. He was just
Speaker 1: dropping names on all these different likings and shit, really cool.
Speaker 1: There's so you've got these liking communities and these moss
Speaker 1: communities and crust communities. It's probably just cyanobacteria and algae's
Speaker 1: and stuff that grow on these uh, these balds, and
Speaker 1: then there's little ephemeral pools where you get some plant life.
Speaker 1: And then there's like rocks there. There's like true small trees,
Speaker 1: dwarfed trees, et cetera, accumulating in the rocks around there.
Speaker 1: It's the same stuff you see if you go to
Speaker 1: h Stone Mountain in you know, east of Atlanta. Is
Speaker 1: it east of Atlanta? I think it's east of Atlanta.
Speaker 1: But really cool shit to see. Man, shout out to Atlanta.
Speaker 1: What a dope city. I fucking love that city. It's
Speaker 1: a car slum in much of it, but in areas
Speaker 1: where it's not, you know, like that belt line project
Speaker 1: they have that was really cool to see. It's an
Speaker 1: old railroad belt that they turned into a bikeway. It's
Speaker 1: got native plants all over it. Some somebody recreated behind
Speaker 1: this u Tacorea there. It's Tacorea is an old warehouse
Speaker 1: somebody created like a car, a Saracenia bog and long
Speaker 1: leaf pine forest. I put a video on that that
Speaker 1: was really cool to see, really wonderful to seas. It's
Speaker 1: just just such a pleasant there's so much good shit
Speaker 1: to see there. And then I was hanging out with
Speaker 1: my friend hippie Josh. He's he's all in a forging
Speaker 1: and stuff. So we were you walking around his neighborhood
Speaker 1: looking at he's got to lives in a really nice neighborhood,
Speaker 1: like just not like fancy wealthy, but but just Nice's
Speaker 1: got trees in it, and it's just feels like a
Speaker 1: pleasant place to live. There's shade, so even though it's
Speaker 1: superhumid and hot out, you know, you can still find shade.
Speaker 1: It doesn't doesn't hurt to be outside, not like where
Speaker 1: I live. I have to like be exposed to one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty five degrees surface temperatures, and I feel
Speaker 1: like I'm walking on a heat mat because there's no
Speaker 1: shade anywhere. Because you know, the city hates trees. This
Speaker 1: one guided city manager. Man, Ah, he's gonna change one
Speaker 1: day I got home. There's no he's not gonna always
Speaker 1: be like this. You know, through a process of therapy,
Speaker 1: guided meditation, and self exploration, maybe he'll stop hating plants,
Speaker 1: or at least try to understand why he does. It
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense at all, like the whole. He's like,
Speaker 1: the complete opposite of the plants is infrastructure theory. It
Speaker 1: just doesn't land with him at all. He doesn't understand it.
Speaker 1: He doesn't understand that urban he on probably doesn't care either,
Speaker 1: because don't go outside. Nobody goes outside. I mean, I
Speaker 1: live in one of the fattest counties in the United States,
Speaker 1: so you know, but there's hope, there's hope. It's just
Speaker 1: a slow process. And if you keep your fucking mouth shut,
Speaker 1: there's not gonna be hope. Right, be nice, be polite,
Speaker 1: but know that you're fucking right, and be loud about
Speaker 1: this stuff. Right, it's this is insane. You're right and
Speaker 1: they're wrong. I hate to just put it as simple
Speaker 1: as that, but that's that's what the case is. You
Speaker 1: can't live in a place of horticultural atrocities and turf
Speaker 1: grass stuff that didn't evolve here. You create these dead zones,
Speaker 1: these dead gardens, the shit gardens. I've ranted about this enough,
Speaker 1: so uh and then where else did I stop? Yah?
Speaker 1: So the one of the last plays I stopped that
Speaker 1: was this Arkansas Prairie with with my friend Habitat Harry
Speaker 1: and god damn, there was a rubus species that was
Speaker 1: just tearing us up, just with these cat claw like
Speaker 1: thorns that had on it. And we were out there
Speaker 1: just sweating balls. So humid, probably really pleasant in the
Speaker 1: fall once it cools off. I don't know when that is,
Speaker 1: late October, early November. But it was beautiful. But we
Speaker 1: had to go through all this agriculture to get out there,
Speaker 1: like toxic agriculture to get out there, you know, driving
Speaker 1: along these little agricultural roads, dirt at one lane agricultural
Speaker 1: roads to get out there and see this stuff. And
Speaker 1: it was totally worth it though. You know. The prairie
Speaker 1: we went to, let me see if I can find
Speaker 1: the name of it. Yeah, it was near Hazen, Arkansas.
Speaker 1: It's in between Little Rock and Memphis. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of cool shit along those agricultural roads too. Man, I
Speaker 1: saw what was it, campsus radic cans. I always get
Speaker 1: these too confused. Okay, First off, the prairie was Connectne
Speaker 1: Prairie ko n E c n Y Prairie Natural Area.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's like, you know, it's big bluestem and lots
Speaker 1: of big bluestem. There was Cynthio trichum arachodes there as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: I don't know what that rubus was, Hypericum labocarpum Saint
Speaker 1: John's Ward, one of you know, many species tried and strictest,
Speaker 1: really important grass out there. A Upatorium capital of foium
Speaker 1: ilex decid you, a Upatorium scabritum. Uh, let's see Ludwigia.
Speaker 1: Oh and Rebeccia elismuth folia. Uh was another cool one. Uh,
Speaker 1: there was a Rexia there too. Have never seen arexia
Speaker 1: out in the open prairie before. I guess it was
Speaker 1: just Mariana uh i Brosia biden tata oh Tefrosia ano bracoids.
Speaker 1: That's a cool one. White flowered Tephrosia, golden, pubescent sand
Speaker 1: the leaves. Hopefully somebody's growing that. And you know for
Speaker 1: native plant the propagation purposes, because that's a dope plant.
Speaker 1: Ludwigia all turn a folio. It was a really cool prairie.
Speaker 1: The big blue stem there was fucking beautiful too. It
Speaker 1: was big blue stem and vernonia. I think it was
Speaker 1: just missurika massive vernonia though, like fields of vernonia, and
Speaker 1: they were all flowering. It looked incredible. And then uh,
Speaker 1: but the way there, I mean we went to another
Speaker 1: prairie too, God, it was fucking hot. Went to another
Speaker 1: prairie too where there was where there was a lot
Speaker 1: more let me see this. What else was here another
Speaker 1: prairie where there was a lot more diversity as well.
Speaker 1: And then just I mean just driving along the roads
Speaker 1: there it was cool. There was there was a lot
Speaker 1: of good ship. Yeah, panicom vorgadim switchgrass. Uh oh yeah.
Speaker 1: In Hydrolia ovada, which was which is an aquatic plant
Speaker 1: with bright purple flowers. It's in uh I think the
Speaker 1: family is hydroleac, which is in the night shade order,
Speaker 1: but it was vic man and it was filling up
Speaker 1: this this little ditch on the side of the highway.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an aquatic relative of night shades order Solinales,
Speaker 1: and we get one and they got spines on them too,
Speaker 1: but like vivid, five pedaled purple flowers, maybe the size
Speaker 1: of a golf all maybe a little bit smaller. Great
Speaker 1: aquatic plant though, So if you got a wet area
Speaker 1: with full sun. And then there was a Usalidago rigidi uscula, uh,
Speaker 1: Desmodium sessifolium. Oh yeah, that was a white flower Desmodium
Speaker 1: that got like five feet tall. Helianthus molus was going
Speaker 1: off everywhere too, like in the in the little in
Speaker 1: the prairie and that Connectne Prairie. Definitely if you're if
Speaker 1: you're near Hazen, Arkansas, check it out. Oh and I
Speaker 1: saw matt again growing in the uh in these like
Speaker 1: wet areas because it's it's really wet there. This almost
Speaker 1: be really wet. Uh So there's these ditches all over
Speaker 1: there is alligator flag, Thalia dilbata with you know, it's
Speaker 1: purple flowers. That's a really cool monocot, gets like six
Speaker 1: feet tall and really interesting flowers as well. I think
Speaker 1: it's in the order of gingers. Yeah, yeah, Marin Tasi
Speaker 1: and Zingibareles. So it's got that kind of you know
Speaker 1: staminodes thing. One stamen and then a bunch of staminodes,
Speaker 1: like a bunch of the bunch of the stamens have
Speaker 1: become infertile. They're now staminodes and they've been just turned
Speaker 1: used as attractants as petals, alligator flags the thing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: powdery alligator flag or hardy kenna. But it's not in
Speaker 1: kan As. It's in Marin Tacy, which is unique. It's
Speaker 1: weird because most of the families in that order, zingibareles
Speaker 1: the ginger order. Most of them are tropical, like bananas
Speaker 1: are in that order. For instance, Marin Tacy costs a
Speaker 1: sy saw a bunch of those and whatever. So it's
Speaker 1: cool to see this one that you know thrives in
Speaker 1: a temperate lineage trips Sakum. Back to Loidy's that grass,
Speaker 1: epic grass. It's kind of doing a little mais thing,
Speaker 1: a little corn thing with its flowers. Got some really
Speaker 1: nice images of that flowering. Common name is gamma grass,
Speaker 1: Eastern gamma grass, or Pacahatchie grass, but that was coming up.
Speaker 1: It's like a six foot tall grass. It's beautiful. I
Speaker 1: think it likes it wet. And then yeah, campsas radic cans.
Speaker 1: I always get that confused with crossvine with Bignonia caprio lotta.
Speaker 1: They're both in the same family. They got the red
Speaker 1: hummingbird pollinated flowers. I wonder which one is more heat tolerant.
Speaker 1: I know Michael Easton was growing one in Alpine. I
Speaker 1: think it was cross fine. I think it was Bignonia
Speaker 1: caprio lotta, or not more heat toler but more more
Speaker 1: tolerant of arid aridity and then there was sassafras coming
Speaker 1: up on the side of the road too, along with
Speaker 1: backriss helmetful, which I don't know they went. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, always associated backerss helm Atfolia with like more
Speaker 1: Gulf coastal bend soup. But I guess you know, we're
Speaker 1: not too far from it. In you know, central Arkansas,
Speaker 1: it's still hot and humid as balls. And so there
Speaker 1: was backriss Helmafolia. And then the sassafras was growing out
Speaker 1: in the open and didn't have that tri lobed, that
Speaker 1: three lobed you know, spade shaped leaf. It had just
Speaker 1: had like a simple leaf with no lobes, this simple margin,
Speaker 1: and it was an entire leaf. Was wild to see.
Speaker 1: Threw me off at first, but then I was like, ah,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is this? Just a couple of the
Speaker 1: more shady leaves looked like actual sassafras leaves, and I
Speaker 1: crunched them up and smelled them, like, damn, this is
Speaker 1: just sassafras. It's just sassafras. I'll buy it. I'm wild,
Speaker 1: but Arkansas. Who knew a lot of cool shit in Arkansas?
Speaker 1: But this is all These were all like wet, pretty
Speaker 1: wet sites except for that prairie. I think the well
Speaker 1: the prairie was pretty wet too. I think it's maybe
Speaker 1: it's more upland Pittiopsis tenuefolia. There was some really cool
Speaker 1: I didn't make any observations in that Liatris bummer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was Lyatris picno stacia everywhere, which you could tell
Speaker 1: from Lyatris speccata if you look at the fileries the
Speaker 1: little roofing shingle bracts on the side of the flower.
Speaker 1: On Pychnostacia, they've got a point that like we're curves right,
Speaker 1: so it looks kind of spiky, whereas on the on
Speaker 1: spiccata the points are just the fieries are just oppressed.
Speaker 1: So a lot of cool shit to see in Arkansas.
Speaker 1: I didn't get a chance to go see Vernonia letter mannii,
Speaker 1: that novaculate endemic that grows in flood disturbed areas on
Speaker 1: the what river was there was that Arkansas River? I forget,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I saw it two years ago, two
Speaker 1: years ago or a year ago. Really cool. It grows
Speaker 1: with that really unique amsonia too on really hot rocks,
Speaker 1: and the rocks, the rocky outcrops are cleared by floods.
Speaker 1: So it's got a really cool ecological story too. Vernonia
Speaker 1: letter Mannii. Yeah, am Sonia who bricked the eye that
Speaker 1: it grows and patrically with Vernonia lettermannii, really really unique.
Speaker 1: I have it that west of Little Rock kind of
Speaker 1: near Malvern on what river is it? Quatchetah, the Wacheedah River,
Speaker 1: right where thirty goes over the Wacheedah River. You go
Speaker 1: south of there, hit Tanner Street, go east Tanner Street
Speaker 1: in the Wachita River near Melvern or beautiful Melvern, what
Speaker 1: happens in Melvern. But that's a dope site to see
Speaker 1: that stuff. You go into the bridge tons of poison
Speaker 1: IVY might as well. It looks like it's a bridge
Speaker 1: where there'd be a hobo fire, except there's no railroad tracks,
Speaker 1: but definitely hobo fire under the bridge vibes I like that.
Speaker 1: You may not, but I do. And then all this
Speaker 1: novaculate rock, which is like a biogenic silica rock, and
Speaker 1: that Amsonia and the Vernonia are just growing right out
Speaker 1: of the rocks there, like in the more dry, hotter
Speaker 1: what would be presumably more stressful sites, And that's why
Speaker 1: they have those narrow narrow leaves, so I am. Some
Speaker 1: of you, of course think moth pollination, butterfly pollination, Aposta
Speaker 1: and ac the oleander and milkweed family, but those two flowers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's an hour and fifty minutes, probably more if you
Speaker 1: are listening to ads and not on the Patreon. You can,
Speaker 1: of course listen to the podcast ad free on the
Speaker 1: Patreon before you fucking complain it. So I read one
Speaker 1: of the comments. I shouldn't even read the comments, but
Speaker 1: I read in the comments someone was complaining about the
Speaker 1: ads on the podcast, like, oh, should I just do
Speaker 1: this for free? Like I bust my balls. I'm just
Speaker 1: supposed to, like do all this shit for free. The
Speaker 1: ads are how I make some revenue I don't. And
Speaker 1: they were like, I can't believe Joey would advertise some
Speaker 1: of this stuff, like as if I'm going through in
Speaker 1: hand picking the air, I have no choice over to ads.
Speaker 1: Blame your own algorithm, right, If you're getting ads for
Speaker 1: stupid casinos and shit, well maybe you need to stop
Speaker 1: gambling so much. I don't know you got a gambling problem.
Speaker 1: Why are you getting ads for casinos? If you're getting
Speaker 1: ads for long care, maybe you need to stop, you know,
Speaker 1: huffing petrochemicals off your own turf. Goof. Don't play me
Speaker 1: for it, that's your fault. I'm not picking the ads here.
Speaker 1: I just trying to get paid so I can, uh,
Speaker 1: because I don't have any time left to myself anymore.
Speaker 1: I need to go on sabbatical or some shit. Is
Speaker 1: that what they call when you go when you just
Speaker 1: you just tap out for a while. I don't respond
Speaker 1: to text anymore. I don't respect. I got friends getting
Speaker 1: mad at me because I don't stay in touch with them.
Speaker 1: They think I'm being negligent. You know, it's wild. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna get myself in trouble here. I'm just I'm a workaholic.
Speaker 1: Maybe should start smoking crack or something, you know, ass,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Maybe that'll get me off off the
Speaker 1: rails real quick. Uh what else? Oh? Yeah? Possibility Place nursery.
Speaker 1: If you're in Illinois, if you're in beautiful Chicago. Got
Speaker 1: Chicago felt so good this last time I was there.
Speaker 1: And you're looking for a spot to get some get
Speaker 1: some nice plants and stuff, go to go to Possibility
Speaker 1: Place nursery and money? Have you ever been to money?
Speaker 1: If not, I think you should go. I think it'd
Speaker 1: be a real nice for you to go. Get in
Speaker 1: your car and shut up quick whining about it. Take
Speaker 1: a nice trip down to Monee, stop at a Casey's
Speaker 1: General Store, get a couple of little sugar free urinal
Speaker 1: mint flavored energy drinks, and go hit up Possibility Place
Speaker 1: and leave a bunch of room in your car to
Speaker 1: pick up a bunch of good shit. You got a
Speaker 1: month or two left in the growing season in the Midwest,
Speaker 1: plant some wonderful, rare shit. They're growing stuff nobody else grows. Right,
Speaker 1: it's Possibility Place, and it's Pizzo Nursery, which I think
Speaker 1: only does wholesale. Maybe Pizso does individual sales. Now those
Speaker 1: are the two best nurseries in Chicago area. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of good nurseries in the Chicago area. You got
Speaker 1: Lady Allison up in Evanston who's selling stuff out of
Speaker 1: her backyard. She does great stuff. There's native nurseries. Getsemini
Speaker 1: Garden Center on the north Side is selling a lot
Speaker 1: of natives. I worked there twenty years ago when I
Speaker 1: needed a job for a month. I think I got shit,
Speaker 1: candor I quit. I can't remember. I don't know I
Speaker 1: was nowhere near as ambitious as I am now. But
Speaker 1: uh yeah, so hit up Possibility Place. Possibility Place does
Speaker 1: mail order too. They sent my mom some real nice
Speaker 1: uh lead plant. They got lead plant and some Dahlia's
Speaker 1: Delia purpoia, so uh, you know, and they arrived the
Speaker 1: next day. Everyone are like two days later. They did
Speaker 1: it by the mail. So you got to get in
Speaker 1: there order some you don't want to drive the Monee
Speaker 1: you live, like up in Rockford or some shit, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a two hour drive one way. They can
Speaker 1: ship order mail do a mail order Possibility Place nursery
Speaker 1: and money and also if you're in Central Texas, hit
Speaker 1: up Green Sleeves Nursery in Flugerville, Texas. It's my friend
Speaker 1: Willie's nursery. He's a good guy. He's real, real solid dude.
Speaker 1: Grows a ton of good ship, grows a ton of
Speaker 1: seeds that I've sent them of rare stuff.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: He sent me a list of some of the stuff
Speaker 1: they've got that I should actually look at because they
Speaker 1: got some they're growing shit no one else carries. I mean,
Speaker 1: they got some really really cool stuff. Holy shit they
Speaker 1: got They got all kinds of Dahlia species I. Theyk
Speaker 1: got four different Dahlia species desmanthis Illinois. Its just for
Speaker 1: the drug bros who really like the plants with the
Speaker 1: DMPT and the roots. They got Ringium, Yakafoium, rattlesnake master
Speaker 1: Erythrostemin cardatas Ooh, that's from me man. That's a rare
Speaker 1: South Texas sandsheet species goes really good up against the sidewalk.
Speaker 1: Doesn't get that tall tops out of like eighteen inches.
Speaker 1: The Some of the native, like these small native harmless wasps,
Speaker 1: were hanging out on that collecting oils off the leaves
Speaker 1: because it smells really funky. The leaves have some weird
Speaker 1: chemical in them that apparently these insects us. It's a
Speaker 1: beautiful plant, two really cool flowers, really heat tolerant. You
Speaker 1: find it growing with the sleepiest prostrata in Star County.
Speaker 1: That thing needs to be in cultivation more. And you
Speaker 1: get one or two plants, then you get the seeds
Speaker 1: are easy to germinate two so you can keep growing them.
Speaker 1: That tura righty eye, he's selling that turre over there
Speaker 1: at Green Sleeves in Flugerville. Melampodium penstemen. God, he's got
Speaker 1: twelve different species of Salvia I might recommend Darcii. I
Speaker 1: like that Salvia darcii, Salvia Azuria, fair and aco i,
Speaker 1: Roda fici, and alys pensteam an Nooides cineloensis. Where do
Speaker 1: he gets Salvia cineloensis? Oh, Texana too? Uh, he's got
Speaker 1: silphium's Sylphium simpsonia. I don't even know that one, Simzia calva.
Speaker 1: I think that ce is from me Vernonia lindheimuri. That
Speaker 1: no one's people are not planting that enough. That's a
Speaker 1: that's a central Texas endemic. Loves limestone would go really
Speaker 1: good up against the sidewalk where you want something to
Speaker 1: stay low, not get too big. That's a fucking dope
Speaker 1: plant yet. Sea Platystigia endemic Texas bract spike is the
Speaker 1: common name. He's got everything. He's got amazing shit. Uh chaitelpa,
Speaker 1: oh chatel. It's like a hybrid. He's got eisenhardi at Texeina.
Speaker 1: I could keep going on. Quirkus, Buckley eye, Camby eye
Speaker 1: quickes Cambia is a dope oak. Damn he's got I
Speaker 1: didn't even see this stuff. He's got guahiotos. That's the
Speaker 1: seed for me, sapandue soapberry. Kind of a boring tree
Speaker 1: until you see it flower and you see it covered
Speaker 1: in all kinds of cool pollinators, all kinds of cool shit.
Speaker 1: So anyway, yeah, Green Sleeves Nursery in Flugerville. He got
Speaker 1: fucked because Flugerville put in water restrictions due to the
Speaker 1: fact that their reservoir had been leaking for like eight
Speaker 1: months and the detector for it with the text leaks,
Speaker 1: the detector was not calibrated right supposedly, so it was
Speaker 1: just incompetence. It wasn't even drought, and so they put
Speaker 1: water restrictions into Willy was having the truck water to
Speaker 1: his nursery, which set him back, you know, a few
Speaker 1: dozen grand I think one hundred or two hundred, I
Speaker 1: don't know. So he was he got fucked by this
Speaker 1: by the city of Flugerville, and then I think he
Speaker 1: was threatening to sue them, and then they started fucking
Speaker 1: with him for fines and stuff. Really corrupt you know,
Speaker 1: corrupt ship. So anyway, uh oh, he's gotten a Lena
Speaker 1: big ALOVII, too, which is that rare Mexican one that's
Speaker 1: from seed I collected in Marathon, Texas. So anyway, all right,
Speaker 1: well those are some nurseries to hit up. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Come see me in Albuquerque, Come see me in Denver.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then I might be playing on East Coast tour,
Speaker 1: going to Philly, New York, maybe Detroit, et cetera. In
Speaker 1: late October. That's all I gotta have. Agress. They go
Speaker 1: fuck you up by.
Speaker 3: But I woke up today in the side of the que.
Speaker 2: My ego, and I haven't done me no good, no hat.
Speaker 3: Going back to the last off to the bound.
Speaker 4: In the pairs of barrow way from you're in taking
Speaker 4: a part of that seven.
Speaker 3: That vacation.
Speaker 2: Reality, no one else in between your parent's miry to
Speaker 2: my destinsion Barbie on time men, I need third nod.
Speaker 3: That my dream.
Speaker 2: Have I dive.
Speaker 3: Either way, I don't.
Speaker 2: Mind aff here in so good, just can't help crying.
Speaker 3: O you have two let go? So you so.
Speaker 2: Mad?
Speaker 3: Fo am I tamer Am I die either, I don't mind.
Speaker 2: No, I'm being so just a cant five. I have
Speaker 2: to so