Speaker 1: Welcome to another episode of the Crime Pace. But Bodany
doesn't podcast nice. Have you ever noticed how messy plants are?
They're so messy. I don't like it when it's messy.
I don't like it when it's messy. Like it when
it's clean. I like, I mean to make it clean,
you got to go. You gotta make it clean. To
make it clean, what you gotta do is you got
to put concrete everywhere. We're gonna put concrete and asphalt
everywhere because it's so messy. Otherwise, the plants are so messy,
they're so many. Oh god, day, can you tell South
Texas has been wearing on me? Can you tell? Oh god, ah,
I got to see I finally got to see Caparis
in Cana, now Quadrilla in Cana. Because Caparis is an
old world genus. Imagine that the Atlantic, the Atlantic Ocean
is a pretty formidable barrier to uh. It's a pretty
formidable uh you know, uh component to genetic isolation, and
in two different genera. The related Quadrilla and Caparis are
of course renated related, but uh, you know it's they're
they're a little bit more distantly apart than uh formerly thought.
But This is a member of the Kaper family, the caparece,
which looking at the flowers, I kind of had the
immediate feeling because I wasn't familiar with this kind of
look at look at the flowers, I had the immediate feeling.
This looks like it's related to mustards, like it's in
the order of brass Akaylee's of the of the family
Brassic casey Oh, I just cut down at tep owai Hey,
my favorite tree in stuff texts. I got the fucking
sawdust of my nose. Still my favorite tree in South Texas.
You can get them eight inch diameter breast height in
two years easy. They are a great fucking tree, great
shade tree. No no thorns. I like the thorns, but
you know a lot of members of the square community
don't want the thorns on them on, you know, so
I miskeats get so much hatred. But I just cut
a tape wayey down because it was growing too close
to these power lines. So I fucking you know, I'll
just probably just prune it, keep it prune, and just
use these sticks for to harvest wood like stay, you know,
because when it sends up new suckers, you can cut
the steaks when they're like the diameter of a thumb,
and or cut the shoots and use the mistakes. Anyway,
I got the but I got the I got the
sawdust in my nose. It's bothered me. I'm just sitting
out there in a Dego tea. We just came through
a freeze. I'm out there standing in a Dego tea.
Just get showered and saw dust holding the polse up
about me? Got anyway? I hope you're not eating. I'm sorry.
If you are, you know what, you gotta fucking be fine,
all right, princess. It's a non gender specific princess. So anyway,
I finally got to see Caparis in Canaan al Quadrilla
and cana which you know, I saw people, I saw
people posting about. I've known about for a while. It
grows near Brownsville, which is, you know, further east than
I am and Brownsville and Harlingen down here in the
Rio Grand Valley, right here in the Mexican border. We
could smell the burning plastic from Mexico's garbage fires occasionally,
and by occasionally, I mean every weeknight around nine pm.
They always burn the plastic at night I don't know why,
unless it's some sketchy factory on this side of the border.
It's certainly whatever it is, it doesn't sound, it doesn't
smell nice. It smells toxic, you know, like sustained decades
of that, you definitely get cancer and the fucking you know. Okay, anyway,
we're getting distracted here. Brownsville and Harlingin have a more
mediated climate, being that they're closer to a large body
of water, which helps mediate the climate, so it doesn't
get as hot nor as cold during the very rare
freeze events we have here, and it's more humid, so
there's members of the flora down here that are not
so tolerant of drying out. That kind of taper off
as you head west towards Laredo Rio, Grand City, Laredo,
Eagle Pass del Rio, you know, these wonderful border towns
with an abundance of pawn shops and paid a loan
places and you know, sleez bag motels. So I don't
mean to distract the same, Sorry, but I've finally seen
this plan and I was looking for it. There's a
housing there's like all these mc mansions, like literally McMansions,
they're pretty gaudy houses. I don't know why. It's a
very weird style they got down here and building these houses.
You couldn't probably pay me to live in one. I
would get fucking depressed unless I had to cover the
whole thing in plants, but cover the whole you know,
outdoors and and like create a recreate a thorn forest.
But the east their own, you know, they've got there's
the stucco, They've got these really blots of black and
gray air and b Airbnb colors, safe colors. Fucking amn,
it's a it's a flavor. It's again, it goes against
everything I've lived in Hispanic Carrious my whole life, well
for most of the large personema of my life. And
you know, we're living in Tucson, living in a Bay area,
East Oakland, living in East uh, you know, or passing
through LA. You know. I'm used to like brightly painted houses,
fucking dope gardens, you know, the fuck you or Mexican
that kind of like attitude, you know, and here it's
very watered down. It's a very strang it's just very beige.
It's very gray and black. Anyway, and there's reasons for
this of course we're right. We're not fucking idiots here.
We know why, all right, And it's they're dark reasons
and it's sad and but you gotta have compassion for anyway.
But maybe I'm reading too much into it. Okay, there's
anyway we're not getting. We're not getting. This is in
the fucking sociology pocket. The point is, I finally saw
this member of the mustard order. I finally saw it.
I was looking for it. I was in this neighborhood
with the mcmachins. They've got some old Guaya cons on there,
Guya cum and Gusta Fulliam. Iron wood, I think is
a common name for it. You see him in the
Sierra Madre. They're old growth specimen. It's probably five hundred
years old. They're like fifteen feet tall. You know, you'll
see him in West Texas tapping out, you know, a
much more arid climate. They grow, but they don't thrive,
topping out of like four feet. Wonderful fucking plants. Wonderful plants,
not grown enough. I just picked them up from my
friend David, who's got a nursery and Harlingen, great guy.
We were sitting there cooking blue corn tortillas in his
front yard. He's barefoot, you know, And I said, damn,
this is this is the life. You know, our kids
were playing together. I'm like, how do you you know?
I could never see someone like you existing where I live.
It's much too stiff and square. The mar A Lago
face is really popular where I live. Again, I'm getting distracted. Okay,
I'm sorry. I got some shit I gotta work through.
I should have talked to my therapist. I can't talk
to anyone because you're just doing the bucks a fucking hour. Okay,
but so I'm talking to you, so just fucking deal
with it. You'll be fine. So anyway, but he was
growing guya coon. There's not enough people growing these down here.
My friend Rosie Rozziel is growing guaya con. He's got
a nursery in Edinburgh, right, little just small growers, right, members,
you know, members of a squirre coman. If you're building
tracked houses, you're not going to go to these guys
for plants. You should, but you're probably you know, a knob. Again,
I'm fucking being a dick, not a knob. You're probably
don't hit you want the crape myrtles in the box
woods and shit, you know what I mean, and the
ornamental crowtons. Okay, we're doing it, you know anyway. But
so there's people down here growing good stuff, right, but
it needs to get bigger. We need to get you know,
fucking get some of those plants so that members of
a square community learn to appreciate them. That's what we
need to go. That's where this podcast is going. And
I'm going to get into why again. Turns out because
the city's fucking with me from my yard and they
are fucking with me for planting street trees. They just
don't want street trees. And then it just made me
realize this whole kind of inner hatred of nature that
exists down here and in much of Mexico. Not I
wouldn't say to maybe it's a hatred. People love plants,
they like horticulture, but they don't like nature. And it's
like this in the United States as well in more
Anglo areas. But it's just a different flavor, you know,
it's a different flavor. And well, how do we change it?
That's what I got to know, you know, how do
you change it without dos in your appolita, right, without
doing like this, you know, a clinical therapeutic mushroom trip
with their right because it's not gonna always she's not
gonna agree to that, okay, and then it you know,
and then at some point you've got to be conniving
and like lure her into she's not gonna do that, right,
how do you you know, especially the old people, the
old people, you really got to reach. Not all old people.
There's some dope old people. All right. I want to fight.
I want to offend any of the old people because
people get ages. They think I'm being ages rather right,
and so you know, you mentioned there's like, uh, there's
some grannies out there who hate street trees. And then
every granny thinks you're talking about them. You gotta say, hey, listen,
I'm not talking about you. You seem pretty cool. Chill out, Okay,
this is this isn't a do you hate street trees?
Do you hate plant? Do you hate nature? Do you
hate native plants? Don't? So it's not about you, don't worry,
but but your horticulture. Let us not confuse horticulture, which
is filled with a bunch of garbage. I feel, in
many ways much of horticulture further alienates and isolates. It's
from the real living world, right, because it's gaudy cultivars
that don't really exist in nature. They've been bred in greenhouses.
They're fucking corny, they're gaudy, they're tacky or whatever. Anyone
who spent time in nature sees a lot of what
constitutes modern hortor culture and fucking gasps. It looks fake.
It's the minecraft landscaping. It looks like it's the plant
version of the Marra a Lago face. Something ain't right,
you know, you can tell it's like a human there,
but it's not right. There's something. The lips are too big,
the fucking no one really has cheekbones like that. Something's
wrong with the skin. Looks like it's about the melt off.
I don't know, I don't know. This is problematic what
I'm saying. It might be, thank you. I just can't
listen to that, okay. Anyway, So, uh, we're trying to
get rid of those people. Anyway. We're trying to filter
the fucking people that say shit like that. Okay. Anyway,
So I went to go see this plant. I was
going to this neighborhood. They got old guyacons they got
Tlanzia BAILEYI hanging into trees and these old ebonyes. It's
weird because it's mostly MC mansions, horrible, horrible looking a neighborhood.
I would probably kill my I couldn't exist in there
for longer than a week, I'd probably kill myself. It's
Saint Augustine Grass. It's all the corny shit that got
done here. I mean, looks like a death cult. It
looks like a spiritual death cult. Parts of me die
when I have to go through and walk through these areas.
Right they look they're completely artificial. They're existing on water
that's not even going to be here in ten years.
You know. The people inside are all aligned to themselves,
no offense. I hope they find what they're looking for
in life eventually, but they're a lying on themselves. And
if I can make a sweeping generalization, there's probably some
very wonderful people in there, probably some very lovely people,
probably some not so nice ones too, But that's that
we're not focusing in that. We're focusing on these two
little lots that are left where the owner has not
sold and converted it to this hideous tract house slum.
Very wealthy tract house slum. It's a spiritual slum. Wealthy
they're doing fine economically, but spiritually it's a slum. Okay,
it's broke, it's broken. Okay, it's empty, it's depauperate and
so but there's these these couple of these plants left
that are growing and thank god because it's you know,
I go every year to check up on it. A
lot of members of a native plant whatever the hell
you call it down here. We come from all different backgrounds,
you know, we come together because we like the living world.
They know this spot, there's a well known spot, right,
so I went to go check it. It's got like
a construction sign and the sign looks so it looks
like they were going to demolish it at one point.
But maybe the project fell through or someone was hoping to,
you know, they were the only reason the project may
have been going through was because someone in city hall
was connected. And then that person in city hall got
caught embezzling money and taking primes, and so now the
project fell through and they couldn't get it approved. I
don't know, I don't know what the deal is. Right,
there's all kinds of corruption because the city politicians down
here mostly work for the developers. They do, and that's good.
I hope they keep doing that because that's great. That's
good for them. They can get their fourth car and
send their kids to private school and whatever. It's much
more important than actually helping make the community a better place.
But okay, I'm getting distracted. I'm my distain is showing through.
I said, I wasn't good theutist. I was going to
be soft and nice and smile and you know, make
the stiffs feel good. Sorry, getting distracted anyway, So I
went to this area and then I said, oh, yeah,
there's I remember, there's supposed to be capris and kana here,
which is a cool shrub to like ten or twelve feet.
It's much more abundant than Matamoros Tamalipas just over the
border a few miles south, at least for now, until
other sleazy development projects go through on that side. But
Mexico is not. You know, if there's a race between
who's destroying more of their native landscape to turn it
into single use you know, development garbage for developers to
please the developers. In the Elisee, the United States is
winning by a long shot. Mexico's got a lot of
work to do catching up demolishing what's left of their
new living biota. So so anyway, so I was looking
for kapris. I knew about this plant, I said, I
know it's rare. I don't know why. It seems like
there's a lot of plants that only grow in this
border region, northern Mexico southern Texas. That's really interesting too,
because it's such a specific area. You start going further south,
you encounter I mean, unless you're going to Vera Cruz,
which is lowland, but you know, you start going further
south and head up west a little bit, all of
Mexico starts to go up in elevation, and so the
climate and the regional environment changes. And so this lowland
Rio Grande Valley, it's not really a valley, it's a floodplain.
There's not really any topography here. But this is a
very specific area where a lot of stuff grows here.
But it's not going to grow as well. I say
it three or four thousand feet. I don't think ebeny's
grow in the Sierra Mandre maybe a little bit, but
they're more of a lowland plant. There's a lot of
plants that are like that. So it's got this very
specific region dictated by different water sheds and elevations, and
were at a low elevation. I remember most of Mexico's
at high elevation. So it's very very cool these plants
that are restricted to this region. Of course, like Jerseys.
Gerdowski said, how are you pronounced that? I don't know.
I'm not Polish. But he was a famous Mexican botanist,
wonderful man who had actually been in as a child.
He was in a concentration kid because he was Polish. Yeah,
I think he was a Polish too. I don't know,
I don't know, but anyway, he just passed away two
years ago. He wrote a lot of great books, Flora
Funeralgamica the Mexico as a one of the like one
of the first Flora books that he wrote. Someone actually
just gave me, my friend, the jusuag just gave me
a paperback copy which was very kind of a you know,
like printed at original printing in the seventies, fucking doll anyway,
So so there's a very specific regional flora here, appreciated
by maybe three percent of the population that lives here
maybe a little bit more right, maybe maybe, but the
majority don't like it. They don't like it. It's just
the culture. Why does anybody anywhere paying attention to nature.
It's like this, whether you go in most places in
the world, they don't give a shit. People. Humans don't care, right,
because everything was put here for us and we don't.
We don't care. Right. You got to put it on there, right,
You got to educate them, You got to show them
how cool it is. Technologies allowed us to believe that
we're estranged from it, then we don't need it, and
so we don't pay attention to it unless it's psychoactive
or medicinal or edible or whatever. So, uh, you know,
it's just the way it is. It's okay. We got
to change it. But but I go and I look,
I'm looking for this cap person. Can't I talk. I
call my friend Ken. I asked, where did this thing grow?
And he tell me the road. It was on stagecoach drive.
I can tell you that because the whole area is
getting destroyed. It's not gonna it's just not gonna be
therer much longer. And I go there with my friend Ava,
and we find all these beautiful quiet cons It's like
dense thorn scrub, right, which looks not inviting. Right. I'm
sure you've got to steward these landscapes. That's I'm sure
that's what native people did here for thousands. You've got
to steward them. You gotta, you know, clip shit back,
prune stuff up, make sure you can get in there.
But we have you do that. They're they're wonderful. They're
they're shielding the ground from the intense sun. They're creating
a microclimate of humidity. They're they're nurturing places right you want,
and they're they're shielding the ground from baking into a
hot clay ball like it would otherwise be, and like
you see it being in much of the area where
it's been developed or turned into parking lots, and absolutely
no concept of the heat island down here by the
way too. I've talked about that numerous times. This is
like basic high school physics when you think about it.
But again, none of us are really ever inclined to
think about it, right, unless you're going on into nature
and seeing how much cooler in temperature it is there,
and then you're going to the parking lot and being like, God,
this is a fucking I mean, I've hated the shopping
center since I was like ten years old. They've always
seemed bleak to me, whether they're in Chicago, whether they're
down here, very fucking bleak. Driving and shopping that's all
you do. Oh and eating and most of the food
is not very healthy. Okay, sorry, we're getting distracted. I
know you've probably already bummed out about recent events and
I'm not helping it. Okay, but listen, it gets better.
It does get better. So we see all these wonderful plants,
and you know, I had heard that the caparis and
kana specimen that I was looking for, and this is
a shrub that gets about twelve fourteen feet tall, beautiful
silver undersides, just the cool. It would probably be great
in landscaping here. They should plant that around the margins
that these bleak shopping centers instead of crape myrtles because
they always die or the native they use natives, they
use fracts. In this berlandier rye, which is an ash tree.
It's riparian. They die unless they're on irrigation or growing
in an arroyo. Doesn't make very much sense. To use
them as yard trees or street trees. Right, unless you're
just watering, you're Saint Augustine grass with water. That's not
gonna beat her in ten years anyway, because the Rio
grand is trying up. Okay, so I'm looking for this thing.
It's a it's a mode down shrub because they just
mow the shit out of it. It's going right on
the fence line, and I don't see it, but I
see some vasis adelia, which is a kind of like
rubbery stemmed shrub to about twelve feet tall. Really cool
plant host plant for the Mexican blueing butterfly. Fucking dope
looking butterfly. Who doesn't like butterflies? You really, you don't
like butterflies? You're an asshole. Really? They fucking unclench, Yeah,
they quit trying to be macho. You don't have to quit.
You can. You can let it go, all right, go
to therapy, allow yourself to cry once in a while
when something really sad happens. No one's gonna think you're
a pussy. Okay, you can do this, all right. It's
not unclenched quit front thing. This is a Texas thing.
It's everywhere, but especially in Texas, right, you gotta you
gotta keep up that bullshit front, and you're just fucking
dying inside. You live thirty years of your life like that,
at least if you're a male. Oh god. Anyway, I
was just crying because Jack, my dog, faked his own death.
And we'll get into that later. He's still alive. Motherfucker
wouldn't die. He freaked me out. He's a dick. He
just freaked me out. I was crying. I was holding him,
and he wasn't eating or drinking. He was couldn't get
up and walk for like two days. I was like, fuck,
this is it. The vet almost came by Saturday, but
then she bailed. Thank god she flaked because I got
these vets that'll come put your dog down in your house,
you know. Fucking hell So anyway, and then Sunday night,
he's like he gets up and I'm like, what the
fuck man? You know? And then I fed him. I
was like giving him food. He wouldn't eat. Sunday night,
I gave him, put a hot dog in. He wasn't
even eating hot dogs. I put a hot dog in
front of his face and he ate it. And now
he's fucking I mean, he's fine. He's fine as he
was for a sixteen year old duck. Okay. Anyway, See
there's a little bit of good news make you feel better.
So I'm looking around. I see Vasi's Adelia. I see
these beautiful old guiacns. This is still in the same
neighborhood where the T. A. Bailey I and the Guayacns were.
And there's already McMansions and there's two just two lots yet,
you know, left that haven't been developed yet. But we're
about four blocks seas to there on stagecoach drive. And
so now I'm looking and I see, you know, in
the background, I can see they've just cleared a whole
bunch of woods. On the satellite map, the woods are there,
the thorn forest. And then I can see on right
in front of me, and physically in front of me,
they're not there anymore. They've been cleared. They've got the
bulldozers in the back hose, they've cleared all this shit.
And I'm just it doesn't even phase me anymore because
I'm so used to it. I've seen so much wreckage
and destruction since I've not only moved to Texas, and
they're doing this all over central Texas, in southern Texas,
but but they're you know, but especially down here in
a Rio Grande Valley. Right, I've seen astrophyte and mysterious
get destroyed, thousands of payote plants get bulldozed, and it's terrible.
It's you know, you just you just kind of keep
the geologic timescale in mind when this is happening. And
and uh realize you're gonna laugh when the comic comes,
because this is this is self destructive behavior, and there's
nothing you can do. It's like having a friend that's
a fucking drunk or a junkie, and like nothing you
say is going to get them to stop. They kind
of have to hit rock bottom and then may then
and only then maybe will they walk into an AA
meeting or decide to quit drinking. It's very similar, very
similar behavior, you know, modern civilization, the leaders in modern
chiliz and and alcoholics and junkies. Okay, so I'm looking
at you know, I've it's still I've given up looking
for the capwards because I couldn't find it. I don't
see anything that looks like it's been mowed down. I
walked the perimeter, I didn't see anything, so I'm just now,
I'm just going againder An google at the guyacons and
the faces Adelli and see what else is there. And
then suddenly right in front of me, and the only
way I realized I was gonna find this plant was
it would be the one plant. I had no idea
what it was because I know all the other plants
down here. And suddenly I look and I see this
multi stem shrub do about twelve feet with these beautiful
silver undersize of the leaves, mahogany shoots and petioles maybe
a centimeter long, petioles of a centimeter line. And I said,
I don't know what the shit that is. I look closer,
I'm like, oh, this is it. This is capers and cana.
It's a full, full grown individual. Holy shit. I was
so ecstatic. And then I look at the flowers. I
see the four white petals, and I think it had
eight stamens the four petals. Of course, remember we look
at flowers when we're trying to figure out what plants.
We're looking at what family it is. And that's how
you start. You start with what family, right, And if
you don't know what family it's in. You try to
figure out what fucking order it's in using things called
sinapa morphis, which are traits of different levels of taxonomic classification,
like this, A genus has its own sinapa morphis. A
family has its own sanapa morphis. For the pea family,
it's banner and keel flower morphology at least for the
Faboides subfamily, or the mimosa style flower for the mimosoid
subfamily of Pabasi, for the p family. For the Brassica family,
it's four petals, six stamens. And not only is it
you count numbers here, but the anthers have a tip
look to them in the in the mustards, right, and
so do the sepals. They're kind of cupped, right. And
as the racy of course, the sunflower family, it's it's
a capitulum of what looks like a single flower is
actually composed of many different flowers. In the evening primrose
family own a gracie, it's four petals, eight stamens. You know,
we're count of numbers, You get it, right, and so
on and so on with every fucking angiosperm family, and
with the ferns you're looking at the sporophylls and the
sri and what have you. And where they're aligned on
the underside of the leaf? Do they have an dusium,
a pseudo indusium? Are they linear? Et cetera. You know,
so I look at these flowers, I said, okay, because
I wasn't familiar with capareci, the caper family. You know,
what is a caper? I don't think I've even had
a caper before. What do you do with capers? You
put them in martiniz or theme. I don't drink. What
do you do with capers? You put them in booze,
you put them in salads and shit, I don't know.
Do you put a caper in jardanira, the Chicago style
olive oil marinated pizza topping. No, jardonira is not just
for pizza. But you can put it on a tany
beef sandwich too. But I don't eat that chick because
I don't try to eat mammals most of the time,
because it's just, you know, it's a it's a health thing, right.
I come from a line of Dagos that I'll get
they get all get ass cancer, they get the colon cancer. Shit. Now,
I'm not going to refuse it if someone offers me some,
but I generally don't seek it out. Right, I just
got a vegetable steamer. I've been steaming fish. I've been
steaming cauliflower, really trying to clean my fucking tubes out.
It's been wonderful. Right, I make smoothies and should drink
a lot of green tea, and then i'll, you know,
indulge in taco polenke, eat far too much taco plunk.
My five year old always wants to go to talk Polenke.
I can't convince her to eat anything else. She doesn't
even fucking like pizza. I don't know. I've never met
a kid that doesn't like pizza. She just wants taco
polnke all the time. She wants to live on bean
and cheese tacos. So you can't do that. That's not healthy.
You have to eat something else besides taco polenke. For
Christ's sakes, you're gonna make me look like a bad parent.
They're gonna call DCFS. I can't just feed you taco Polenke.
But then I realized she's five, and just whatever, just
deal with it. People don't get a broadened palate. For
foods until they're older. Right to do. I don't know
what the fuck I wanted to eat. I didn't even
know what refried beans and cheese were when I was five, right.
I learned it later on when I got sent to
this our bound program for fucked up kids. I was
there with this guy who got cast selling five hundred
hits an assid got sent there by the court. I
was there with another guy from wait, wonderful community of people,
wonderful youths. I was thirteen. You know. I got in
a fistfight with this kid I later became close friends with.
That's a great way to become close friends. By the way,
if you're curious about how to make friends, just go
up to someone and punch them in the face and
then but then be nice to him afterwards, and it works, wonders.
It's a great bonding experiment. That's how I met my lawyer.
We didn't punch each other in the face. We were
talking shit to each other. I told him to go
fuck himself, and it wasn't an endearing way like the
way I signed off on the videos. We really, you know,
we were mad. And then a day later he said, well,
I guess we know each other. We you know, we
we know each other much closer now. And I said,
you're right in and so let's work together. And so
now he's my lawyer. So anyway, that said, where were we?
So I see this thing. I'm I can feel the
dopamine rush. I'm getting excited. I'm looking at this rare plant.
I say, holy shit, we need to cultivate this. I
call my keep, I say, we got to get cuttings. Stat.
I take an herbarium about your stat. I gotta go.
Where the fuck did I put the Irbarian boucher too?
By the way, I can't remember, God damn it. It
was dry and somewhere. I don't know how I did
with it. Anyway, I'm sure I'll find that at some point. So,
you know, I tell uh, I tell my friend. I
just I said, we're gonna be here for a minute. Now.
I got it, and we we start looking immediately looking
for more. I couldn't find anymore. There's just this one.
I do a video on it. Whatever, take a voucher.
Then we go out for typhoon and it was it was.
It was good food, but it was expensive. It was
fucking overpriced. And I don't get typhood in Brownsville, no offense.
Wonderful people that run it, but they're not you know,
it's it's not the it's not affordable. Okay, but if
you're in Alpine, Texas, go to the type place there.
That's a wonderful way. Okay, let's keep going. I'm getting distracted.
Here are you still listening? Even I don't know what
are you doing? You work? What the what are you fucking?
What are you doing? I don't know? Do you what
are you doing? I don't care, never mind some of
my business. So we uh we go. And the next day,
after the video comes out, I get contacted by a
gentleman who tells me he's the forester, the city forester
for the city of Brownsville. I didn't even know they
had one. That's pretty cool. I can't imagine the town
I live in having a city forester because they don't
have trees. They hate trees, they don't want trees. They
want to cut all cut down all the trees. And
the ship they plant is horrible too. Again, it's like,
you know, live oaks, which aren't really native, don't do
that well. And uh, I mean they're native to the continent,
but not down here. It's just they're not thorn scrub plants.
And and then you know the fracss berlandier rye, crape
myrtles and all this shit, right, stuff that's not really
going to be good. They've totally turned off to the
native legumes that are so dominant here and such great
street trees. So and so this guy tells me, he said,
I'm gonna wait, can you shut tell me where this
spot was? And I said, oh, yeah, I just left
the location open an eye naturalists because I want people
to go there. They're going to destroy it anyways and
build some fucking mc mansions. So and they are McMansions.
They're large houses. You can see what they're building. So
he looks it up. He finds out they didn't pull
their permits correctly. He goes to you know, he's like,
I'm going to order a stop to the construction whatever,
to the whatever they're doing. And then I get a
call from him later and it turns out he actually
he reached out to the guy that the owner, who
he went to high school with. And so it's it's
not even this antagonistic situation anymore. It's just like the
guy said we could go remove it, I'm going to
call this tree farm to go do it with a
tree spade. By that point, my friend David and Mike
Heap and a few other people had gone and taken cuttings,
and so hopefully we can get this thing at the cultivation. Meanwhile,
I know a guy at Wardo and another dude on
the other side of the border in Mexico and tam
Alipus where there's a very small but the enthusiastic native
plant community, and they're collecting seeds from the wild plants
left over there. So now the goal is to just
grow the absolute shit out of this and get it
into cultivation. And as much as I even hate going
to home despot in all these other places, we need
to start working on these focks to get them to
grow native plants. Low's home despot. You got to start
working on them. What we need to do is change
the entire concept of what horticulture is supposed to be.
It's not. You know, for so long, horticulture has just
been about what's esthetically pleasing to rich old ladies. That's ridiculous.
That doesn't mean anything. People that are disconnected from the
living machine in their region. Why are we concerned about
their opinions about what's pretty. We need to start treating
plants as infrastructure, and the whole concept in the context
itself is what's beautiful? This plant supports these other species
of insect bird, They nurture the land they've They're perfectly evolved,
fucking perfectly evolved for this set of conditions, whether it's
the soils, the extreme summer heat for flooding, whatever, they
evolved there, and why are they built perfectly for it?
Because the environment literally selected for them. The environment literally
bred them. The same way that if you're trying to
grow heat and humidity tolerant tomatoes, because most heat most
tomatoes are not heat and humidity tolerate. They're from eight
thousand feet in the high dry and these where they
grow with brown Ninea condilaris, which is a giant cactus,
beautiful cactus Pronygia, right, that's where the ancestors of tomatoes
are are native. So they don't like the heat and humidity.
They don't like the the higher nighttime temperatures that that
humidity creates because their metabolism can't slow down, so they
hit the compensation point too easily. They're burning the machine's
always on, the machine being the plant, and so it
quickly burns out its energy because it's only it's running
twenty four hours a day, but it's only photosynthesizing for twelve.
So at some point it just hits a tipping point
and they decline. Right, A lot of plants from high
altitude environments, well, you're not gonna have luck growing bristol
cone pines for very long in say, the Southeastern United States,
because bristol compines are from a high altitude environment where
they get cold nights and the machine shits down and
of course it's just hot as ever living shit and
humid as balls in the Southeastern United States. You get
you catch my drift. So if you're trying to get
tomatoes to grow, you're trying to you're trying to breed
a heat and humidity tolerant tomato. You it's gonna take selection.
And so how do you do that? You grow a
thousand seedlings with a you know, pooling from a broad
genetic diversity, all different cultivars that have been bred by
humans over the last few hundred years since uh, you know,
since tomatoes hit it big with the human populace. The
Europeans took them over and they said, what you get
what I'm saying you take you select a broad genetic pool.
You grow a thousand seedlings, maybe more, the more the better,
select them to heat and humidity. Most will die. That's
those that survive. You then start breeding those, and now,
because the rest have died, you've opened up this huge palate,
this huge canvas for more to grow and thrive. And
there's not as many competing for the limited resources of
you know, root space and water and whatever. And so suddenly,
within a few generations you've created a heat in humidity
toweran tomato. Right, look at what humans have done selecting
for different dog breeds that they've all bred from the
same ancestral species of wool. For selecting for broccoli and
kale and colabie, which are all the same species of
Brassica brassica olerasia. Right. If humans can do that in
a few centuries, what can the environment do in a
few million years? And that's what's happened in every region
where there's a plant list and a plant community that's
native is those plants were literally built and selected for
by the environment. Human selection is a great way to
introduce you to the concept of natural selection. It's nothing
to do with only the strong survived, dumbest shit I've
ever heard. Okay, It's got more to do with literally
selection by the environment, and what's advantageous in one environment
may not be an advantageous adaptived in another environment. We
talk about this all the time on this podcast. Do
I need to get this through to you again? This
is for a people who haven't heard it yet, right, So,
then that's why the native plants make sense. That's why
they're pragmatic, That's why they do so well. I mean
they literally pop up unassisted, especially down here. A lot
of the natives, a lot of the aggressive plants are
not invasive. The ruteral plants, the plants you see growing
after they bulldoze a lot and then the project falls
through because the sleeves bag developer couldn't get the funding
for it, or couldn't you know, wasn't able to get
the bribe to the city council person in time before
they retired or got voted out, you know, something like that.
Like those plants literally pop up mesquites paalo verdes, Parkinsonia
koliata in this case, not my favorite Parkinsonia Texana. But
you know, that's why they pop up so easy, because
they mean, you look at how they're just built for
this environment. They're great. They're great plants. And that's one
thing that's really cool about South Texas is most of
the pioneer species we have, except for buffalo grass and
guinea grass and I think KR. Bluestem too, they're all
invasive grasses. The pioneer species except for those, most of
the pine, the ruteral plants, the plants that thrive around
human environments, on the sides of railroad tracks, drainage ditches,
the shit that's gonna pop up if you bulldoze a
lot and don't do anything disturbance event. The pioneer species,
the rutural plants kind of the same thing, are all
going to be native, which is very cool. So why
don't we use it? We have such an extreme climate
down here, right, And so this was something that was
hard for me to grasp when I was younger, when
I just wanted to grow fucking medicicoias everywhere because I
thought they were cool trees. Oh it's a cold tolerant redwood.
Was let's grow medicaquoias and you know the Mediterranean climate
of California where it doesn't rain during the hottest part
of Ye, that makes sense. Right. Let's take a plant
from a climate that's more akin to that of eastern
North America, where they get fifty to sixty the inches
of rain a year and the tree grows in floodplains.
Try to grow that, you know, in a front yard
in West Oakland. Right, it doesn't doesn't make sense. It
doesn't make sense. Rights. It's like trying to get a
square peg to fit in a round hole. It's not
gonna work unless the square is smaller than the roundhole.
But you know what I mean, it doesn't work like that.
So anyway, Uh, this is what we get to do,
and you gotta do it, and you gotta talk, especially
if you're in Mexico or you're you're you know, uh,
you talk to your abolita. If you're in Mexico, you're
obviously not listening to this podcast. It's in English. Maybe
you are. I don't know a lot of them. A
lot of my Mexican friends are bilingual, which makes you know,
it's so pathetic for most Americans, since many Americans only
speak English. But anyway, you talk to your appolita, talk
to your talk to your tears, talk to everybody. Start
to start convincing them that the concrete backyard is not nice. Okay,
unless you're like a fucking professional NBA player, you need
to practice a lot or something. Okay, all right, you
gotta we gotta stop doing this, Gotta get rid of
the Mexican lawn Gotta stop doing the Mexican equivalent of
the lawns of the concrete backyard. Gotta stop doing that.
You gotta start convincing your a belita that maybe instead
of all the crape myrtles and the horticultural home despot
garbage that she picks up at the polga and don't
call it then in front of it, be very nice,
but start saying, Look, the native plants are beautiful too.
You see the birds hanging out in the native plants.
They might have spines, but it's because they have to
protect themselves, because they evolved in this harsh climate that
we live so much, and so let's respect them. You
can do this. You can advocate these things. This is
something you can do, Okay, And if you're in in
fucking ioware or whatever, and they just want to have
you know, you could do the same thing. The tall
grass prairie is pretty amazing. It's not filled with ticks
all right. When it's filled with ticks, it's because it
hasn't burned like it was for you know, every two
or three years and two or three year intervals by
the people that took care of this land for twenty
thirty thousand years, you know, before settlers came. Right, he's
got to manage it, right, The tall grass prairie is amazing.
You're not gonna get ticks in the front yard unless
you got our models of deer hanging anyway, So settle down, right. Stop,
we got to encourage people stop planting just because you
can still plan dow nty whatever. But the but the
native plants are what makes sense. Right. Stop stop having
the go to be the horticultural atrocities in the garbage. Right,
Have it be the natives. Right, this is don't create
a religion out of it. Don't be a militant asshole
about it. Don't be like the kid with the sept
and piercing who's twenty four years old and you know,
just learned what colonization is and it's going to annoy
the shit out of you and lecture you and morally
condescend to you. Right, That's what helped us get where
we are today. That's what that shit turns people off.
It doesn't work. Just politely imply, politely and kindly imply.
I can coach switch. I talk a lot of shit.
I talk a whole lot of shit, right, I've got
disdain and contempt in my voice sometimes, right, Not really,
it's just I'm just spiny and the inside I'm soft.
I'm soft, fluffy, okay, But I can also code switch.
And if I'm sitting in front of, you know, a
bunch of stiffs in front of city Hall, like I
was a few days ago when I was trying to
convince them to plants street trees, and then also to
leave my yard alone because I just got a code
violation for the yard, which I'm pretty sure is just
a personal it's personal now, because we already went through
this two years ago and I pissed someone off there.
They got a heart on for me, even though they're
about to retire, and so they're coming for the yard again,
and so they don't even know what they're upset about.
But I code switch and I talked to them. I said, look,
can we just stop doing this. You guys don't even
know what you're upset about. I don't live in an Hoa.
You guys are not an Hoa. Come over to the yard.
I'll show you what's up. I'll show you what all
these plants are, how wonderful it is. Right, it's technically
not breaking any of the code. They're cultivated plants. Well,
they don't look cultivated. How would you know what looks cultivated?
And you can't tell by look alone whether something's cultivated. Okay,
let's be honest with ourselves. You're not used to this,
and you don't like it because you're not used to it,
And that's okay. But let's come over. Let's pick it apart,
and I'll show you what's up. It's not about height limits,
it's not about any of this. It's because you don't
know what it is. Every single person who's ever been
over to my house fucking loves it. Talks about how
wonderful it is. All the birds hang out there. It's great. Okay,
it doesn't make sense to have mode bermuda grass and
an irrigated saint augustine lawn in a climate where it's
summer for eleven months out of the year. That's insane,
that's crazy. We don't have the water for that, and
nor should anyone be forced to pay for that, because
if you're not paying the irrigated, then what you're gonna
have is a barren dirt lot that gets mowed. And
I can see them mowing around my neighborhood too. It's
really cute. These guys go out. They've got the face
masks down. They look like fucking ice agents, but they've
just it's because they got to have these scarves because
there's not really any grass there in these lots that
they're mowing. They're just kicking up clouds of dust, so
they have to have these masks so that they can breathe.
And don't you know, get some sort of fungal infection
from inhaling long dormant spores in this compacted silty clay soil.
Because there's you can't can't have that. You can't have
a grass a lawn here without it being irrigated because
it's just too fucking hot. Right. The grass blades are
not long enough to shield the ground from getting baked
to shit. Okay, you know it is good at shielding
the ground from getting baked to shit. The native thorn
scrub flora, the native thorn forest flora, the same thing
that the native chachilacas hang out in and the cool
indigo snakes and god knows what cool animals that went
extinct only ten thousand years ago. You can do that
and you can still see what a thorn scrub forest
looks like if you go to like say Kinta Mazatlan
over McCallan, or some of the rare patches of thorn
forests that are left Itteria brush tracks La Puerta saying
something wildlife refuge. You know, just look for the green
parcels on the map down here that haven't been bulldozed yet,
that were thankfully that previous generations were thankfully considerate and
forward thinking enough to set aside, and which developers probably
will come for at some point because they're doing that
for all over. I mean, these developers really got a
heart on for the land. They're not concerned about, you know,
community well being at all. They are only concern is
to make as much money as possible, and they're probably
lying to themselves too, So they're they're probably they're probably believing,
they're probably getting high on their own on their own sauce.
They don't, you know. So it's not like they're malicious.
They're intentionally conniving. Certainly some are, but a lot of
them just I think, believe their own lives. They believe
the bullshit they tell other people and they believe it themselves. Oh,
we're probably make more holthy for people at the point.
And now you're trying to make as much money as
possible by coming for whatever little morsel of land is left.
And you view land as a resource that you can
manipulate and exploit. You don't view land as though this
this has a purpose, it's got a you know, it's
preserving the wild living world that's left there. It's a
little crumb. You don't view it like that. It's it's
whatever's left. Right, Like pigs at a trough, they'll go
for the gobble up every last little bit. So they'll
come for the lands down here at some point eventually.
But again I don't say this to discourage you. I
say it to motivate you. You got to advocate. If
people don't know what the native plants are in a
certain region wherever it is, they're not going to give
a shit when developers come to destroy it. There's going
to be no outrage. There's going to be no one
to speak up for it. Right, whether it's fucking hunters
and fishermen, or whether it's people that just want to
go cool their head and go on a hike, or
nature lovers or birdwagers or whatever. Right, you advocate for it.
And you have to realize how the horticulture that's been
a part of human sociey. The shit we plant in
front of new developments, the stuff your grandma might plant
in front of her house unless she's really dope, grandma,
and is in the native plants. The stuff that you
see planted in front of the wells Fargo, and you
have to go in there and cash a check, and
you really don't like doing it because the bank just
feels terrible anyway, and you know they're fucking you. Right,
you see the little deductions monthly and your statement, right,
you look at that stuff that is not that those
are that's garbage. That further, it's as bad as the lawn,
as far as I'm concerned, as bad as the lawn.
It further alienates us. It creates this paradigm that views
nature as messy and things that if plants are going
to be growing where we exist, that they've got to
be flowering all the time and have shiny leaves and
and be hedged and neatly spaced. It's a deranged, fucking mindset.
That's not okay. You live in places like that. That's
going to affect your mental health, whether you like it
or not. Okay, get rid of this weird Victorian European
garden esthetic. Let that go. That's not nature. Where do
we look to see what we can do in those
places instead? And this is my message to all the landscapers.
I want to dose all of them, because horticulture doesn't
need an enema. Where do we look? We look at nature,
We look at the habitat, whether it's the California Maritime
Chaparral and coastal southern California, or whether we're in the
thorn scrub of the Tama Leap in thorn thorn forest,
or whether we're in the Illinois Prairie or in Northeast
woodland or the coastal plain of the Southeastern United States,
or the Ozark Plateau or the grasslands of Nebraska and
Kansas and western Oklahoma. That's where we look to. You
got to stop trying to deny these places. You got
to stop living in ignorance of the plant communities that
exist there and trying to plant ship from the home
depot garden section like boxwoods or fucking whatever in your yard.
When you live in these places, okay, because we've been
severed from the land, you've had it. Yeah, it's not
been severed from it, it's been stolen from you. And
you've been lied to about what a landscape should look like,
what the world that we live on should look like.
So advocate for it. And you see this in Mexico too.
It's the same thing. It really takes apart all the
weird identitarian bulls. Oh, Mexicans are technically half the digital though.
They just automatically know how to stewar the land. Now now, bullshit, bullshit. Now,
it's not the case. So many people, my friend Carlos,
so many bonis in Mexico, my friend calls. The first
time I met him, he was he was amazed to
see astikiam. He was amazed to see people that were
excited about plants. He said, there's no one down here
and grow. Granted he lives in Monterray, which could be
fucking bleak. Okay, there's like a lot of they've got
like the Mexican version of the mar A Lago face
down there, lots of phrases, lots of fancy shit, lots
of glossy garbage. It's all poison that value systems poison.
You don't want that, right. There's some dope shit too,
but there's the phrases. Shit is really popular in Monterray.
You could look at the billboards and whatever. Okay, it's
a really cool movement. There's some page I found that
is all about all about restoring that river because they
kind of did in Monterey what they did in La
you know, fifty years ago with the La River. They
cemented it and turned it into a dish, which is
just a shit for Brainwaight, I mean, come on, that's ridiculous.
It's gonna you're gonna speed up the flow so fast,
right that there's people who restoring the La River too.
So people are correct the mistakes. Stuff can change, but
you need to be part of that. You need to
advocate for it. Okay, you need to really inject it
into the popular consciousness. The traditional landscaping's horrible. It's it looks,
it's fucking ridiculous, it's gaudy, it's not real. We want nature,
We want what was real here. If we don't know
what it is, we have to seek it out. We
have to find out what did these plant communities look like?
What is ecological secession? We have to realize it's not
always static. There'd be a disturbance event and there'd be
pioneer species. Then they would taper off as the secondary
secessional species took over, and then they would taper off
as the climax, the you know, the the climax species
took over, right, the really cool shit, The stuff that's
slower growing and can't take full sun and get you know,
can't grow on a barren environment that's been recently cleared
by a bulldozer, a landslide or a fire. What do
these places look like? What was real? What is real
where you live? What was there before? If there weren't houses,
go back in time five hundre right, if at least
if you're in North America, what was growing there before?
Those things? Okay? And also might as well, while you're
here to learn who was living there before? And I'm
talking about like guilty, you know, self flagellating honky land acknowledgments,
But who was there before? What was going on here?
You know, curious about where you live? That's what I'm
talking about, right, figure out what species were there? All right?
Got the fucking land? Are people still doing land acknowledgments?
That is a corneus shit? God damn it. I mean
it's again, this is nothing to change. Putting pronouns and
bios and land acknowledgment absolutely nothing to change the material
conditions of anybody. In fact, they might have done more
to reverse them, because it just alienated people that maybe
weren't that smart and didn't understand it. And so now
now they're voting for a fascist, which is what we have.
And so we've got American cit Gate getting killed in
the streets. Let's not get into it. I want to
get into that. Okay, we're not. We don't get into that.
Jesus Christ and I keep those do you have those
rich college take over your You know it's not a
good idea. I Dentity politics was not a good idea.
Maybe it came from a good place for a little bit.
But you know, once you reach you know, beyond the
age of twenty years old, you gotta get a little
bit more depth of the human experience. You realize it
gets a little bit deeper than Okay, here we go.
So yeah, so anyway, so back to Caperson came. So
I guess they're gonna go in. They're gonna take this
thing out with a tree spade. Maybe you could put
some super thrive in there. You know, it's like, what
is that, like B vitamin super Thrive was like, it's
like a like it's a liquid concentrate you mixed with
water and you sprinkle it on the roots of something
that you just a plant that you just stressed. Maybe
it'll help. And of course if they dig this thing up.
We used to talk about that when I was volunteering
at San Francisco Botanic gart and a bunch. I wasn't
volunteering so much. I never signed their formal waiver. I
was more so just lurking around, and then Don and
Diane and then kind of got the idea that I
knew what I was doing, at least mildly, and just
let me fuck around. I grew a ton of rare stuff,
and I learned to lot about propagation there, which was great.
And then ten years later some new they got some
new head honcho who threw out all the interesting stuff
and wanted to grow petunias and design backdrops for weddings
and corporate events so they could rent out. They Oh,
it's tragic. It was tragic what they did at San
Francisco Botanical Guard. Maybe it's not like that anymore though,
I don't know, but it used to be a really
great God. I had so much fucking fun there. It
was so interesting. They had a cool library in the greenhouse,
these rickety old greenhouses. I think they demolished them eight
or nine years ago, rickety old greenhouses that had this
smell to them. But it didn't smell bad. It was just,
you know that we'd all get it. We'd all eat
our burritos there on lunch break at the main table
and talk like old people young people. You know. It
was a fucking great part of my life. And I
was just growing all these rare conifers. Got a bunch
of stuff from New Caledonia rare era carriers. It was
the same time I germinated a bunch of Fitzroya Cooper
Sodi's seed somebody had sent me from Chile, which I
guess was illegal under sighties, but whatever, who keeps a shit?
It was pointless. You're not cutting down the tree, you're
taking seeds to forexit do conservation. Mind blowing how counterintuitive
sightis could be in some places, you know, just more paperwork.
Well intentioned, but I certainly saw backlash against it. But
then it's good because maybe, you know, maybe there's some
lady coming over with a bunch of endangered frogs or
some shit in a trench coat, you know, tortoises stuffed
into roundies or something, and she's trying to sell them
for the petrate. So maybe that's more what it's for.
They should have made it exempt for plants, at least
for seeds. Okay, I digress. Could you fit a tortoise
in your under You couldn't fit a tortoise in your
well maybe if they were some of those little tortoises.
I don't know. I saw the cutest fucking tortoise in
South Africa, the parrot beak tortoise Homopus areolatus. God damn,
it was a fucking adorable little bit, little bastard. I'm
still working on videos, man. I got videos from exactly
a year ago when I was in Chile that I'm
just finally editing a lot of the high alpine stuff. Incredible.
So many different plants. It's from seven thousand feet in
central Chile. Take on the rosette leaf form, whether they're violets,
violas like the rosolate violets, you know, rosette leaves like
an ecaveria or a seatum or something looks like that, right,
So many different families converge on this form. Really fascinating. Shit,
I forgot how cool it was. I love doing it.
But those videos have just been sitting on my phone
the whole fucking time. I didn't work on them. Now
I finally am like, I'm going Ecuador in a few days.
I got a clear shit off my phone, got her
three hundred d barium specimens to make labels four. I'm
stressed out. I gotta go pick my kid up on
a bike. She gets mad when I don't show up
on the bike because I got this little bicycle. It's
like a Tannem bicycle. She wants me to, you know,
and uh so I bike over there. I think she
just wants to show it off to her friends. I
don't know, but it's either way, it's great. It's really fun.
It's a wonderful time to bike too, because it's not
one hundred degrees like it probably will be in two months.
But it's you know. That's the other thing I wasn't
used to is like the when I grew up, we
walked to school, and in Texas, I guess it's a
regular thing throughout much of Texas because it's such a
car dependent state. It's so everyone's kind of such a
slave to the automobile here, just because the way the
infrastructure is built in cities at least. But I see
these lines of cars, it looks like a fucking Bears
game getting out. Man, it takes twenty minutes. These people
wait in line twenty minutes to pick their kids up.
It's crazy. Why don't they just park on a side streets,
walk a block, and then go get their kids. That
seems like it'd be so much easier, you know, because
nobody wants to walk here. They hate it. You go
to a fucking drive through coffee shop, there's like, you
go to a coffee shop to drive through, gotta line
at fifteen cars and you park and walk inside. There's
no one. It's crazy get out the car. You got
to convince people to get out the car, and you
got to convince your ab willitas to start embracing the
native plants around them. But again, that's the hard part
we reentrough is where they actually encounter them because so
much with that' spin destroyed. Thus comes the importance of
the native plant movement and advocating for it. But there's
always that one species that's gonna be a hook. Right,
my friend Willie was talking about, you know, this redneck
guy he's friends with wasn't in the natives at all.
He was like doing landscaping stuff. He's playing all this
horticultural shit, garbage that needs you know, irrigation and gets
sick and dies because it's not from here and whatever,
or it just takes over because it's invasive. And uh,
the guy couldn't get into the native thing. He didn't
really care. And then he saw Salvia DARCIAI and he
was like, goddamn, he loved it. The guy loves hummingbirds.
This redneck loves humming birds. I fucking love that. I
love that, right, loves hummingbirds and so, and he saw
that these hummingbirds were actually going absolutely eight ape shit
for Salvia DARCIAI. So then he started getting more aut
Salvia darcia I was wanted to plant them. He just
fucking planted plant. It's hard to not like Salvia DARCIAI.
I was so stoked to have seen that in the
wild in uh Waeva leone or now it's what are
they gonna call it? Salvia Schafner. I know there's some
guy I've been uh communicating with an I naturalist Mexican
bonus that studies Salvi, A great fucking guy. Forget his name,
but he was telling me he's he I go to
him for all my lamy aces stuff. And there's still plants.
I have no clue what the fuck I saw when
I was in Hidalgo uh last month. We started off
in San Luis Poto C, went through Hidalgo, Carrectro and
uh and in Wahaka. But I did see Vaccalinia australis,
a shrub in the rose sea which was grown with
fucking Fukiria purpussii and Pakassiri's WEBERI incredible man, goddamn Wahaka
is so nice. What a fucking amazing state and city.
But anyway, you gotta if you live in Oahaka, you
gotta commiss your belief to embrace the native plants there.
You know, they really and they need to label some
of those goddamn plants at the Ethno Botanic Garden there,
which they give this kind of like limptic excuse as
to why they don't do it. They're like, oh, it
it kills They're like, what they're saying is we don't
label the plants here. I've got incredible stuff. It's all native.
They say, we don't label the plants here because it
kills the magic. The fuck No, that's not why. No,
it's like, it's a wonderful spot. You get a chance
to go there, it's a wonderful spot. You're gonna get
followed by a bouncer on this tour. You have to
do a paid tour and they got a bouncer that
follows you. But whatever, it's worth it. The pain the
tour is not that bad. But the bouncer that follows you,
and the fact that no one there knows what any
of the genus and species names out of the plants
gets frustrating unless you look out and you got a
dope tour guy. But the tour guide I had didn't
know it. So anyway, okay, I want to speak at
a high school Friday after my meeting with the city,
which was depressing. It seemed like they were almost intimidated
by me. They didn't have much to say. They're probably
still going to try and annihilate my yard and fuck
with me over any other CO violations they can find.
But I was very kind and did the code switching.
Think was very nice, and I just want them to start.
Some of them were actually really cool, but some just
seemed totally out to lunch, not listening at all, so
that was kind of depressing. I had Ken King and
a couple other people from the Native plant the movement
down here with me, and and so that kind that
was good because they had like eight people at this meeting,
which was not like eight people from the city at
this meeting to meet with me, which was hilarious. It
was like Jesus, really, it's like you got to bring
this much muscle. So I left and I went and spoke.
I got invited to speak at a junior high and
the kids were fucking dope, but was the great. It's
always nice talking to kids, you know, especially like you know,
they were all really nice this one. I was surprised
one kid actually knew the age of the universe. I
was like, how old is planet Earth? Can you tell me?
And he said thirteen billion years? But I was like, Okay, well,
I know what you're talking about. You're talking about the
age of the universe at least or the galaxy. Excuse me,
was it galaxy universe? I don't know anyway, but you've
obviously been reading up, which was cool. And so I
just ranted to them for twenty or thirty minutes, no
cursing whatsoever about plants and native plants and you know,
why don't we have more? And do you guys know
what the native plants there are? Can anybody name a
single native plant that grows here? And none of them could.
It was really sad. But then I showed them how
to use my naturalist and the teacher was really cool
for inviting me. Some Cajonis man seriously to invite me
to a junior high right. I think a lot of
people down here look at me and they're scared of me,
or they think I'm some I don't know, because you know,
the look for down here is like tucked in shirt
and very you know what I mean, eric can be
and I think I just I defy the stereotypes. So
I freaked people out, and I got fucking neck tattoos
and hand tattoos whatever, and I don't know, I don't know.
Tattoos shouldn't be a point of contention. It's fucking twenty
twenty five, twenty six now, but you know, but still,
I guess whatever. You get what I'm saying. It's a
very high and tight clenched area at times. So I
went through this speak to this high school, went really cool,
went great. The kids seemed genuinely interested. They you know,
they were actually watching me as I spoke. And then
as I was leaving and the teacher was walking out,
you know this. The whole high school is like the
Soviet block style, very bleak architectural style. And we walked
and there's no trees anywhere except a couple dying phracsinists,
which again need arroyos to grow. They need arroyos or
constant irrigation. They're not ideal trees for this. This campus
should have mis guts or polo verdes all over it,
but it doesn't or Ebony's even better, Ebony's can be
really drought tellers. So the teacher then points to an
oak tree and she says, look, that's that's like the
one of the few trees we had here, and they
just hacked it, like eighty percent of it back. And
I asked the principle why he did it, and he
said because it was messy, which is something you always
hear down here. It's messy. It's so messy. The plants
are messy. Okay, Well, have you heard of a broom?
You just go out out there and you sweep every
once in a while. It's not that bad. I mean,
what is the issue here with this? Are you are
you handy capable or something? Are you not able to?
Is it what's impeding you from just sweep? Because it
takes about three minutes to do this. What's the problem? Right,
So instead of doing with the mess and instead of
realizing the benefits that trees provide, like absorption of water
and infiltration of water into the ground with thus reducing
flooding or keeping the sun from warming the ground and
the concrete that surrounds it and thus creating a heat
island because it takes upwards of fourteen hours for asphalt
it's at one hundred and forty five degrees fahrenheit to
finally cool off within ten degrees fahrenheit of the ambient temperature.
And as you know, summer nights are nowhere near that long.
So then that effect built up over many weeks, is
that you've created a heat island in a giant space
here that's fifteen degrees hotter than it would otherwise be,
thus making it more miserable for people. Right, instead of
realizing that, oh, sweeping is just a small price to
pay for the many benefits vite about his tree, Well,
let's just cut it back, right, and we're not going
to cut it down because people might actually complain about that,
so we're just gonna cut it back. Well, that's this
kind kind of shit that you got to be loud about, right,
nice but loud. Let's not do this. This doesn't make
sense and point out why and talk about how it's
affecting everyone. It bums everybody out, you know, And if
people aren't bummed out, then they need to be and
you need to bum them out. You need to bum
them out about it. Oh, just don't don't don't make
any wave, just bake, keep your head down, smile, don't
bake any waves. Oh God, anyway, how'd they work out
for the housewives in nineteen fifties? They didn't leave to
do a bunch of mental health issues, right, keep your
mouth shut and just avoid conflict at any cost, avoid
anything that might be unpleasant. God, that's not a healthy
way to do things. So anyway, But yeah, so that
was kind of a I mean, that was testament to it.
And you see that everywhere, at least down here, you know,
the health strip, the strip between the sidewalk and the
street completely barren, just the giant heat island, just so
few trees everywhere. It's crazy. So you can change advocate
for it. I also, I went to go visit a
friend of mine at his house and he works for
the Highway Department here and they're building a new road
around Rio Grande City, which has resulted in a lot
of destruction of plants. And he luckily was able to
save like he had like thirty more tonias that he
had dug up. And when you dig him up, you
got to cut back eighty percent of the top because
you're disturbing the roots. You're destroying the roots. Right, the
roots are doing most of the absorption through the distal
five percent of the end of the root, because that's
where the root hairs are. Right, most of the root
is just transporting water. It's only the tips that have
the root hairs on them. For most plants with agaves,
that might be a little bit different. And you look
at a gave roots under a microscope, they've got hairs
and little projections around the whole thing. But you know,
a guylways have to they are desert plants, so they
have to absorb water as quickly as possible make use
of that sparse rain that they're getting. But but he
had dug up these mortonias, and Mortonia is in the
family Cellistracy, which, uh, what what order is cellistracy? And
I should know this, but I don't. Oh, it's in
the order cell Australis. Okay, that's not family cellistracy order
cell Australis. Uh. Celeustrace is one of two families in
Cel Australis. Celeus Tracey is one of two families in
cel Australia's, the other being Lepido boutriacei. Where the shit
is that? Where is Lepido boutriace It's a family of
two genera Lepido boutrous and a Reptilio carpon, which are
both tropical genera. Oh beautiful, bark on it. Oh it's
got the like red Flowum. It looks like a red cambium.
I think celistraci has orange red cambium as well. I'm
not sure anyway, Yeah, Mortonia, So Mortonia, you get Mortonia
utai insis in the Mojave Desert, Mortonias and perviians in
West Texas, Mortonia scabrella in New Mexico and Northwest Texas.
It's a really wonderful genus. The leaves look really cool
on it. Their imbercate kind of like snake scales or
roofing shingles. They kind of point upwards. They tend to
on most of the species. But Mortonia gregory is the
one we get done here, and it's more common in
Mexico and especially in the Sierra Madre where it grows
out of rock walls and it'll be growing with a gave.
Sorry it was a phone call anyway. So Mortonia Gregory,
I there will be growing with a gave albo palosa
growing out of rock walls. And here where you see
it growing in South Texas, it's normally growing in very
rocky areas, often on these these little cerro's, these little zartos,
these little hills composed of rocky conglomerate, you know, rocks
that were transported by the ancestral Rio grand however many
millions of years ago, and then cemented, deposited and then
cemented with caliche into what formation is it is? It's
not the catahula, it's the Goliad formation, the Goliad gravels,
and so you'll see moretonia grow in there. It's a
really rare planet. It needs to be planted more in cultivation.
It's fucking dope. It's incredible. So he was able to
save many of them, but there's you know, we're we're
witnessing a lot of destruction down here. So it makes,
you know, it all the more imperative in a state
that's ninety six percent privately owned, it makes it all
the more imperative to grow things, to grow them as
much as possible and get them out there and expose
people to them. Whether it's even if it's in the
landscaping of like a bleak shopping center or especially better yet,
your front yard, and it's you know, I know this
is this is specific to South Texas, but it's the
same for wherever you are, right especially if you're on
the East Coast, because so much habitat has been cleared
in the East Coast compared to the west, because that's
where the settlers landed first, and where this mentown that
just annihilates and gobbles up land, uh with no with
very little regard for the living world on it. That's
where the that's where it landed first. Right until we
update the system, the culture, which hopefully we can do,
you know. Uh, that's that's the status we're living on
right now. Right till you get you get respect and
reverence for these things. That's where we're at right now.
Everything's threatened. Anyway. On a lighter note, I was walking
to the pizzeria and there my house, me and Louis
were my dog, my other dog, the one that's not
faked his own death. Okay, Jack, you know, Jack faked
his death. He pretended like he was gonna die. He
wasn't eating, drinking, or walking for two days. I had
to carry him outside the piss. Suddenly he started eating
hot dogs against Sunday night. What the fuck? You know,
right when I was sitting there crying with them on Sunday,
telling him how much I loved them, how grateful I was,
and then you know, and then that he just comes
with what he's making me look like an asshole anyway.
Uh so we already went through that. So I'm walking
to the pizzeria to just get a slice, just really quick,
and this this car. You know, the drivers and the
drivers in Texas are terrible, but in South Texas especially,
like they're just aggressive. In all of Texas, they're aggressive.
They ride your ass. They drive these giant, jacked up trucks,
which sometimes they need, which I totally get. But most
of the time these things are just parking a lot princesses.
They have not a single scratch on them, right, they're
like excellent paint job. Not you know, they really it's
it's just you know, like a dick measuring contest, which
is kind of cute. It's kind of funny. It's like, oh,
you didn't get enough love from your father, so you
got it, okay, anyway, not let him offending people out there.
But whatever the reason. So the cars are coming at me,
I'm crossing the street, and I do that thing that
you see in Chicago, especially in black neighborhoods, and I
fucking love it. Where there's like West or South Side,
you're crossing the streets, some dude jaywalks and then when
he sees it you're not slowing down, he intentionally slows down.
And I fucking do this one hundred percent. It's where
do you think I learned it? And he's and he
then he gets like a fucking swagger in his step,
like he says, Shane slowing down as he crosses the street,
looking right at you, and his eyes just say go ahead,
hit me, motherfucker. You know, like he wants you to
hit him. So that's what I do here because people
don't slow down. And you know, normally you look and
it's like some three hundred pound woman no offense, uh,
you know, driving you know, texting and like eating something
while she's driving, and then she gets a upset that
you're in the middle of the road even if you've
you know, even if there's a red light like one
hundred yards down like she's going to be stopping a
red light anyway. You know. He's a Texas thing and so,
and I've just gotten accustom to it. And so I'm
crossing the street and it's this car honks at me.
And I didn't do anything, luckily, because then as a
car passes by, you know, I'm doing that thing that
the dudes on the western south side of Chicago do
when you look at the people, like I look at
them to make sure they see me, and also to
see that I don't care if they hit me, because
I'm gonna fuck up their car. If they hit me,
you hit me, I'm taking I'm definitely taking out a headlight.
And I'm gonna you're gonna have to get a new windshield.
I'll make absolutely sure, right, I'll make sure I get
it and give it an elbow. I don't care about
a fracture. I'm gonna fuck up your car, you know.
So this dude Hanks, and I look, but he doesn't
look angry. I can like see through the tinted glass.
And then as he passes me, he rolls down his
window and he goes, I can't wait for your book, man,
you know, And I'm like oh that's not go right on, man.
And he looks he's like he's like a he's like
a fat dude in a mini van, looks like your
average Chicago Bears fan. And the amount of pride, and
he's wearing a hat. You know, it just looks like
some some working class slub like me. And the amount
of pride I felt at that being my fan base
was overwhelming. You know. I wanted to go give that
guy a hug. I was like, fuck, yes, thank you,
you know, and it's at THEIRS fan base, the crime
Pace fan base, you know, and it's and I'm glad
that I have that those dudes. You know, I don't
know if he works as an electrician or something or
if what. I don't know what his deal is, but
to that, sir, I will buy you. I owe you
a slice. I should have gotten a slice of pizza
for him. If if he was pulling into like the
payday loan place that's next to the pizza spot, I
would have gotten him a fucking slice. So would have
been like, hey, brother, you know so uh. You know,
there's college kids and stuff to follow this too, and
teachers and stuff, but you know, there's certainly It's funny.
I can trust the the demographics of people that I've seen,
you know, right me or just on the street, say
I love what you do, and then I can and
that they always make me feel good, like just knowing
who they are, you know, because it's it's I approve
if I can be so judgmental, whereas the people that
it's always the people that say they have a problem
with me or they don't like it's always a certain
I can fit. I know exactly what kind of person
it's gonna be, all right, And I'm only being partially hyperbolic,
partially exaggerative when I say that it's gonna be you know,
the stiffs. Someone's kind of apprude, kind of a you know,
it makes that the face, you know the face people
that are really happy, you know that face they make,
but m like they're squinting, like they just ate a
turd or like they were eating a doughnut. And then
there was like a they found bird shit or like
a pube on it, like something like that, you know
what I mean, MM, like that kind of you know
what I mean, You're generally Anglo, right, not always, but
generally generally generally from a wealthier background. Right, I'm pigeonholing here.
Take it with a great as salt. But I know
who it's gonna be. Mmh. You know what I mean?
The people who are gonna call me problematic or whatever.
He's yeah, he's he said he was called someone fatter.
He said the R word, you know, something like that.
That's it's always gonna be that that. It's always gonna
be that person. I know who it's gonna be. So
when I've got the demographic of people that don't like
crime pays and the people that i'mographic people that are
fucking stoked on it, and I'm I will say I'm
content with who those like. It's it's rarely someone that
I actually on the surface, I'm looking at superficial features
and traits. It's it's rarely someone that I respect, that
that hates what I do. What I do. It's always like,
oh yeah, of course, I say, yeah, oh that person
hates me. Yeah, of course, you know. I saw that.
It's you know, or the page, because I try it
to take it personally. It's not about me. It's about
the page. It's about me sometimes, Right with those rich
college kids with the check group, they got a fucking
you know, they don't look very happy. It's always that's
like a perfect demograt. That's that's who, That's exactly who
I You know, those are the people that it wasn't
meant to be. I could guarantee you pigeonhole in here,
pigeonhole on right. I hope they get therapy. Those the
college kids with the check group. Anyway, they're rich kids
with the check group. Not not all of them are
in college, but anyway, so I felt good. The thing
that's an important point to note, and this is something
I want to start doing more, is uh because people
are always asking me what the plant like, people that
have no idea about this, like I want to kill
I want to kill my lawn. I don't know what
to put in. And I always say, pick five plants
right to five pioneer species. The pioneer species is going
to be the easiest things to grow, right. The things
that they get established after disturbance, they can be weedy,
especially if they get to other contents. They can be weedy,
like golden rod, very important pioneer species in the Midwest
and more temperate latitudes Midwest East Coast. But when they
get when that genus gets Solidago and that genus gets
to Europe, it can be very very problematic. So you know,
to find the pioneer species and and just listed like
fives like here in the in South Texas, I give
I have like a list of like I've got I
love using everything, but five sturdy shrubs that I recommend
the people. And if I was in you know, the
tall grass prairie area regions, I would it would be
five you know, fast growing, relatively long lived or bacious
pregnice not long lived. I guess I shouldn't say that
Sylphium can Sylphium terriment, that nacium can last a century
or so, but but I would, you know, I would.
I've got my five plants. I recommend the people. If
you don't know what you're doing, just get plugs of
these five plants. And you know, in Illinois, and then
the same thing for South Texas. Like for South Texas,
it's uh Lucophylum protestants Sydneya tenuifolia aka skeleton leaf one
hundred percent uh Cythererexylum. Though cythereexlum is like an Eastern
Rio Grand Valley species. It tends to like a little
bit more humidity. It doesn't do so well in drier areas.
There's a cythereexylum that does better in UH. In drier
areas of like Star County, it's got reduced leaves and
flowers sizes. Trixis Inula or californica, because if you get
up towards Laredo you get more Trixis californica, and we
got TRIX's Californica at thornscrub. Actually it's like a weird
intergrade between Ula, the broader leaved species adapted to more humidity,
and then Trixis uh Trixis californica. Trixis, of course ascerace.
It's a mutissioid, the Mutisicioe subfamily fucking dope genus Trixis
Californica grows in the Mojave desert too. It's got a
broad range. And then you get into you know tom
Alipis noble own, you get the Trixis Inula East Texas,
East Southeast Texas Trixis inenula as well. So Trixis Inula
cid the Rexalum Lucophylum protestants aka Siniso skeleton leaf aka
Sydney at Tenuafolia isisen Hardia Texana. That's a fucking solid one.
It smells incredible, can get ten feet tall. But you know,
you tell people get these perennials established because especially in
terms of shielding heat from hitting the ground, that's going
to be really important. And then also the pollinator benefit.
You want to get all the cool bugs in their
beneficial insects. That's what you know, that's what you've got
a plant. Sidniso does it. I don't see too many
things pollinating Siniso lucophiling for testins family scrow fularyac. But
but Sidney attendu Afolia definitely. You know, I'm sure there's
a lot of stuff that pollinates luco filing for testants.
I just maybe I just don't know about it. That's
just more of like a really sturdy, fast growing cover.
It's important for shade. They looked ope, they got silvery leaves, right,
So find that in your region. And if you find
that in your region, do me a favor and email
me five six, seven plants whatever that are really easy
to get established and very important to grow after somebody
kills their lawn for the purposes strictly of you know
long killing you having a native plant card, and then
I will put those up on the website for every
different region of the United States. Okay, keep the email
short if you can't, because I'm probably not going to
read them. No offense. I just I have too much
shit to do. And I'm fucking sick again too. I
got sick, I got I got It's weird. I just
have like it's like a head cold. I've been taking
those those Chinese tablets to it's like a compressed pill
or compressed plants, like herbal Chinese Erbo medicine. Lily recommended
it to me, and then I I wasn't going to uh.
I was kind of making fun of him, like, oh,
it's a placebo. But then I was like, fuck it whatever,
I'll take them. And they actually they actually seem to work,
so they've held it off. But I still feel pretty
fucked up. And I had a sore throat last night,
and I just feel that stuffy head feeling where you
feel like you're on bad acid or something, you know,
where you just like your head or like cough syrup.
I get the same thing when I take coughsp it
feels terrible. So figure out what those five or six
species are, right, and then tell other people too. Right,
So once, some for the Northeast, like some of the
Sympio trichoms, some for the Southeast, some for the central
East coast eastern seaboards, some for Appalachia, some for Ozark Plateau,
some for the some for the dryer grasslands, some for
Colorado and the rocky mountain areas or foothills of the Rockies.
Some for the Pacific Northwest, you know, coastal California. Backris
pillolarius would be there. Of course, coyote bush backers neglected,
don't forget that. For Central Texas poverty weed, whatever the
stupid common name is for you know, south southwestern the
southwest areas from you know, the high deserts in New
Mexico to the lower deserts of Tucson, Arizona, to the
Mojave Desert areas of southeastern California, to the La Chaparral
La and San Diego Chaparral. Russ probably right rous, integrafolio maloes, malorhina.
Those are important shrubs. But the shrubs are really important.
Shrubs are really really important. It's it's like a blanket
that protects the ground from getting baked to ship by
the sun and provides ample pollinator benefit and his host
plant for numerous things. That's the things. You know, what
you if it's a native insect, you want your plant
to get eaten. You want the leaves to get eaten.
And we got Texas leaf cutters here and I was
stoked to see they were taking leaves off a tepe wai.
They totally denuded it. But it'll bounce back. It's like
a fifteen foot tall tree. It'll be fine. You know.
I enjoy watching the little fuckers right the feeding, you know,
cutting the leaves off, feeding, the feeding the leaves to
the fungus in the ground. In other news, I was
at Thorn Scrub a couple of days ago, and yeah, man,
the pigs are just We got like a pig couple
living on the south and we have to we have
to take him out some hot they're not going in
the trap. Willy helped me. My friend Willy helped me
bring a trap down there that we got and they're
not going in it. So it's just it's a pain
in the ass. It's I don't know how they know,
you know, because I don't know if they've seen a
trap before or what. But we're probably gonna have to
get hunters with thermal scopes, which people want to do,
but it's just it's hit or miss. You might be
waiting all night, you might be waiting for three days,
who knows if they're gonna come by or not. But
that's what you gotta do. You gotta you gotta kill
the pigs. Thermal scopes and and you know, good strong rifles, right,
you could kill AR fifteen would work if you could
put a nice scope on it. Right, that's like a
AR fifteen from what I understand from my limited firearm knowledge. Uh,
they're like the be all rifle. They're just like the
general multi tool rifle. Right you can you can use
them for hunting. They just you know, uh, you can
also use some brother terrible ship too. But uh, but uh,
you know, when I was getting or because for killing pigs,
AR fifteen's or that'll work. That's good. I mean, I'm
sure like pro hunters could recommend a better rifle, like
a more accurate long range but but the but they
work for me, They work for me. And again, this
pig thing was like completely new to me until a
few years ago until I realized the damage they do.
Mammalarias spherica especially is basically wiped out from the land.
It's a it's a really cool clumping cactus with yellow spines,
and it forms heads just like peyote, but it doesn't
and it forms a big tap root just like paeoti,
but it doesn't have that all the alkaloids in it.
So it's you know, because the pigs will destroy payoti,
but they'll they'll uproot it and kind of take a
bite and realize it tastes bad and then leave it.
But the Mammalaria spherica they've just totally destroyed. And it's
such a it's such a wonderful species, man, especially when
it's lit up, you know, when it's blooming like big
yellow flowers the size of golf balls, and it'll be
covering the whole thing. You can't even see the tubercles
of the plant. Some of them get some of the
clumps I've seen get upwards of like a summer foot across.
But nobody grows it. That's an nothing. Nobody grows. You know.
You could have such dope native cactus gardens down here,
but nobody even like the cactus and succulent people down here.
They don't grow. They don't really grow. Many of the natives.
Maybe you'll see a horse crippler homolo cephalith text on it,
but you don't see any of the Rio grand Rio
Grand valley barrows like Hamado cactus hamatacanthus, which has both
an East uh you know, or South Texas and West
Texas ecotype. The West Texas ecotype looks totally wild, totally different,
much longer were curved spines. But uh, you know, you
like the there's cactus nurseries around they all sell like
South American stuff. It's so bizarre. There's just everywhere you
go in the world there's such a hesitancy to embrace
the natives, which is for me that's so interesting. Like
I don't watch something that evolved in Uruguay. Is if
I lived in Uruguay, I would want that. That's cool,
there's a context there. What the fuck am I going
to do with it here? Right? Not only is it
probably not the best adapted for here because it didn't
evolve here, but I want the shit that's native. I
want context, you know, that's that's really about what all
of what it is. And I talk about that in
concrete botany. I want the context for this place that's
specific to this place. I want the plants that were
made by this place, by this region. And there's so
many cool ones here. You know. The Coraphantha macro maris
roun yonii. That's another one nobody grows. Absolutely. You could
find mounds of that four feet across and when they
when they bloom, they're just fucking lit up. It's so
so crazy, man. So But I've got a little native
cactus garden in my front yard. It's a lot of
hamato Cactus astrophytum, a kindo serious postselgarai. The pencil cactus
that I've grown from seed, you know, the one that
like blends in camouflages itself. With the white stems of
shrubs that it grows up through. You can get five
feet tall. We got an individual at thorn scrub that's
a four four, it's like five feet a five foot tall,
a kindo serious postselgraai. That whole clade they used to
call will will Coxia, that whole evolutionary group they used
to call will Coxia. They're like the diameter of a straw,
But then they can get five feet tall, and they
just kind of grow up scantily, like leaning on shrubs
and ship and then when they bloom, it's you won't
know it's there. That's the coolest thing is you won't
you won't see these things. You'll you'll it'll be next
to a path you walk by daily, and you won't
know it's there until it blooms, and then suddenly you're like,
holy shit that you realize how good it camouflages itself
in It's the same thing with like aerocarpis and astrophyt
them as well. So you gotta you gotta grow these things,
especially if you live down here or just you know,
if you live in Texas in general. Right, and there's
a whole cast of cool Mojave native cacti I used
to be obsessed with when I was doing work out there,
you know, the Mojave Desert. And of course Arizona has
got its own shit ton of cool native cacti, But
you want the stuff that's got the got some context anyway,
you could probably Well, I sound like I'm on kludes
right now because of this flu or this virus, whatever
the fuck it is. So I'm gonna relax. I just
made Jack some hot dogs, and uh, motherfucker won't take
his guy. I saw he had a he had a
flea on him the other day, which he's you know,
I don't know where he picked it up, because I'm
normally good about that, but I didn't. He's not taking
his trifexus now, so I got to figure out a
way to you know, sneak it to his ass. I'm
gonna be such a mess when he goes, you know,
just just crying, right, just crying a bunch, just bawling.
I'm going to Ecuador in two days for this this
tour we're having down there, getting paid to beat a
plant guy and then and then hopefully teach some plant
id and uh then I'll be back. I'm going. I'm
gonna be in Saint Louis around February twenty eighth. I
forget who I'm speaking with? What is it? What am
I speaking for? What is it? I forget what the
thing was? I wish I could tell you, but let
me look up. Okay, here it is Partners for Native Landscaping, Saturday,
February twenty eighth, eight am to noon. It's a workshop
and uh oh, they're having a tour and a plant sale.
A plant sale on the twenty eighth of February and
Saint Louis. It sounds very chilly still the uh what
the hell is it? Oh? For more information and registration
www dot b T dot L Y Bitley b T
period L Y Forward Slash twenty twenty six p NL
Workshop Partners for Native Landscaping p and L Workshop. I
guess I'm speaking there, and then I'm gonna be at
the Carnavorus Plant Society thing in North Carolina in May,
and then I'm gonna be at the Aeroid Society thing
in September. So come out to one of those if
you want to shoot the shit and listen to me
rant so oh yeah. And then if you could pre
order my book, if you're interested in that, I think
you'll I think you'll enjoy it. Right, it's going to
be audiobook two. Just recorded the audiobook, uh so two
weeks ago. It'll be uh Genie dot U s g
E N I g N I dot us Forward slash
Concrete Botany And uh, you can order they're try I
guess they're trying to pump up ordered on Scamazon if
you want. I don't give a shit it doesn't matter.
There are these people that lecture you if you get
if you like, buy one thing on Scamazon. You're not
buying a car on it. You're not giving them that
much money. It's a fucking book, right. They're like the
same people that lecture you if you if you like
ask deep seek AI a question to like summarize a
paper for you because you don't have time to read it. Right,
it's always the same fucking I gotta stuff, you know,
it's but it's like a trend. It's like a performative thing. Right.
There's reasons to use AI and reasons not to use AI,
and you're not going to save the world by not
reading it. Don't be a lazy schmuck and use it
for stupid stuff when you could just use a search option.
But people turn these things into religions and they just
get they and then they start moralizing and you know,
morally talking down to people, and it's just so fucking annoying, Like,
I how how how do people on the on on
that particular side of the political I mean they do
every left and right to it, but especially the left
does this. And this is something that moving forward, if
you ever want to get get rid of fashion. Left
is going to have to get over this. And you know,
instead of finding like the ways to be as annoying
as possible about things right, because there's there's there's some
people that are just they're just going to shut down
the minute you pull that shit right. I've had to
learn code switching for certain things, right, and I can't.
Why can't the others? It's fucking crazy. Yeah, some guy
lectured because I during when I was looking up how
long it takes a uh uh a slab of asphalt
at six inches deep to cool from one hundred and
forty five degrees fahrenheit, I asked deep sea because I
didn't want to fucking I don't know physics to that
extent that I don't want to didn't want to do
the maths like I just wondered. So I had deep
Seak look it up for me, and this guy, you know,
knew that I did it, some guy online, you know.
And it's, of course, it's like a white dude with
a mask on a fucking mask selfie Jesus Christ. And
there's reasons to wear a mask. There's race, I get it,
but like for a fucking selfie, at what point is
it just obviously performative, you know, to your specific peer
group and so, and then he said some comment like
I'm really disappointed to see that you use you use
a shit the fuck up? Spar Spur met this. Okay, Spur,
talk to your shrink. Why do you feel the need
to do that? Ask your shrink? Why do I feel
the need to do this? Why do I feel the
need to talk down to people? You know, It's like
you can't there's no I don't know what you hope
to get by talking to me like that. But now
I'm just gonna tell you to go fuck yourself and
really not listening. Now I'm gonna now I want to
use AI. I'm gonna ask it to make me a
fucking picture of a cartoon dog, you know, wearing a
sailor hat and you know, waving around a three foot
long dildo on a cane, just just for you. God
damn it. It's like the same thing that's what people
always shitting on vegans, right, Okay, It's not enough to
just be like, yeah, I'm not gonna die of a
cholesterol of a heart disease like so many people will.
And I'm just gonna keep that to myself and be
they gotta like they gotta like ruin it. They have
to be an asshole and just like the most obnoxious,
lecturing cunt about it. I don't I don't understand. Why
where does it come from? Do you just not interact
with normal working class people to realize that, like, that's
just not a nice way to be like that pisses
people off. It's just shitty. You just seem like a snap. Anyway,
I'm sorry, I'm right again, I'm right. Think I gotta
take this up with my shrink. Have a g rest
of your day. Hope you enjoyed that, and uh yeah,
check out the book if you feel like it, and
please kill your lawn and convince your neighbors to kill
her law and talk to you about Wala and tell her,
you know, nature's pretty cool, actually not everything, you know.
We gotta how about the native plants? Right, the stuff,
the the you know, cultivar marigolds and a pot look nice,
But what about some of the natives? What do they do?
What's get her? Get her to embrace some more holistic
view of the living world. Anyway, that's I got have
a rest to day. Go fuck yourself by and convince
people to stop doing it. Concrete backyard thing. It's not good.
It's not good for you. Okay, that's all. I gotta go.
Fucus it by