KYL LIVE @ the Hideout

<v Speaker 1>Different katie DIDs, and then you get these wafts out
<v Speaker 1>of the plants. It's like, you know, some invasive shit
<v Speaker 1>like Artemitia ludoviciana, and then there'd be cottonwoods and box elders.
<v Speaker 1>But I didn't know any of that at the time.
<v Speaker 1>I just know that when I rode by the vacant lot,
<v Speaker 1>it was a lot more pleasant to be around, and
<v Speaker 1>it was nice. And so that heat island effect, imagine
<v Speaker 1>that amplified by ten in places like South Texas or Phoenix,
<v Speaker 1>or southern California wherever. Right, so, the the heat islands
<v Speaker 1>goes into a apple transport of cooling. Lawns don't offer
<v Speaker 1>a apple transport of cooling. I dragged you out here
<v Speaker 1>to come to a bar to show you fucking science diagrams. Right,
<v Speaker 1>but this is good. This is good. It's not gonna
<v Speaker 1>fucking hurt you. You know, learn about the world you
<v Speaker 1>live in. Everybody know what stomata art does. Anybody not
<v Speaker 1>know what stoemates are, You could be forgiven obviously. Still,
<v Speaker 1>mota are the holes. They're generally in the undersides of leaves,
<v Speaker 1>and that's how plants. Part of how plants support the
<v Speaker 1>rest of the biosphere. They take in CO two and
<v Speaker 1>as they take in CO two they let out water,
<v Speaker 1>vapor and oxygen. Right, everybody knows we need oxygen, that's important,
<v Speaker 1>But they're also letting out water vapor. That water vapor,
<v Speaker 1>and this is just passive transport. Like, the plants aren't
<v Speaker 1>actively pumping water up from the roots. It's just capitlar reaction.
<v Speaker 1>The water gets pulled up as water gets evaporated out
<v Speaker 1>of the leaves right the flow them making all the
<v Speaker 1>sugars and shit that's made in carbohydrate. That's active transport.
<v Speaker 1>That's actually actually pumped by the plant. But the water
<v Speaker 1>is just passively pulled up. And that's because as it
<v Speaker 1>goes out of the stomata, it goes through a liquid
<v Speaker 1>to a gas state. That pulls more water up from
<v Speaker 1>the roots. But when it goes from a liquid to
<v Speaker 1>a gas state, anytime matter goes through a state chains
<v Speaker 1>it takes energy. And where does that energy come from?
<v Speaker 1>Where's the heat? And it comes from the surrounding air,
<v Speaker 1>thus cooling it. That's just what a swamp cooler does. Right.
<v Speaker 1>That's plants are nature's swamp cooler. Little picture of a
<v Speaker 1>stomanta looking like a little puking mouth, the stomate, and
<v Speaker 1>then yeah, just swamp cooler. Nice diagrams. I just pulled
<v Speaker 1>these off the internet, right, So plants cool the landscape,
<v Speaker 1>but they also shaded. Here's someone took these massive shade
<v Speaker 1>cloths to shield their patio because this, you know, stone
<v Speaker 1>and rock and asphalt has a high heat capacity, and
<v Speaker 1>it just gets charged up with the sun. It's like
<v Speaker 1>a battery gets charged up with the sun, and then
<v Speaker 1>once the sun goes down, it continues radiating heat until
<v Speaker 1>two or three in the morning in some cases. This
<v Speaker 1>is a beautiful parking lot off of between Phoenix and Tucson.
<v Speaker 1>I've actually been there. This wasn't my photo, but uh
<v Speaker 1>it looks great though. I really do think it looks great.
<v Speaker 1>It could use some graffiti all over it. It's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's a closed shopping center. It's a failed failed strip mall.
<v Speaker 1>You know this, I mean, don't get too happy. There's
<v Speaker 1>like ten thousand more of these in central and southern Arizona.
<v Speaker 1>They even use some native plants. They're kind of forced
<v Speaker 1>to down there. They got Palo Verde, they got in Celia.
<v Speaker 1>But this whole thing, imagine a spot where it gets
<v Speaker 1>one hundred and fifteen degrees. The Sun's intense as fuck.
<v Speaker 1>This is only like a thousand feet above sea level.
<v Speaker 1>It gets so fucking hot. That's probably the most miserable
<v Speaker 1>place you could think to be on a summer day
<v Speaker 1>in July. Right, you park your car in there, and
<v Speaker 1>you fucking go and you buy some dumb plastic shit
<v Speaker 1>that arrived in a shipping container from China and later
<v Speaker 1>ends up in the ocean. I mean, you know how
<v Speaker 1>it goes. But anyway, so this whole thing just becomes
<v Speaker 1>a battery once the sun goes down. And this is
<v Speaker 1>what I was talking about. Like we were getting the
<v Speaker 1>bottle of Carla Rassi and Sirmac Road in Western I'd
<v Speaker 1>ride by the the you know, riding up there, I'd
<v Speaker 1>go through the parking lot and just start sweating. More's
<v Speaker 1>just hot as fuck. The ground as a space heater.
<v Speaker 1>That's what happens to places like this. This is why
<v Speaker 1>Phoenix becomes a heat island. Now imagine this but a
<v Speaker 1>surface area and you can see it from the satellite.
<v Speaker 1>A surface area of i don't know, forty miles by
<v Speaker 1>forty miles, sixteen hundred square miles. I mean, imagine what
<v Speaker 1>that does it just turns the whole fucking area into
<v Speaker 1>a giant heat mad It's insanity, right, but it's good
<v Speaker 1>for the economy. Gotta do it. There's no other way.
<v Speaker 1>Lawns are much better, right, Why would this be any better?
<v Speaker 1>It's a little bit better, but it's not that much better.
<v Speaker 1>There's nothing protecting the sun from hitting the ground. There's
<v Speaker 1>only two inches of leaf blades. But look at the lines.
<v Speaker 1>Don't they look nice? I just like that. You really
<v Speaker 1>watch people go down this fucking neural you know, this,
<v Speaker 1>this neurotic wormhole with their with the lawn care. It's hilarious.
<v Speaker 1>I just pictured these suburban men like if you could
<v Speaker 1>just give him MVM a therapy, you're fucking dose them
<v Speaker 1>for fuck's sake, Like what would come out? Like they'd
<v Speaker 1>be like, I didn't have to do this shit anymore?
<v Speaker 1>Why am I doing this? Right? My friend Kyle Liiberger,
<v Speaker 1>he's got a Native habitat project. He's out of Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool guy, really nice fucking guy. One of the
<v Speaker 1>only people I don't bust his balls about only using
<v Speaker 1>common names. He took one of those COVID thermometers and
<v Speaker 1>he pointed it at the UH he pointed it at
<v Speaker 1>the you guys play nice over there. Okay, he points
<v Speaker 1>the COVID thermometer at the ass fault. It's like one
<v Speaker 1>hundred and forty degrees. You'd expect that, And then he
<v Speaker 1>points to it a lawn and it's like one twenty five. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it's not much better. This is why when I'm trying to, like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, work on people that have a lawn, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, well, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.
<v Speaker 1>And it still gets hot as fuck, and you know
<v Speaker 1>it always like, well, my kids like playing in it? Really,
<v Speaker 1>your kids like playing on that in a fucking July day.
<v Speaker 1>Like when I was a kid, the last thing I
<v Speaker 1>wanted to do was go sit in a fucking you know,
<v Speaker 1>open sunfield with no exposure. It just yeah, you hit
<v Speaker 1>me right, like with right, like, and lawns have a
<v Speaker 1>place like in a park, you need a spot to
<v Speaker 1>fucking maybe play some sports, kick a soccer ball, or
<v Speaker 1>have movie night in the park, or the dog needs
<v Speaker 1>a spot to shit or something. But to the point
<v Speaker 1>where it became the norm, I mean I drive through
<v Speaker 1>some of these towns and it's it's not just about
<v Speaker 1>the lawn. There's like a whole ethos. That just fucking
<v Speaker 1>chokes me. You know, I'm like, God, this fucking probably
<v Speaker 1>calling the cops on me that, you know, I really
<v Speaker 1>go down a wormhole. So anyway, so this is we've
<v Speaker 1>established that's hot as fuck. Do get a nice little
<v Speaker 1>urban heat island effect. I put these in there just so, uh.
<v Speaker 1>If you want to download this presentation later, just email
<v Speaker 1>me and I'll send it to you in PDF form.
<v Speaker 1>This is where I live. This is Edinburgh, Texas, ninety
<v Speaker 1>eight percent Hispanic area, but it's called Edinburgh. Don't ask me,
<v Speaker 1>but this is. This is a Walmart parking lot. This
<v Speaker 1>is gonna be one of my scenes of hell for
<v Speaker 1>when I get there. Just fucking bleak and just again
<v Speaker 1>the law, I mean, the lawn like this is they
<v Speaker 1>use Saint Augustine grass, which is a coastal Texas grass
<v Speaker 1>gets a lot of rainfall. It's milder by the coast,
<v Speaker 1>just like it's milder by the lake and and so.
<v Speaker 1>But they got to irrigate the shit out of it.
<v Speaker 1>And it's really nice when you go by here at
<v Speaker 1>like you know, fucking eight in the morning and they're
<v Speaker 1>watering the pavement, you know, like at the sprinklers on
<v Speaker 1>and it's just all going. You're like, what the fuck
<v Speaker 1>are we? What are we? Why are we doing this? Like?
<v Speaker 1>What there's nice? Look you go, you got burger king,
<v Speaker 1>you got fucking just fucking brutal future development. I think this,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I think I got this from like the
<v Speaker 1>Chamber of Commerce website or something. They're all they're fucking
<v Speaker 1>proud of it. They're fucking proud of it, right, And
<v Speaker 1>then of course the landscape. I mean to bike in there,
<v Speaker 1>you have to fucking we're like full hockey regalia in
<v Speaker 1>a fucking helmet. But why would you bike anyway? That's
<v Speaker 1>for poor people? Why the fuck you want to do that?
<v Speaker 1>You know, you got on your Dodge charger. You're fucking
<v Speaker 1>jacked up pickup truck. And then you wonder why you
<v Speaker 1>come down with metabolic diseases at age forty five? Well, no,
<v Speaker 1>you get type two diabetes. How'd you get dead? So?
<v Speaker 1>What was here before? What was here before all this
<v Speaker 1>bleak bullshit? What was what was there before that? That?
<v Speaker 1>That's our conservation property. There's probably fucking god knows how
<v Speaker 1>much peyote in this photo. Right. We put our pig
<v Speaker 1>trap right there, We've killed like eight of them. The
<v Speaker 1>Texas tortoises are just everywhere. We get reticulated collar, lizard's bobcats, coyotes.
<v Speaker 1>The coyotes got some fleet problem. I want to I
<v Speaker 1>want to dose them with trifexus or something. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>He looks mangy on the trap can as we got.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so this is a you can imagine what
<v Speaker 1>this does. So we've got av appo transpiration. This is
<v Speaker 1>a giant swamp cooler. It fucking smells amazing. The roots
<v Speaker 1>go down deep, which means the soil is gonna take
<v Speaker 1>in water. This is stuff we don't think about. Imagine
<v Speaker 1>you're pouring water on a brick, right, like a big
<v Speaker 1>ass brick, like a brick the size of a coffee table.
<v Speaker 1>What's gonna happen. The water's gonna hit it lila, bit's
<v Speaker 1>gonna get it, get absorbed, but most is gonna roll off. Now,
<v Speaker 1>imagine you're pouring water on a fucking dry sponge the
<v Speaker 1>size of a coffee table. What's going to happen. It's
<v Speaker 1>gonna get absorbed, right, The sponge has a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>porosity in a bunch of porous holes. Same thing with
<v Speaker 1>the prairie or the thorn scrub or anything. It's got
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of porous holes in it. Why because the
<v Speaker 1>roots have fucking penetrated through it, and there's they're branching
<v Speaker 1>all throughout it. If you could look at a X
<v Speaker 1>ray vision of underground, you'd see this huge network of roots.
<v Speaker 1>God knows how deep some of them go. I mean
<v Speaker 1>like Sylphium goes fucking thirty feet deep, miskeap goes thirty
<v Speaker 1>feet deep as well, free out of fights. Those are
<v Speaker 1>plants that tap into really deep groundwater, all right, So
<v Speaker 1>those roots go deep, and the whole time they're providing
<v Speaker 1>scaffolding for cool insects and fungi and bacteria, a lot
<v Speaker 1>of species of which we don't even know exists yet,
<v Speaker 1>because the only way to study him is really with
<v Speaker 1>DNA DNA sequencing, and nobody sequenced them, especially in South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to put this up here so I don't
<v Speaker 1>trip and break my hands. So this okay. So also
<v Speaker 1>there's lichen on all the trees. Right, It's I mean
<v Speaker 1>you think it's a desert, it's more like a you know,
<v Speaker 1>seasonally dry subtropical scrub. This is like twenty six degrees latitude,
<v Speaker 1>five hundred feet above sea level. And so there's lichen
<v Speaker 1>on everything, and what's that tell? You take it like
<v Speaker 1>it and you need water vapor in the air. That
<v Speaker 1>mean the plants sweat vappo transpire every morning. It's foggy
<v Speaker 1>out there. My good front Javier, who runs the nonprofit
<v Speaker 1>with me, he'll go, you know, he's stayed out there
<v Speaker 1>a bunch. I haven't been able to do it because
<v Speaker 1>I'm normally out of town, but they'll stay out there
<v Speaker 1>a bunch. And he's like, man, the morning's are the best.
<v Speaker 1>It's like seventy five degrees and there's fog on everything
<v Speaker 1>and just smells amazing. And so this is what was
<v Speaker 1>This is what was here before the Chase Bank, the Walmart,
<v Speaker 1>Murphy Auto Supply, Dunkin Donuts, What the fuck is that
<v Speaker 1>firehouse subs? What the fuck is that hobby lobby? You
<v Speaker 1>know all this bleak shit, right, I just wanted to
<v Speaker 1>put that photo up. This is this is Jim Howk County. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was just so nice. I was like, this is
<v Speaker 1>fucking this is nice. As I can't He'll put this
<v Speaker 1>in there. And you got the calcareous rock right, remnants
<v Speaker 1>of one hundred and ten million year old oceans ripe
<v Speaker 1>to the western interior seaway. Right. And I know all
<v Speaker 1>these plant species by name. They're like good friends. You know,
<v Speaker 1>Sydney attend you a folio, Senegalia, Berlandier. And I know
<v Speaker 1>it because I spend a lot of time in these places.
<v Speaker 1>The more time how am I spending places like this,
<v Speaker 1>the less I want to die when I have to
<v Speaker 1>go to places like this. Right, It's like taking a
<v Speaker 1>preventative snake anti venan. You know, they got like rattlesnake
<v Speaker 1>vaccines for dogs, like the same thing. Like you know
<v Speaker 1>your dog might get bit by a rattlesnake. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you might have to go sit in front of ross
<v Speaker 1>dress for less when you're you know, cashing a check
<v Speaker 1>at the bank or some shit. You're gonna take that vaccine, right,
<v Speaker 1>So why do I like you destroy this. Sure, you
<v Speaker 1>gotta have some of this garbage, but you got to
<v Speaker 1>take all of it. I mean, it's just that's the
<v Speaker 1>economic model that's set up, especially in Texas where all
<v Speaker 1>the land is private, or in Florida. Florida's even worse.
<v Speaker 1>Florida is one of the bleakest places for it, just
<v Speaker 1>no appreciation. But why does this matter anyway? Because what
<v Speaker 1>does it do? Can you eat any of those plants?
<v Speaker 1>Can you? Maybe a couple is? Are they medicinal? Who cares?
<v Speaker 1>Get rid the fuck rid of them? But it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>do anything? How's it benefit me? He's just sitting there
<v Speaker 1>doing nothing. So this just stays what we've already established
<v Speaker 1>here the first two images or depressed shitholes, right, that
<v Speaker 1>commodify human beings and kill the spirit. Right, it's more
<v Speaker 1>than just it's more than just a land issue. Right.
<v Speaker 1>These are just bad places to be. And you can
<v Speaker 1>tell it too. I never you see how many miserable motherfuckers,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they don't know anything else. This is what
<v Speaker 1>you grow up in. I would be on opioids and
<v Speaker 1>fucking playing Call of duty all day too, probably, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, you know, if I had to live in
<v Speaker 1>a place like that, that's all I knew. I didn't
<v Speaker 1>know there was anything else, you know, And then you're
<v Speaker 1>you see stuff like this and you're like, hey, what
<v Speaker 1>about snakes? What about the snakes? There's ticks and it's messy,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, all the down here, it's even harder
<v Speaker 1>because the plants have spines. I was doing a native
<v Speaker 1>plant install. They got to you're the only thing on
<v Speaker 1>the menu. How are you going to keep shit for
<v Speaker 1>meeting you? There's deer down here. It's hot as fuck
<v Speaker 1>all the time, but there's deer down here, right, So
<v Speaker 1>you got to keep stuff for meeting you. Eventually evolve spines.
<v Speaker 1>That's just what happens, right. Anything it doesn't evolve spines
<v Speaker 1>gets taken out, right, So the plants have spines. So
<v Speaker 1>then it's more reason for people not to like it.
<v Speaker 1>It's got spines. I don't want to put in my yard.
<v Speaker 1>I was doing a native plant in stall for this
<v Speaker 1>lady two weeks ago, and she was like, I got
<v Speaker 1>a whole fucking I'm like worse than the Jehovah's Witness.
<v Speaker 1>I'm like a very aggressive Jehovah's Witness, right, like spreading
<v Speaker 1>the gospel of this shit like the living world. You know.
<v Speaker 1>It's a nice antidote to help keep the puke down.
<v Speaker 1>And she's like, he said, well, I don't want anything
<v Speaker 1>with spines, And I said, you live in You live
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas, man. It's like, I mean, the Peote
<v Speaker 1>gardens are only like twenty minutes away. That's like going
<v Speaker 1>to the beach and not wanting to see sand. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's you know. But also the plants stopped producing spines
<v Speaker 1>at eight feet because again it's it's a waste of
<v Speaker 1>energy and the production of spines is triggered by stress hormones.
<v Speaker 1>If the plant's growing in a garden and you're watering it,
<v Speaker 1>it's and nothing's chewing on it, that's gonna produce stop
<v Speaker 1>producing as many spines. Especially at eight feet, they stop
<v Speaker 1>producing spines because no herbivore can reach that. It's a
<v Speaker 1>really cool thing plants do. There's a cactus in northern
<v Speaker 1>Chile eighteen degrees latitude, eight fucking thousand feet up right,
<v Speaker 1>It's eight thousand feet in the air, and it's there's
<v Speaker 1>cactus there. It's also where the ancestors of tomatoes come from,
<v Speaker 1>and it's it's called Broninia candelars and it looks like
<v Speaker 1>a big they're these beautiful fucking monolists, you know, multi stemmed,
<v Speaker 1>you know, twenty feet tall, and they produce these spines
<v Speaker 1>that you know. This is another presentation I give on
<v Speaker 1>like xara plants, the spines are like that long. In
<v Speaker 1>some cases, like there are fucking foot long foot long spines. Right,
<v Speaker 1>you could tell this thing got fucked with it. It's
<v Speaker 1>evolutionary past. It's just saying stay to fuck away from me. Right.
<v Speaker 1>But then at eight feet it stops producing spines and
<v Speaker 1>it just has these little fuzzy dots in lieu of
<v Speaker 1>where the spines went, and you can put your hand
<v Speaker 1>along them and they don't stick in you. And it's fine.
<v Speaker 1>It's well, I produce spines if nothing's gonna eat that
<v Speaker 1>high anyway. I guanaco can't reach tar on eight feet,
<v Speaker 1>so anyway, So the others a living skin consisting of
<v Speaker 1>a dense network of relationships. That's the thing, right there,
<v Speaker 1>dense network of relationships between living things which were not
<v Speaker 1>even close to fully understanding. It took millions of years
<v Speaker 1>to evolve. That's net work of relationships. What is that like?
<v Speaker 1>It's like it's I like to always make the analogy.
<v Speaker 1>It's a living machine. Some people don't like that. Well,
<v Speaker 1>it's a machine. It sounds synthetic and it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it works fine, It's fucking fine. It's a living machine.
<v Speaker 1>Every species is a cog in the machine, and they
<v Speaker 1>all function to do the purpose of the machine. Which
<v Speaker 1>is support the life in that region. That's what a
<v Speaker 1>fucking ecosystem is, and it took millions of years to
<v Speaker 1>evolve it. This is something I always argue with the
<v Speaker 1>invasive plant deniers about You're like, well, how far back
<v Speaker 1>do you have to go? It's not about that, jack
<v Speaker 1>as it's about these All things relate to each other.
<v Speaker 1>When you zoom out and you see, okay, this there's
<v Speaker 1>fung guy that only eat a certain kind of bark, right,
<v Speaker 1>like the cypresses for example. I mean there's numerous species
<v Speaker 1>that do this. There's monterey cypress. There's a species of
<v Speaker 1>fung guy that only occurs on monterey cypress stuff. The
<v Speaker 1>only thing that it's enzymes can eat that it secretes
<v Speaker 1>ends the hyphee can secrete enzymes to eat are the
<v Speaker 1>the foliage. The foliage scales. They look like juniper. When
<v Speaker 1>they fall to the ground, they turn brown, and the
<v Speaker 1>bark that's all I can eat. Right, That's I mean,
<v Speaker 1>how long do you think that took to evolve like that?
<v Speaker 1>The specificity in that relationship. That's one example of like
<v Speaker 1>five million right insects, mammals, birds, et cetera. There are
<v Speaker 1>very specialist relationships and So when you're just looking at something, well,
<v Speaker 1>can I can I eat it? Or if I put
<v Speaker 1>it in my ash and make a poultice out of it?
<v Speaker 1>Is it? Is it medicinal for you know, some imaginary
<v Speaker 1>ailment they might have, Like I always say that, like,
<v Speaker 1>not against herbal medicine, but are you sick you need
<v Speaker 1>it or whatever? I get it some people. If that's
<v Speaker 1>how people connect to this shit, I'm all in. I'm like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>let's get you in the door. It's a nice hook.
<v Speaker 1>You know you're herbal medicine. Get it the fucking here,
<v Speaker 1>and I'll tell you about ecology. Right. Oh, you're like,
<v Speaker 1>you want to learn about payote because it's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's psychoactive. Yeah, let's get the fucking here. I'll tell
<v Speaker 1>you about I'll tell you about the story of its
<v Speaker 1>evolution and the phylogeny. Right. So, anyway that we're destroying
<v Speaker 1>this stuff to make way for this it's sick, doesn't
<v Speaker 1>make any sense. But I think it doesn't have to
<v Speaker 1>be that way. You want to You want to change things,
<v Speaker 1>change the culture, show people how cool it is. So
<v Speaker 1>plants reduced peaks, some are temperatures by ten degrees at
<v Speaker 1>least in some cases twenty degrees of fahrenheit, mainly through
<v Speaker 1>a apotransporation in shading. If apotransporation is an active form
<v Speaker 1>of cooling, it's the same thing as swamp cooler does,
<v Speaker 1>and shading is just keeping the sun off the ground.
<v Speaker 1>We already went through this the root to shoot ratio right.
<v Speaker 1>I taught a semester of botany a year ago, and
<v Speaker 1>this was something they talk about. This is in Raven's
<v Speaker 1>Biology of Plants textbook Root to shoot ratio Right. You
<v Speaker 1>want the roots to grow deeper, don't cut it, let
<v Speaker 1>it grow. You're going to get increased absorption whatever I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I recommend removing the lawn altogether if you have it,
<v Speaker 1>or even if it's not your own lawn, and go
<v Speaker 1>fuck up someone else's long. Fuck it right. But that's
<v Speaker 1>just how all plants work. And this is the same principle.
<v Speaker 1>Like you know, when the border will was coming through
<v Speaker 1>South Texas and we were you know, peop all the
<v Speaker 1>like local botanists and plant people and plant thereds were
<v Speaker 1>going down there to salvage and quote rescue, it's not
<v Speaker 1>rescuely salvaging. It fucking sucked to do it, was It
<v Speaker 1>was felt horrible. But we're digging all these plants out
<v Speaker 1>because they're going to put a two hundred foot wide,
<v Speaker 1>you know, fifty mile strip of clear land right there
<v Speaker 1>on the border. The amount of Payotia that almost got
<v Speaker 1>destroyed was amazing, I mean just crazy. I mean that's
<v Speaker 1>like a you know, a very special plant, a very
<v Speaker 1>sacred plant to a large demographic of this country. And
<v Speaker 1>it was just being fucking just get it out of
<v Speaker 1>the way so we can put this border wall in there.
<v Speaker 1>But we were moving plants. We were moving you know,
<v Speaker 1>woody plants too. And I saw my friend Ken, he
<v Speaker 1>was digging up you know, a big gog Nadia hype Luca.
<v Speaker 1>It's a remember of the sunflower family. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>woody shruve that can get twelve feet tall and grows
<v Speaker 1>in a place where it's one hundred and five degrees
<v Speaker 1>for six months. Out of here. He dug it up,
<v Speaker 1>and he immediately, like ten inches above the roots, just
<v Speaker 1>chopped it in half. And I said, why are you
<v Speaker 1>doing this? And he goes, because I'm just closing holes
<v Speaker 1>in the bathtub. I don't want it to leak out moisture.
<v Speaker 1>I just ripped it out of the ground. I destroyed
<v Speaker 1>most of the roots and doing it, it's really hard
<v Speaker 1>not to you know, I mean unless you came in
<v Speaker 1>with like a back hoe and scooped up the whole
<v Speaker 1>mass of soil that it was in. And so there's
<v Speaker 1>not going to be enough roots to support what's up top.
<v Speaker 1>I chopped it in half. It's got buds, it'll re
<v Speaker 1>sprout new branches and boom, there you go, and it survived.
<v Speaker 1>They survived. You leave. If you would have left that
<v Speaker 1>those shoots on, there wouldn't have been any roots to
<v Speaker 1>support it, and it would have died. It wouldn't have
<v Speaker 1>made it. So if you're ever moving plants, you got
<v Speaker 1>to just chop the shit out of it. And you know,
<v Speaker 1>of the top and root the shoe ratio. This is
<v Speaker 1>nice to go at this, this nice flooded fucking suburban backyard. Right,
<v Speaker 1>not enough light for the grass and it's mowed anyway,
<v Speaker 1>and so right that brick pouring water on a brick
<v Speaker 1>versus pouring water on a dry sponge analogy is really
<v Speaker 1>what's going on. That's why purpose of bioswales, It's why
<v Speaker 1>the prairies are so amazing. Right, it's roots matter, Root
<v Speaker 1>the shoot. This is just the case you try to
<v Speaker 1>download the PDF later. I put it all in there
<v Speaker 1>for you in case you remember what I'm talking about. Right,
<v Speaker 1>if I can keep most of you for two hours,
<v Speaker 1>I'll be amazed. That will not be offended if you
<v Speaker 1>need to fucking dip out. So so, keeping any plant
<v Speaker 1>perpetually stressed, which is what we're doing with the lawn
<v Speaker 1>and cut, makes a drug dependent, necessitating consistent applications of chemicals.
<v Speaker 1>So what are these? What are some of these wonderful
<v Speaker 1>chemicals two four D? That sounds nice, right, That's like
<v Speaker 1>a fucking recipe for lymphoma in twenty years. Mimics the
<v Speaker 1>plant growth hormone. And why why do we use this
<v Speaker 1>on a loan? Because it only hits broadly, It only
<v Speaker 1>hits diecos only hits broadly plant. It's gonna leave the
<v Speaker 1>grass alone. So you can dowse the grass. You you can
<v Speaker 1>douse all your Kentucky bluegrass in two four D. Your
<v Speaker 1>kids might get cancer in a decade, but whatever, at
<v Speaker 1>least your loan looks good. And uh and uh and
<v Speaker 1>all the all the creeping Charlie and the clover and
<v Speaker 1>the the things that break up the monoculture that that
<v Speaker 1>you want will die, but the grass will be fine. Right.
<v Speaker 1>International Agency for Research on Cancer identified it as possibly
<v Speaker 1>carcinogenic to humans. I'll take that as a yes. Also
<v Speaker 1>been linked to endocrine disruption. This lady is having a
<v Speaker 1>good time carbaryl. There's a nice broad spectrum in zecticide, right,
<v Speaker 1>because you got this monoculture. Nature doesn't like monocultures, right.
<v Speaker 1>I can think of a few cases where it does,
<v Speaker 1>like creosote in the extremities of the Mojave Desert, a
<v Speaker 1>Sonoran desert where it's so fucking hot and the water
<v Speaker 1>the rock is just volcanic. There's little else that can
<v Speaker 1>grow there. But in most cases, nature doesn't like a monoculture.
<v Speaker 1>So what happens. Shit starts getting in there to exploit it.
<v Speaker 1>You got a monoculture of turf grass that's stressed anyway,
<v Speaker 1>what's gonna happen. You're gonna get beetle grubs, right, those
<v Speaker 1>little weird looking worms that look like the metroid character.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna get all kinds of other stuff. So you
<v Speaker 1>know you don't want that because that's gonna lead to
<v Speaker 1>spots and it's not gonna look like a nice clean
<v Speaker 1>monoculture with lines in it, and so you gotta you
<v Speaker 1>gotta use carbaryl, right, and so that's been classified as
<v Speaker 1>a likely human likely likely human carcinogen. They can never
<v Speaker 1>just say it causes cancer. It's it's to cause it. No,
<v Speaker 1>it's likely it might, it might cause cans. And then
<v Speaker 1>neo and the cottenoids, which are just synthetic nicotine analogs,
<v Speaker 1>nicotinees and alkaloid. It evolved in the genus Nicotiana and
<v Speaker 1>quite a few other members that are sol and ac
<v Speaker 1>the night shade and tomato family. And uh, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>a it's an alkaloid that evolved to keep insects from
<v Speaker 1>chewing on it. And it does a great job of
<v Speaker 1>it too. You get little glandular trichomes. It's just the
<v Speaker 1>it's just the word for sticky hairs on the stems
<v Speaker 1>of There's like ninety different species of Nicotiana, right. Some
<v Speaker 1>are pollinated by hummingbirds. They get pink flowers. They grow
<v Speaker 1>in the andes. Some are pollinated by moths. They grow
<v Speaker 1>where I live in South Texas. Got really fragrant white flowers,
<v Speaker 1>but they're all sticky. You run your hand along it.
<v Speaker 1>It's oily it leaves a residue. Right, it's a great
<v Speaker 1>It's great at keeping insects off of you. And so
<v Speaker 1>that's why it's used as a systemic insecticide, meaning you
<v Speaker 1>pour it on the ground, the plant absorbs it, and
<v Speaker 1>it will kill anything that's trying to feed on it, right,
<v Speaker 1>including bees or you know, caterpillars whatever. Right. And it's
<v Speaker 1>probably not that toxic to people unless you're drinking it
<v Speaker 1>or something, but it kills everything. And this is what
<v Speaker 1>drives me nuts too, is you know, it kills all
<v Speaker 1>the shit that keeps the pest insects down. Like I
<v Speaker 1>was in I was in Ecuador, and I was in
<v Speaker 1>Ecuador in uh when the fuck was that in February?
<v Speaker 1>And I thought, you know, I'm going it's the Upper Amazon.
<v Speaker 1>I'm only in three thousand feet. I'm gonna get eaten
<v Speaker 1>a live by mosquitoes. I'm gonna get fucking dengay. Oh shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I grotewn this like hypochondriac hole. And I
<v Speaker 1>went there and I got like two mosquito bites the
<v Speaker 1>whole two weeks I was there. And I was really confused.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, everything's wet. It rains every day there's
<v Speaker 1>water everywhere, there's I mean, it's a fucking rainforest. Why
<v Speaker 1>am I not seeing any mosquitoes? And I'd listened to
<v Speaker 1>thes at night and it clicked and I was like, Oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is why I'm not getting eaten alt by mosquitos.
<v Speaker 1>Because there's literally thousands of frogs. There's thousands of things
<v Speaker 1>that eat mosquito larvae that keep them in check. And
<v Speaker 1>it's the same in the prairie or in other places.
<v Speaker 1>You know, where you support that, you plant the things
<v Speaker 1>that support all the other life forms, they help keep
<v Speaker 1>it in check. That's the way an ecosystem works. Right.
<v Speaker 1>Mosquito species like eighties of Gypti can be really bad
<v Speaker 1>because they've spent the last twenty or thirty thousand years
<v Speaker 1>evolving with people. They're not even native to North America, right,
<v Speaker 1>They're like pigeons, They're like they're like coyotes and crows.
<v Speaker 1>They benefit off of human development. So you come in
<v Speaker 1>and you completely annihilate the living skin of the earth
<v Speaker 1>in a region and you start putting up concrete in houses.
<v Speaker 1>But of course it's still rains and there's water catchment,
<v Speaker 1>and they can breed. You get mosquitos and there's nothing
<v Speaker 1>to keep them in check. They can thrive and they
<v Speaker 1>take off right, especially because you're spraying neo nicks on everything. Right.
<v Speaker 1>And then fungus fungus control. There was a species of
<v Speaker 1>fungus I found. It was that eats a certain turf
<v Speaker 1>grass species. I wanted to find out if one of
<v Speaker 1>my my college's friends could cultivate it, you know, put
<v Speaker 1>in a petri dish and I could make little capsules,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like little pellets and just go throwing them
<v Speaker 1>around golf courses and shit. But at which case they
<v Speaker 1>would just use propaconasol if I did that, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and they would just apply it, you know. And there's
<v Speaker 1>another thing that you know causes probably is that's very
<v Speaker 1>specific liver cancer. It's probably tied to liver cancer. This
<v Speaker 1>is not stuff that you want to be ingesting. Right.
<v Speaker 1>Root systems, the prairie plants, this is why they they're
<v Speaker 1>so good at holding holding the the turf, holding the
<v Speaker 1>soil together and helping water penetrate. And I've killed a
<v Speaker 1>lot of lawns. I've ripped them up, I've torn them
<v Speaker 1>up with a shovel. They're really easy. I mean, there
<v Speaker 1>I can attest to the fact that the roots of
<v Speaker 1>turf grass doesn't go down deep. I've killed a lot
<v Speaker 1>of fucking lawns. I've seen how deep it goes. You know.
<v Speaker 1>All you got to do is come in with a
<v Speaker 1>sharp shooter, shovel at at a low angle and it
<v Speaker 1>comes right up this little It's like you know, feeding
<v Speaker 1>a dog, trying to get it to eat a pill.
<v Speaker 1>You put it in the hot dog. You put the
<v Speaker 1>little bits of scientific knowledge in the presentation. Die cot
<v Speaker 1>roots have a taproot. Monocot roots, whether it's a gaves
<v Speaker 1>or yuccas or asparagus or whatever, they got fibrous roots.
<v Speaker 1>Now is my favorite part. Horticultural atrocities, right, and this
<v Speaker 1>is probably what you'll see here because there's not a
<v Speaker 1>lot of room for law in a city in Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>I mean people make room, of course, but mostly what
<v Speaker 1>you're going to see is horticultural atrocity. Shit. That's just
<v Speaker 1>you know, you just plant it because it's pretty. That's
<v Speaker 1>the only purpose of plants. They're just supposed to be pretty.
<v Speaker 1>You just just sit in the back and just look pretty.
<v Speaker 1>They flower all the time, you know, or they got
<v Speaker 1>variegated leaves, right, because the plants are generally kind of boring.
<v Speaker 1>You gotta make them. There's got to be a gimmick.
<v Speaker 1>Got variegated leaves, it's got different colors on it. Some
<v Speaker 1>of it it's yellow, and it's got stripes in it,
<v Speaker 1>and it looks it catches the eye. Right, These are
<v Speaker 1>fucking crape myrtles. This is one of my most hated plants.
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure they're great where they're native in Southeast Asia.
<v Speaker 1>Probably cool to see there where you can see what
<v Speaker 1>habitat they grow on and all the other things that
<v Speaker 1>have relationships with them. But you know, you think, thank god,
<v Speaker 1>you guys don't get these up here. Got a fucking
<v Speaker 1>fucking hey crape mrtle, and they've got the smith bark
<v Speaker 1>and they just blim all the time. It's just right.
<v Speaker 1>And then we've got the topiaried hedges. I don't know
<v Speaker 1>why the fuck this is? What is this? It looks
<v Speaker 1>like molars or something, right, But this is what. This
<v Speaker 1>is what American horticulture does. So you grow up in
<v Speaker 1>a place where all the all the native habitat around
<v Speaker 1>you is destroyed and you have no chance in hell
<v Speaker 1>of connecting with anything that's real. Right, but the plants
<v Speaker 1>that are around you is this shit. It's stuff that's
<v Speaker 1>you know, native to seven thousand miles away and completely
<v Speaker 1>pulled out of the relationship that it has with everything else.
<v Speaker 1>There's no context for it here. It doesn't benefit any
<v Speaker 1>of the cool solitary bees, it doesn't benefit any of
<v Speaker 1>the cool dragonflies or counterpillars. It's just right. But that's
<v Speaker 1>all you get. And not only is it not native,
<v Speaker 1>but in a lot of cases, a lot of the
<v Speaker 1>shit that gets planted in horticulture isn't native anywhere. It's
<v Speaker 1>the product of the last one hundred and fifty years
<v Speaker 1>of hybridization and breeding in a greenhouse by people for
<v Speaker 1>traits like, oh it's pretty, it's got pretty flowers. This
<v Speaker 1>thing flowers longer, This doesn't make a mess, this is sterile,
<v Speaker 1>This doesn't drop fruit, you know, right, I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>mean a lot of the shit that a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these plants you go like if you go to the
<v Speaker 1>home despot garden section, a lot of the plants you
<v Speaker 1>find there don't even the flowers don't produce nectar or pollen.
<v Speaker 1>In some cases they've been bred out. You can breed
<v Speaker 1>those out, you know, you grow a thousand different phenotypic
<v Speaker 1>individuals germanyated a thousand seeds of one species, and you
<v Speaker 1>pick the two that have the prettiest flowers. I really
<v Speaker 1>like the way that flower looks. And then you just
<v Speaker 1>keep breeding those. You know, I think this is marketable.
<v Speaker 1>You make a cult of right, so some fucking rich
<v Speaker 1>housewife is gonna find it and find that you know,
<v Speaker 1>wanted attractive and want nine of them planted, you know,
<v Speaker 1>at three hundred dollars each in her front yard. You
<v Speaker 1>know her husband's in orthodonas she's not paying for it.
<v Speaker 1>So I mean this same thing here, these are these
<v Speaker 1>are all the same clone because you don't you can't
<v Speaker 1>plant different different phenotypes there. You know, we're all different
<v Speaker 1>phenotypes of the same species. Almost satanis. You can't plant
<v Speaker 1>different phenotypes because the one the other one might not
<v Speaker 1>have as bright as flowers there are My only flower
<v Speaker 1>for two weeks instead of three months, Right, So you
<v Speaker 1>want that consistency. Just like if you go to a
<v Speaker 1>chick fil A in fucking Iowa, it's gonna be it's
<v Speaker 1>gonna taste the same as a chick fil A in
<v Speaker 1>Fort Worth, Right, it's that same shit. It's you want that,
<v Speaker 1>and you gotta even space them. I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>the fuck they do this either, because you never see
<v Speaker 1>that in nature. I don't know what the ship this is.
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to know, you know. And so this is,
<v Speaker 1>this is, this is the plants that you grow up.
<v Speaker 1>But this is why people think plants are boring. This
<v Speaker 1>is why I thought botany was boring. It's like, I
<v Speaker 1>don't give a fuck about that. What am I gonna do?
<v Speaker 1>You know? I got kicked out of the Chicago Botanic
<v Speaker 1>Garden for pie and on a tree. I later found
<v Speaker 1>out it was flashing a whole trailer full of old
<v Speaker 1>women with tinted windows and it they called security. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>but I went to Chicago Botanic gards like two thousand
<v Speaker 1>and nine and it was, you know, it was this
<v Speaker 1>kind of shit. I mean, you still see this and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of botanic gardens. It fucking kills me. Man.
<v Speaker 1>I love making fun of it, don't get me wrong.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a nice dopamine rush to just ridicule how
<v Speaker 1>silly it is. But but this is and where does
<v Speaker 1>this come from? You know? Where does where? Why do
<v Speaker 1>we do this? Like? Where does this? Why is this?
<v Speaker 1>What's been normalized? See everything like the uniformity of color
<v Speaker 1>right here, and we've got this line. See it's all
<v Speaker 1>in lines. And then we've got a grasp. But then
<v Speaker 1>to draw the eye into the back, we've got these yellow,
<v Speaker 1>very great variegated shrubs right here with yellow leaves looking
<v Speaker 1>somewhat chlorotic. And you got the mode lawn. And of
<v Speaker 1>course we you know, little curves to imply that some
<v Speaker 1>of the shit you hear these fucking landscapers say is ridiculous.
<v Speaker 1>Like calm down, buddy, you're not Picasso, all right. I
<v Speaker 1>know you'd like to think of that. You know, your
<v Speaker 1>next bent from sniffing your own ass for the last
<v Speaker 1>twenty years of your life. But just take it easy.
<v Speaker 1>This is not this is not day lilies. I think
<v Speaker 1>these are daililies who cares. It doesn't matter. They're just
<v Speaker 1>supposed to look good. This is in South Carolina. I
<v Speaker 1>had fun looking for these images too, I mean really
<v Speaker 1>it was like the gag reflex. Look the symmetry here,
<v Speaker 1>this is nice right boom boom boom boom boom. And
<v Speaker 1>you've got they think coming, he's tinn here and you
<v Speaker 1>get they think red and big purple, and right here
<v Speaker 1>and take mirror image and again everything's the same clone.
<v Speaker 1>It's the same clone, it's the same phenotype. The good
<v Speaker 1>thing about that is if one of them gets sick,
<v Speaker 1>they all die, right, there's no phenotypic variation. They've all
<v Speaker 1>got the same response to a you know, a pathogenic
<v Speaker 1>fungus or something which you know makes me happy? This too, right,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is you know, someone thinks this is
<v Speaker 1>a great job. Someone's someone, This is in somebody's portfolio.
<v Speaker 1>I did that. You know, get the Japanese maypole and
<v Speaker 1>the fucking box woods and whatever this shit is. And
<v Speaker 1>if you think this shit doesn't affect you, this is
<v Speaker 1>just landscaping, what do I carry? I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>the subconscious imaging you're exposed to. It's like living in
<v Speaker 1>a world full of personal injury attorney billboards. It's the
<v Speaker 1>same thing you think that doesn't make your life feel
<v Speaker 1>a little more bleak and hopeless and desperate. You've gotten
<v Speaker 1>nothing of the actual intact living world or anything resembling
<v Speaker 1>quote nature, an intact ecosystem, But you've got this kind
<v Speaker 1>of hideous bullshit, right. I mean, I'm sure the people
<v Speaker 1>who live here think it's lovely. It makes me want
<v Speaker 1>to die when I look at it. If they saw
<v Speaker 1>my yard, they'd probably you know, freak out too. But
<v Speaker 1>it's all just the values thing, and it all goes
<v Speaker 1>down to being disconnected, you know, the natural words. The
<v Speaker 1>natural world is boring, right. Plants are just something you
<v Speaker 1>drive by an eighty miles pro in the freeway. Who
<v Speaker 1>cares what they do? If you can't eat it, you
<v Speaker 1>can't put it in your ass. It's not medicinal. What's
<v Speaker 1>the point of it, right? This is why you go
<v Speaker 1>to botanic gardens. The Garfield Park used to do this.
<v Speaker 1>They don't do it so much anymore. They've got some
<v Speaker 1>great shit there, but you know, I remember going in
<v Speaker 1>there once and they had like a whole fucking bed
<v Speaker 1>with like five hundred of the same that you know,
<v Speaker 1>the geometric shit. It looks like a fucking DPI on
<v Speaker 1>a pixelated image, you know, just brutal, like why why
<v Speaker 1>are you doing that? Who wants that? Man like you?
<v Speaker 1>You could be displaying cool plants with cool ecologies or
<v Speaker 1>cool like weird fucking looking plants too, like the shit
<v Speaker 1>that I give the rest of my presentations on. And
<v Speaker 1>you're you know, you put a little plaque up there
<v Speaker 1>showing what the label showing the family and the name
<v Speaker 1>and where it's from and what it's adapted to and
<v Speaker 1>what's cool about it. People come out of there. It's
<v Speaker 1>like they went to the museum. That's fucking dope. That's
<v Speaker 1>really cool. I didn't know that. That makes me kind
<v Speaker 1>of want to learn about botany instead. You're planting this
<v Speaker 1>gimmicky shit. You know, plants that don't even exist in nature.
<v Speaker 1>They've been hybridized. They got you know, bright purple flowers
<v Speaker 1>and they're all the same color of mauv or violet.
<v Speaker 1>And we plant them in a line, diagonal lines, even
<v Speaker 1>lease space. It's fucking brutal, you know. But why design
<v Speaker 1>spaces like this? And why the insistence on colors in uniform?
<v Speaker 1>Where's this? Where's this archaic bullshit come from? Right? I
<v Speaker 1>think we all know the answer. It comes from, you know,
<v Speaker 1>aristocratic Europe. This is some nineteenth century shit. This is
<v Speaker 1>some old I mean that looks again. You know how
<v Speaker 1>much did they pay it, the topiary guy to come
<v Speaker 1>in here and make that look like a butt plug?
<v Speaker 1>I bet he charged five grand a tree, five grand
<v Speaker 1>a fucking tree. But because it'd be boring otherwise, you
<v Speaker 1>know that we got these. This is a cute garden.
<v Speaker 1>We got the tulips all the same color, and I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's just what the fuck do these people who do
<v Speaker 1>this shit spend time in nature? Do they get out?
<v Speaker 1>I mean, fuck, it's it's crazy, man. And so this
<v Speaker 1>is what is everywhere. You know. This is why I
<v Speaker 1>grew up. This is why I grew up two miles
<v Speaker 1>from where Sylphium terebinthinaceum grows. And I had no idea
<v Speaker 1>what it was until I was thirty five because everything
<v Speaker 1>had been destroyed. It's like a four foot tall leaf
<v Speaker 1>petiole and everything the roots like a giant fucking turnip.
<v Speaker 1>It's the size that it's. I mean, the root balls
<v Speaker 1>like this as at a stool, and then the roots
<v Speaker 1>go down thirty feet and they can live a century,
<v Speaker 1>probably longer. They've been clocked at a century, right, And
<v Speaker 1>this is what I hear when I think it is stuff, sir,
<v Speaker 1>we've already called security. Don't make it fun for me.
<v Speaker 1>Don't make it fun. You couldn't pay me to live
<v Speaker 1>in a spot like that. And that's what I think
<v Speaker 1>of too. I think they're like minecraft. I think a
<v Speaker 1>video game. I think I like, you know, circa two
<v Speaker 1>thousands video game landscaping. I had an N sixty four
<v Speaker 1>when I was a child, you know, before I got
<v Speaker 1>into vandalism. I was the sims right, that's another one.
<v Speaker 1>That's what this stuff looks like. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.
<v Speaker 1>Look at this. I mean these are the same image.
<v Speaker 1>This is real. This is from a fucking screenshot of
<v Speaker 1>a Why who actually thinks that's pretty? Man? I mean
<v Speaker 1>maybe I would have when I was ten. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but I've actually the more I've seen of
<v Speaker 1>the living world, the more I'm like repulsed by the
<v Speaker 1>ship I see landscapers doing Nandina domestica. You guys can't
<v Speaker 1>grow this here too, Thank god, I think it would.
<v Speaker 1>It dies in the freeze. Who knows what climate change.
<v Speaker 1>Keep an eye out for this fucking thing. Start sawing
<v Speaker 1>those down if you see him. It's from Asia. It's
<v Speaker 1>Berbera d Ac. It's the family. We got a ton
<v Speaker 1>of cool members of berber at Ac and the forest
<v Speaker 1>preserves here. They're the spring ephemerals. Some of them. They
<v Speaker 1>have fucking great plants, and we plant this shit. I
<v Speaker 1>went the four worked Botanic Guard and they had this
<v Speaker 1>plant that is a specimen tree. I couldn't. That was
<v Speaker 1>ten years ago. I shouldn't. I should stop telling that story.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe they've come correct now, but it was, you know,
<v Speaker 1>this is like but these are this would be like
<v Speaker 1>a great spot to urinate. That's probably where I would
<v Speaker 1>go because I try to avoid urinating on a concrete
<v Speaker 1>or the asphalt because then, you know, we all remember
<v Speaker 1>to see TA in the UH in the mid nineties.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe dating myself there, but you know, you get some
<v Speaker 1>of the urine when it collects on concrete, it really
<v Speaker 1>becomes sticky and it gets a foul smell to it,
<v Speaker 1>and p on the PM in the soil paint by numbers.
<v Speaker 1>Me and Al had a UH when we were doing
<v Speaker 1>to Kill Your Law. We did four episodes in Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>We caught one of the fucking landscapers trying to do
<v Speaker 1>this with native plants. At least at least you gotta
<v Speaker 1>watch them. At least they're using natives. But they're still
<v Speaker 1>trying to do this shit. And we said no, And
<v Speaker 1>it's always, you know, some fucking affluents and whatever. They
<v Speaker 1>gotta I get why they're like it. They have they
<v Speaker 1>have an audience, they've got a customer base. They need
<v Speaker 1>to please. It's kind of like working for a tattoo parlor,
<v Speaker 1>Like you want a tattoo plants and people are gonna
<v Speaker 1>come in and beg you to tattoo you know, pirate
<v Speaker 1>ships and koyfish and I'm no finish to anybody that's
<v Speaker 1>got those, by the way, but you know what I mean.
<v Speaker 1>I have tattoo friends, tattooist friends that you know, talk
<v Speaker 1>about how they wanted to kill themselves because people just
<v Speaker 1>ask for the same shit. And anyway, okay, let's not
<v Speaker 1>get into that. I might be a fending some of
<v Speaker 1>my clients. Till here. This is I think this was
<v Speaker 1>Chicago Botanic Garden. I mean, this is just fucking the colors.
<v Speaker 1>This horrible. And I didn't realize how fucked up this
<v Speaker 1>was until I went to a spot like you know,
<v Speaker 1>used to sneak into UC Berkeley Botanic Garden all the time,
<v Speaker 1>not saying you should you should support them if you can,
<v Speaker 1>but if you don't have money whatever, have the fence.
<v Speaker 1>But I go there and they did. They didn't do
<v Speaker 1>this kind of shit. They had like one little section
<v Speaker 1>where it was all, you know, kind of corny. I
<v Speaker 1>think it was like leftover, you know, Rose garden shit.
<v Speaker 1>But then everything the whole botanic gardens group by geography,
<v Speaker 1>Like there's a Chile a section of South America, section
<v Speaker 1>of Mexico, section of fucking South Africa section. I've been
<v Speaker 1>to all these places, and when I go to that
<v Speaker 1>part of the garden, I see these rare plants that
<v Speaker 1>nobody else would grow because they don't flower all the time,
<v Speaker 1>and you can't put them in a uniform line like
<v Speaker 1>that and make them look nice. But I would see
<v Speaker 1>these plants, and that's how I learned a lot of
<v Speaker 1>these plants. Like before I went to Chile, I knew
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the plants because they were already planted.
<v Speaker 1>They'd already been planted in the botanic garden. It's more
<v Speaker 1>of like a museum style approach, you know, it's actually
<v Speaker 1>exercising your mind to go there, and it gives you
<v Speaker 1>some context. You know, this this is well witchy and mirabolis.
<v Speaker 1>It looks like a fucking giant mop sticking out of
<v Speaker 1>the desert floor and the closest thing it's related to
<v Speaker 1>is redwoods. It's not related to flowering plants. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's holy shit, that's cool, it's weird. It's things like conifer.
<v Speaker 1>What so anyway, this is what they seem like. There's
<v Speaker 1>a nice thing. They kind of look the same, don't they.
<v Speaker 1>One's a dollar general the shelves of a dollar general,
<v Speaker 1>and the other is a classical botanical garden whose ideology
<v Speaker 1>and horticultural ethos is rooted in nineteenth century Europe. It's
<v Speaker 1>the same shit. Again, none of these exist in nature.
<v Speaker 1>These were all there are all the products of hybridization
<v Speaker 1>for look for esthetic. They don't feed any of the insects.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe you'll see honey bees on them. This is Nandina domestica.
<v Speaker 1>That one's lost. I can't blame you, guys. It doesn't
<v Speaker 1>grow here, thank god. Right this daylilies look daililies and
<v Speaker 1>just the line. Shit, it's fucking brutal, man. It looks
<v Speaker 1>it does It looks like it's product's on a store.
<v Speaker 1>Shep use the bedroom with the Starbucks if you go in,
<v Speaker 1>or I got a nice bathroom. So where do you
<v Speaker 1>look to for Where do you look to if that's
<v Speaker 1>the wrong shit to do? Where do you go? Where
<v Speaker 1>do you go to to look at? What to emulate? Right?
<v Speaker 1>You go to places like the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma,
<v Speaker 1>A giant granitic pluton. Okay, this all was like a
<v Speaker 1>big mass of molten rock that cooled fifty million years ago,
<v Speaker 1>very slowly underground, that was later uplifted, and you get
<v Speaker 1>all this cool shit on it. You know, this is
<v Speaker 1>the dry season. It had been a long drought. But
<v Speaker 1>I see places like this and I can't wait to
<v Speaker 1>get into them, Like, holy fuck, I bet there's so
<v Speaker 1>much cool shit growing in there, even if it's not flowering.
<v Speaker 1>You know, twenty years ago I would have seen this,
<v Speaker 1>say it's pretty, I'll go take a picture of it's boring.
<v Speaker 1>And now it's like I got some context. I want
<v Speaker 1>to go get into it and look, and where's that.
<v Speaker 1>That's Tedstone, Tedstone prairie and beautiful Hodgkins. Tedstone Prairie and
<v Speaker 1>Hodgkins right off the two ninety four I fifty five interchange.
<v Speaker 1>This was a destroid's side. I don't know what they do.
<v Speaker 1>I think it might have been a lance landfill at
<v Speaker 1>some point, but some native plant, some people who knew
<v Speaker 1>how cool the prairies could be restored it thirty or
<v Speaker 1>forty years ago, and now it's fucking dope. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this would be a nice spot to microdoes if you
<v Speaker 1>ever get a wild hair up your ass and you
<v Speaker 1>know you want to go out there, you know, But
<v Speaker 1>standing here, I mean, I can hear and smell this
<v Speaker 1>photo like I remember what it was like. The prairie
<v Speaker 1>sunset's intoxicating, it's psychedelic. It's fucking crazy, man, I mean.
<v Speaker 1>And there's a little prairie plant things in downtown Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>There's prairie plant things, you know, actually throughout the city.
<v Speaker 1>It's pretty impressive. You know, you could hear all the
<v Speaker 1>insects in them, you can hear the birds. It fucking
<v Speaker 1>smells wonderful because again, all those the plants are breathing,
<v Speaker 1>they're letting out all that water vapor. And with that
<v Speaker 1>water vapor as they take in the carbon dioxide. With
<v Speaker 1>that water vapor coming out, they're letting out all the
<v Speaker 1>volatile compounds, all the phyto chemicals that they use to
<v Speaker 1>keep up their metabolism, to keep insects off of them,
<v Speaker 1>to make them taste unpalatable to deer. And that shit's
<v Speaker 1>knows good like dear hate members of the mind family,
<v Speaker 1>lay me ac Salvias mintce of Regano's time. They smell
<v Speaker 1>good to us, but to a deer. It's horrible, Like
<v Speaker 1>that's the one thing that deer will leave alone. If
<v Speaker 1>you have like a bad deer overpopulation problem in your neighborhood.
<v Speaker 1>They don't like members of a mid family. It smells
<v Speaker 1>amazing though. This was in beautiful Gary actually, and this
<v Speaker 1>wasn't This was like near a slag heap. This was
<v Speaker 1>just Monarta speaking to members of the mid family. And
<v Speaker 1>it just took over right. We were coming back from
<v Speaker 1>tour me and now and I said stop the van.
<v Speaker 1>I had to piss it. Got out and looked at
<v Speaker 1>this and I said, holy fuck, this is crazy. It
<v Speaker 1>went on for for like one hundred yards in either direction,
<v Speaker 1>and over here there's like a power light easement and
<v Speaker 1>a railroad embankment, you know. But you know, you get
<v Speaker 1>a suburban homeowner in there with a lawnmower, and they
<v Speaker 1>would just say, why would I don't want this? Like
<v Speaker 1>maybe the flowers are pretty, but there's ticks and blah
<v Speaker 1>blah blah. The reason you get ticks is because of
<v Speaker 1>fire suppression. That's the main reason ticks are so bad.
<v Speaker 1>I have a friend in Vermont. He wrote me, He's like,
<v Speaker 1>we used to not get ticks in Vermont, and we
<v Speaker 1>just started getting them five years ago. I mean, I
<v Speaker 1>can't believe what that would be like. But fire suppression,
<v Speaker 1>two hundred years of fire suppression and then eradicating the
<v Speaker 1>predators that keep the deer populations down. You're gonna get ticks,
<v Speaker 1>right a deer. One deer can host like a thousand ticks. Man,
<v Speaker 1>it's snarly, you know. And so so that's what we
<v Speaker 1>deal with. Like the forest reserves of Illinois. Man, there
<v Speaker 1>was off Ogden in two ninety four, there was I
<v Speaker 1>remember going in there once to look at the spring
<v Speaker 1>ephemerals and like the minute I stepped off the path,
<v Speaker 1>that were just ticks crawling up my legs. Right, So
<v Speaker 1>what's the way around that? Start burning? Right? Fire was
<v Speaker 1>immensely important to all of North America, but especially the
<v Speaker 1>eastern half. And why is there? Remember I was talking
<v Speaker 1>about the Hunt of Meridian and you look at a
<v Speaker 1>satellite photo and west of the Huntred Meridian, it's bays.
<v Speaker 1>You can see the deserts start. You can see the
<v Speaker 1>great planes start to turn into the deserts. It gets
<v Speaker 1>really dry. Rocky mountains have some moisture in them. That's
<v Speaker 1>because they're at higher elevation. But overall, like the American
<v Speaker 1>Southwest is base. You look at the eastern half, it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking green and the furthest east you go is where
<v Speaker 1>you get the highest rainfall, sixty inches of annual rain
<v Speaker 1>a year along the eastern seaboard in Maryland. What does
<v Speaker 1>all that water do? It makes everything grow very vigorously,
<v Speaker 1>and it keeps it. Eventually it starts piling up. And
<v Speaker 1>we're just talking native plants to I mean, this is
<v Speaker 1>like six hundred years ago, you know, when fire was
<v Speaker 1>still practiced. I mean the fire suppression in the East
<v Speaker 1>Coast really started. Two hundred years ago was when it
<v Speaker 1>got bad. But not anyway. You get such a massive
<v Speaker 1>explosion of growth, and it's especially if it's a prairie,
<v Speaker 1>it all just dies every year, right Eventually that will
<v Speaker 1>build good soil if you give it enough time to
<v Speaker 1>die down. It's just a giant compost heap. That's why
<v Speaker 1>the prairie's got annihilated for monocultures of soybean and corns
<v Speaker 1>so quick when Europeans came here, because the soil was
<v Speaker 1>so rich, because you'd had thousands of years of plant's
<v Speaker 1>growing and dying, growing and dying and just just building
<v Speaker 1>up this rich black soil, and the bedrock is thirty
<v Speaker 1>forty fucking feet down. Man, that's crazy. Where I live,
<v Speaker 1>the bedrock is like no one's got basements because the
<v Speaker 1>bedrocks like five feet down. It's all limestone. But here,
<v Speaker 1>because of the prairies, the bedrocks deep. And so it
<v Speaker 1>was in a lot of plays in the East Coast too,
<v Speaker 1>And so what's a way around that? Like? Why did
<v Speaker 1>well before native people got here thirty thousand years ago?
<v Speaker 1>I'm sure there was still a lot of fire because
<v Speaker 1>there's lightning, right, and you get so much, so much
<v Speaker 1>debris building up, it burns. And I mean we know
<v Speaker 1>that fire was a part of the landscape here because
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the plant species have seeds that won't
<v Speaker 1>germinate without fire. Right. I mean California too, there's there's
<v Speaker 1>species of Arctostaphilos, really big genus, ninety species in it.
<v Speaker 1>I got friends that germinate the seeds because some of
<v Speaker 1>them are really rare and they're trying to do conservation.
<v Speaker 1>How do they germinate the seeds? They take fucking stubs,
<v Speaker 1>liquid smoke, cooking smoke, and they mix it with hot
<v Speaker 1>water and they let the seeds soak in them and
<v Speaker 1>they get germination. I mean, this is a thing in California.
<v Speaker 1>It's a thing in you know, glade habitats out east,
<v Speaker 1>it's a thing in South Africa, anywhere, especially the Mediterranean
<v Speaker 1>climates where you know, the summers are dry and don't
<v Speaker 1>get any rain and fire adapted plants everywhere. Right, So
<v Speaker 1>this is Jerry Wilhelm's backyard. He's the author of Flora
<v Speaker 1>the Chicago region. You meet this guy, he's like, you know, old,
<v Speaker 1>old white guy, looks like he might be kind of conservative,
<v Speaker 1>and then you learn that he sets fire to his
<v Speaker 1>suburban backyard every November. He's had the cops called on him,
<v Speaker 1>you know, many times. But this was twenty years ago
<v Speaker 1>when he started doing it. Now they just know it, okay,
<v Speaker 1>and now that he's used to it. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you pick a cool, wet day when it's going to
<v Speaker 1>be when it's actually hard to get it to stay,
<v Speaker 1>and you burn and you kill all the ticks, you
<v Speaker 1>kill all the chiggers, and most importantly, you're killing all
<v Speaker 1>that dead debris because the plants are still alive, but
<v Speaker 1>they're alive in the roots and the roots don't burn
<v Speaker 1>because they're under a bunch of duff and soil, and
<v Speaker 1>you're removing all that duff. You're killing any ticks that
<v Speaker 1>are hanging out on the plants, but you're also moving
<v Speaker 1>all that which is where the ticks over winter and
<v Speaker 1>lay eggs and where the nymphs are. And so a
<v Speaker 1>prairie that burns don't you don't get ticks there. It's wild.
<v Speaker 1>You may get one or two from that season that
<v Speaker 1>got brought in by a deer somebody. You don't get
<v Speaker 1>ticks there, right. But also when you burn all that ash,
<v Speaker 1>all the phosphorus and the potash just reinvigorates the soil
<v Speaker 1>and that helps you get that massive, you know, flush
<v Speaker 1>of growth. It's like getting a haircut, you know, making
<v Speaker 1>way just clean slate for new plants. So this is
<v Speaker 1>Jerry Wilhelms's backyard. It looks messy, it looks like it
<v Speaker 1>be full of bugs. It was fucking delightful to be
<v Speaker 1>back there, and not just because I know what all
<v Speaker 1>the plants were. It was very cool. It was it
<v Speaker 1>was alive, It had a wonderful smell to it. It
<v Speaker 1>was lit up with the sound of singing insects. Right
<v Speaker 1>kind of get like the wave machine effect, like nice ASMR.
<v Speaker 1>And why does he do that? Because he studies the life.
<v Speaker 1>He studies the living world in this Chicago region. He
<v Speaker 1>knows what prairies are. He knows how dope it is
<v Speaker 1>to be in a spot like this. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know how cool this was till I was fucking
<v Speaker 1>thirty five years old. I would I'd been alienated from it,
<v Speaker 1>you know. And I just kept thinking why am I
<v Speaker 1>so mad when I'm in the strip mall, Like why
<v Speaker 1>do I just fucking hate being here so much? Like
<v Speaker 1>why is it so bleak? And then this when I
<v Speaker 1>saw this and answered it. There's like six different species flowering.
<v Speaker 1>There's a bunch more in the back that will flower
<v Speaker 1>later on in this season. I think I took this
<v Speaker 1>in like July, A lot of prairie stuff, especially flowers
<v Speaker 1>later in the year, arnold glossom. That thing's not flowering yet,
<v Speaker 1>relative of a synesio and sunflowers. Right, bunch of diversity.
<v Speaker 1>And what's even cooler is all these plants have specific
<v Speaker 1>insects that can only eat that plant right, checks and bounces,
<v Speaker 1>plants that act as other organisms that act as an
<v Speaker 1>you know, antagonist or a mutualist for it. It goes
<v Speaker 1>so deep. I mean, if you were to draw a
<v Speaker 1>map of all the relationships in the network, it looked
<v Speaker 1>like a giant bowl of yarn. This I took this
<v Speaker 1>a couple of days ago, and this shit like this
<v Speaker 1>gives me home. This outide the Field Museum. I took
<v Speaker 1>my kid to the Field Museum and she loves it.
<v Speaker 1>She's running around and she actually it got fucked up
<v Speaker 1>for because she saw a night at the museum, you know,
<v Speaker 1>six months ago, and she was telling me, all this
<v Speaker 1>shit's gonna come alive if we need to get out
<v Speaker 1>of here. I was so bummed. I was like, fucksh,
<v Speaker 1>I didn't see that one coming. I shouldn't let you
<v Speaker 1>watch that movie. Fuck, But I you know, I walked
<v Speaker 1>out and I saw this, and I was like Jesus Christ,
<v Speaker 1>when you got golden rods, you got sylphium right there,
<v Speaker 1>you got you know, uh all Joe Pieweed right there
<v Speaker 1>like these fucking dope plants that I know, and they're
<v Speaker 1>all there was bumblebees and sparrows and all kinds of
<v Speaker 1>cool other cardinals and other shit hanging out in there,
<v Speaker 1>and dragonflies and it was just sounded alive. It was
<v Speaker 1>fucking intoxicating. And I remember I thought, how odd that is,
<v Speaker 1>because when I was a kid growing up, I don't
<v Speaker 1>remember anything but the same, you know, minecraft landscaping of
<v Speaker 1>tulips planted in lines and what other horticultural bullshit. I
<v Speaker 1>was really kind of blown away. Hey, this is just
<v Speaker 1>a vacant lot behind my friend Jonathan's house that they
<v Speaker 1>don't spray. The railroad is this is kind of like
<v Speaker 1>a neglected railroad line. There's only one job that goes
<v Speaker 1>out there maybe three times a week, and so the
<v Speaker 1>railroad doesn't come in spray like they would in other cases.
<v Speaker 1>And so it's a mixture of invasive plants and natives.
<v Speaker 1>You've got plenty of natives. We got pioneer species for
<v Speaker 1>species to show up after disturbance, plants that are really
<v Speaker 1>good at growing out of cracks and sidewalks, right. A
<v Speaker 1>lot of invasive plants are good at doing that because
<v Speaker 1>they're pioneer species where they're native, right. And we have
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of native plants that are good at doing
<v Speaker 1>that because they also are pioneer species, and our native
<v Speaker 1>pioneer species some of them can be really invasive in
<v Speaker 1>places like Europe. Is Europe and America in the United
<v Speaker 1>North America have been isolated for like nine million years, right,
<v Speaker 1>the ecosystems have, so Golden Rod gets over to fucking Germany.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't have any checks and balances there. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the fifteen to twenty different species of insects that you
<v Speaker 1>know hit salid Ago altissima and and you know, put
<v Speaker 1>galls on it or chew on the leaves. They don't
<v Speaker 1>exist in Europe, so it's got cheat codes. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I love this, man. I mean, this is just like
<v Speaker 1>a vacant. I mean, you can see how easy it
<v Speaker 1>is for this to come back. Right. This is why
<v Speaker 1>I can't stand the landscapers, man. I show them pictures that,
<v Speaker 1>you know, great yards I've seen. I don't even call
<v Speaker 1>it a garden. It's just the fucking yard. It's your
<v Speaker 1>piece of prise. It's your chance to bond with the
<v Speaker 1>life forms around you. It's your chance to engage with
<v Speaker 1>the life around you. Pick the fucking seed, sniff the flowers,
<v Speaker 1>pull the fucking leaves, get out there and just bathe
<v Speaker 1>in it, you know, and let it cool you down
<v Speaker 1>from all the Bullshe had to deal with from the
<v Speaker 1>few hours before, right, But I got into it with
<v Speaker 1>this guy and he's like, that just looks messy. There's
<v Speaker 1>the you know, there's the ice. I don't know if
<v Speaker 1>he talks like that. I assume he's from an affluent background.
<v Speaker 1>You know, he had some very very glamour shot type
<v Speaker 1>photos on his profile page. You know, you can tell
<v Speaker 1>he probably paid for him. But you know, it's just messy,
<v Speaker 1>and it takes a whole team of to do this.
<v Speaker 1>The fucking You're not building a spaceship out of toothpicks
<v Speaker 1>and trying to get to the moon. Man, this is
<v Speaker 1>the shit, just recreating the shit that lived there two
<v Speaker 1>hundred years prior, you know, before we came and just
<v Speaker 1>fucking cleared everything and annihilated the landscape. And there's proof
<v Speaker 1>of it. No one planted any of this shit. You
<v Speaker 1>got ilantic Altissima Tree of Heaven, which is invasive. You
<v Speaker 1>got some other invasives, you know, but you got a
<v Speaker 1>lot of natives. It looks great, it's covered in cool
<v Speaker 1>life forms. Was me and Kyle. I don't know why
<v Speaker 1>I put that in there. I just wanted to. Actually
<v Speaker 1>I do know. So this is a glade in Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>And uh, and you know, he told me he used
<v Speaker 1>to come here. He his he got into plants through hunting.
<v Speaker 1>He liked hunting whatever, and uh, and so he was
<v Speaker 1>trying to make the land more palatable for wildlife. And
<v Speaker 1>he knew when it's all smothered, the deer and turkey's
<v Speaker 1>didn't like hanging out there. So he came in here.
<v Speaker 1>This is a spot he'd been hanging out since a kid.
<v Speaker 1>It was like his neighbour's property. His neighbor didn't care
<v Speaker 1>if they would go there and fuck around his kids.
<v Speaker 1>So and so he showed up and and you know
<v Speaker 1>he didn't know either. It was like I just sprayed
<v Speaker 1>round up on everything because I wanted all the plants
<v Speaker 1>to die so the deer and turkeys would hang out.
<v Speaker 1>And he's just annihilated it. And then after a few
<v Speaker 1>months he realized it wasn't working. Like there, you can't
<v Speaker 1>just clear all the shit out of it. Like yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you're you're getting rid of the smothered mess, right, because
<v Speaker 1>remember you get a lot of rainfall. It's at fucking Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>Shit grows really quick. And you know, these were all
<v Speaker 1>areas that burned and the native people who lived there
<v Speaker 1>were absolutely burning this, you know, either on one year
<v Speaker 1>or three year, five year intervals, and so he realized, like,
<v Speaker 1>why are they not coming? He realized because actually a
<v Speaker 1>lot of those plants they needed. They ate them, They
<v Speaker 1>they you know, ate the seeds, they ate the lea whatever.
<v Speaker 1>And so then he started burning. And when he started burning,
<v Speaker 1>shit took off like you'd burn at the right time
<v Speaker 1>of year. There's a science to it. It's not super complicated,
<v Speaker 1>but there's a method to it, and the ship would
<v Speaker 1>just take off. And so then he started seeing all
<v Speaker 1>kinds of plants he'd never seen before popping up. The
<v Speaker 1>seeds had been in there for decades, but the fire
<v Speaker 1>aheadn't and so the seeds didn't germinate, and so all
<v Speaker 1>this shit came up and he saw how great it was,
<v Speaker 1>and the wildlife came back. They started hanging out, and
<v Speaker 1>that's that's how he got into Bondy. This is Native
<v Speaker 1>Habitat project. He's got like a big social media page.
<v Speaker 1>He gets paid it through consults and shit, and he's
<v Speaker 1>doing a lot of good work. Spread we have different
<v Speaker 1>target audiences, needless to say, but uh, he's doing a
<v Speaker 1>lot of good work, you know, getting people to uh,
<v Speaker 1>to just appreciate the living world around them, and that's
<v Speaker 1>all it should be. It shouldn't be some political shit, man.
<v Speaker 1>I just I don't give a fuck about arguing about
<v Speaker 1>conflict algorithms with people. I've got my opinions. I'll keep
<v Speaker 1>it to myself. As long as you can kill your
<v Speaker 1>lana plants and fucking native plants, that's all I care about.
<v Speaker 1>The ship is sinking anyways, guys, you know it's anyway
<v Speaker 1>I put the you know, skip the slide one seventeen
<v Speaker 1>because this is all just Central Texas stuff. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>I could talk forever about all these plants. They're so
<v Speaker 1>fucking cool. This orchid is pollinated. It it emits pheromones
<v Speaker 1>that mimic the smell or the alert pheromones of aphids.
<v Speaker 1>Like when aphids are being eaten, they emit a pheromone,
<v Speaker 1>they emit a smell to warn other aphids, stay the
<v Speaker 1>fuck away, our predators here. And so that's what this
<v Speaker 1>orchid does. It produces pheromones that mimic aphids, the alert
<v Speaker 1>pheromones of aphids, so that it gets the predators of
<v Speaker 1>aphids to come pollinate the thing. And that's one of
<v Speaker 1>the eggs of a hoverfly. A hoverfly is a predatory
<v Speaker 1>fly that comes and eats aphids. Fucking wild. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you see, you start, you start looking closer, and you
<v Speaker 1>realize how how close all this shit is, how specific
<v Speaker 1>some of this shit is. You know, how long did
<v Speaker 1>that relationship take to evolve? All right, let's get the
<v Speaker 1>fuck out here, let's keep going we at anyway. No,
<v Speaker 1>you're landing local biota. Here's the native prairie flower. They're
<v Speaker 1>going off right now, Gentiana Andrews. I was at the
<v Speaker 1>Luri Garden and uh north of the Art Institute yesterday.
<v Speaker 1>They before and Gentiana's were everywhere. They got you know this,
<v Speaker 1>they got Gentiano's going. It's a great They got some
<v Speaker 1>non natives in there too, but they're not invasive. Right
<v Speaker 1>right there in downtown Chicago. Blew my fucking mind. Man,
<v Speaker 1>there's gentiana down here. So no your land. So it's
<v Speaker 1>again herbaceous perennials. What's that mean? The top dies every year.
<v Speaker 1>The roots stay alive. The roots can live for decades,
<v Speaker 1>in some cases centuries, but the tops die. The vegge
<v Speaker 1>dies every year. Right, it gets cold, that's too cold
<v Speaker 1>to grow whatever, So they they just close up shop
<v Speaker 1>and go dormant, right, and then so this, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>that's the other cool thing about the prairie, the tall
<v Speaker 1>grass prairie too. I mean, some of these prairies, like
<v Speaker 1>that one at the Field Museum will get so so
<v Speaker 1>thick that you can't see through it, and it's six
<v Speaker 1>feet tall. None of that was there three months prior. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it's gone. It's gone for the winter, and in two
<v Speaker 1>more months it'll be completely gone. They'll just be a
<v Speaker 1>pile of dead stems and leaves on the ground. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>some bumblebees overwintering in this stems. Maybe some birds as
<v Speaker 1>they're migrating south coming by to come pick seeds out
<v Speaker 1>of the flower heads and you know, eat at the
<v Speaker 1>buffet and then before moving on. But they're gone. So
<v Speaker 1>here's some of the cool prairie plants. Ciympio trichem Nova
<v Speaker 1>angling New England. Aster is the common name. Really easy
<v Speaker 1>to grow, really fucking easy, like happy as a pig
<v Speaker 1>and shit. And the climate of Chicago. You put it
<v Speaker 1>in full sun, you plant it in May, it turns
<v Speaker 1>into this within a few months and it's just blooming
<v Speaker 1>and covered in cool bugs. Here's what I'm talking about.
<v Speaker 1>With that U that one hundredth meridian. I mean, you
<v Speaker 1>can see it clear as they evaporative intex eridity index. Right,
<v Speaker 1>how does the commodity change as you go east to west?
<v Speaker 1>And I put this up there because this is when
<v Speaker 1>I first got into native plants. I thought, you know,
<v Speaker 1>the people I always heard talking about it, it'd be
<v Speaker 1>like some snobby white dude from North Berkeley. That's that
<v Speaker 1>native you're into. I wasn't when I got into botany.
<v Speaker 1>I wasn't into natives. I was into, you know, very
<v Speaker 1>specific families of plants, like I was growing right, like
<v Speaker 1>growing redwoods because they would grow tall and grow fast,
<v Speaker 1>and I knew they'd fuck up the concrete later. And
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to just grow shit that could live. I
<v Speaker 1>will live me, right, And so I was planting all
<v Speaker 1>kinds of shit, you know. And I did graffiti as
<v Speaker 1>a kid, so I already had it in me, like cool,
<v Speaker 1>I can affect the public surroundings and you know, and
<v Speaker 1>start affecting the I see these places, I don't like
<v Speaker 1>the way they look. They look like shit, I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>change them, fuck it. And so I started planting gorilla gardening,
<v Speaker 1>as they call I started planting stuff illegally, just you
<v Speaker 1>know where. I saw that there were holes in the
<v Speaker 1>city's infrastructure, and so I started doing that. But I
<v Speaker 1>realized if the first year it wasn't working. I was
<v Speaker 1>planting dawn redwoods, which are like a they're great trees,
<v Speaker 1>you know, they grow fast as hell. They can take
<v Speaker 1>Chicago winters. But they're like Riparian trees in China. They lived.
<v Speaker 1>They went extinct in North America two million years ago,
<v Speaker 1>at least according to the fossils. But I was planting
<v Speaker 1>those everywhere. They grow in floodplains in China a right,
<v Speaker 1>But I was planting them in Oakland, California, where it
<v Speaker 1>doesn't rain from like April to October, right the hottest seasons,
<v Speaker 1>the driest season, and so needless say, they were dying.
<v Speaker 1>So I started I started thinking about Someone was like, well,
<v Speaker 1>why don't you try planting cypresses. California's got a lot
<v Speaker 1>of cool cypress species and they're all drought tolerant and
<v Speaker 1>as long as you plant them in the winter, that
<v Speaker 1>get established. And so I started doing that. But to
<v Speaker 1>get seeds, no one grew them. So I would go
<v Speaker 1>find out where they grew, and I'd trek out there
<v Speaker 1>my little beater Honda Civic, which I really fucked up.
<v Speaker 1>I put a lot of work into ruining that car.
<v Speaker 1>Was proud of it. And so I would go out there.
<v Speaker 1>And as I go out to these places to collect
<v Speaker 1>cypress seeds, which grew great as long as I planted
<v Speaker 1>them in the ground on this you know, abandoned freeway
<v Speaker 1>where this freeway had once stood, the cypress freeway. As
<v Speaker 1>long as I planted them in a wet season and
<v Speaker 1>went there, they made it through the summer fine. And
<v Speaker 1>some of them are still standing. They're like thirty feet tall.
<v Speaker 1>And so when I was going out to get seeds,
<v Speaker 1>I would go to these beautiful places. You know, I
<v Speaker 1>was like looking up for barium records, trying to find
<v Speaker 1>where these things had been collected. And that kind of
<v Speaker 1>helped get me more into Bonnie as a science. But
<v Speaker 1>when I'd be going out there, I would see all
<v Speaker 1>these other cool plants and I'd be like, what the
<v Speaker 1>fuck is that? That looks weird as hell? What is it?
<v Speaker 1>It's like a it looks like a bright red lily
<v Speaker 1>growing in this fucked up volcanic area, Like what is that?
<v Speaker 1>I want to know what that is, you know, because
<v Speaker 1>it looked so cool, and being in these places felt
<v Speaker 1>so nice. You know. I spent most of my youth
<v Speaker 1>pissed off and wanting to fuck things up and just
<v Speaker 1>not in a good place emotionally or mentally. And suddenly
<v Speaker 1>that was starting to go away. I was in these
<v Speaker 1>beautiful places, and I was like, Wow, it feels nice
<v Speaker 1>being out here. I want to spend more time out here,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But I didn't know what any of the
<v Speaker 1>stuff I was looking at for. I was just looking
<v Speaker 1>for this one species, so I want to know more.
<v Speaker 1>And as I got to know more, I realized a
<v Speaker 1>lot of this stuff was really cool, and I realized
<v Speaker 1>I had a context. And when, especially when I started
<v Speaker 1>planting those cypresses on the Mendela Parkway in Oakland, that's
<v Speaker 1>when I realized it had a context. These things didn't
<v Speaker 1>die as long as I planted them in winter. They
<v Speaker 1>took off. They did fine. I planted like thirty or
<v Speaker 1>forty of these things and they did great. And that's
<v Speaker 1>when it clicked. I was like, Oh, the native thing
<v Speaker 1>isn't just you know, some like elitist purity badge. Like
<v Speaker 1>there's actually a rhyme and a reason this makes sense.
<v Speaker 1>These evolved in the climate of California, probably over millions
<v Speaker 1>of years, and so it makes sense that they're doing
<v Speaker 1>good here. So it makes it easier on me. I
<v Speaker 1>don't need to irrigate them. I could just dump some mulch.
<v Speaker 1>And so that's when it started to really click, and
<v Speaker 1>I started to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
<v Speaker 1>And so it just became something of pragmatism, and that's
<v Speaker 1>what this is. You know, if you're living in Phoenix
<v Speaker 1>where the iridity index is greater than five, and you
<v Speaker 1>give what is it, six inches of rain some years,
<v Speaker 1>If that then it's one hundred and fifteen degrees, why
<v Speaker 1>would you try to plant crape myrtles there. You might
<v Speaker 1>be able to keep them alive for a year or
<v Speaker 1>two by watering the shit out of them and jacking
<v Speaker 1>up your water bill, but eventually they're gonna die. There's
<v Speaker 1>just there's just too much moisture being pulled out of
<v Speaker 1>the leaves. And they're not able. They didn't evolve there.
<v Speaker 1>They don't have any of the adaptations like hairs on
<v Speaker 1>leaves and reduced leaf service area that the native plants
<v Speaker 1>have to endure that climate. The native plants were literally
<v Speaker 1>built the natural selection for that place. They're tied to place.
<v Speaker 1>And this is something like the invasive species denialists always
<v Speaker 1>don't get. It's if they're tied to place, they're literally
<v Speaker 1>the same way. I could grow a thousand tomatoes and
<v Speaker 1>I expose all of them to high heat and humidity,
<v Speaker 1>and most of them die because tomatoes are native to
<v Speaker 1>northern Chile and southern Peru, where it's not hot and humid.
<v Speaker 1>It's hot and dry, right, And I could pick the
<v Speaker 1>two that survive and then propagate those get into fruit
<v Speaker 1>and flowering and fruit. Take those seeds, breed them again,
<v Speaker 1>and maybe half those will die, only half this time,
<v Speaker 1>and then I'll breed the other half, and I just
<v Speaker 1>keep selecting. The environment's been doing that for millions of years.
<v Speaker 1>If people can breed kale and broccoli and cauliflower from
<v Speaker 1>the same fucking species right in a matter of a
<v Speaker 1>few centuries, what can nature and habitat do in a
<v Speaker 1>few million. And that's why you get all this wonderful variation.
<v Speaker 1>This is just basic Darwinian biology, you know. And when
<v Speaker 1>you make the connection to to human breeding, which is
<v Speaker 1>what we've done with all our crops, and with poodles
<v Speaker 1>from wolves, same species, right, it starts to connect, right,
<v Speaker 1>like pugs, poodles, great danes, same fucking species. Right. So
<v Speaker 1>if we can do it, why can't the land over
<v Speaker 1>greatly increased amounts of time? Right, So you've got it.
<v Speaker 1>You've got dry the dry West. The music East music
<v Speaker 1>just means good amount of rainfall, right, not too much,
<v Speaker 1>but enough, right. And so the way that affects the
<v Speaker 1>nighttime temperature is important too. You get more humidity. Water's
<v Speaker 1>got a high heat capacity. That's why it's so muggy.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the Chicago summer, it doesn't cool off that
<v Speaker 1>much at night on maybe cool off twenty degrees. But
<v Speaker 1>you go to like the fucking Chihuahua or Sonoran desert,
<v Speaker 1>it'll be one hundred degrees during the day and then
<v Speaker 1>you get a forty degree temperature drop by six am.
<v Speaker 1>Because there's no water vapor in the air, it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>hold heat. Right. So this is how specific this shit gets.
<v Speaker 1>This is why one plant isn't as good as the other.
<v Speaker 1>As traditional horticulture has been thinking about, Oh it's a
<v Speaker 1>crape murder, it'll just stick it in the ground of water,
<v Speaker 1>it'll be fine. Don't war it's a Bradford paar, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Put it in the ground and water the shit out
<v Speaker 1>of it. It can be fine. You can have a
<v Speaker 1>golf course in Scottsdale, Arizona. Who gives a fuck, it'll
<v Speaker 1>be fine. Right, It's ridiculous. You got to quit pretending
<v Speaker 1>you don't live where you live, right, Get some context
<v Speaker 1>for where you live. So this is the species of vernonia.
<v Speaker 1>This grows in central Texas. We get species of vernonia
<v Speaker 1>Vernonia missourika that you could see at any of the
<v Speaker 1>cool prairies that grow in the Chicago area. There's some
<v Speaker 1>planted down by the Field Museum, some Vernonia species. They
<v Speaker 1>give magenta flowers that relate to sunflowers. Dope fucking plant
<v Speaker 1>pollinators love them, right, But this is what central Texas
<v Speaker 1>did to a vernonia. This has a direct ancestor with
<v Speaker 1>the vernonia that grows here that's got big, broad leaves
<v Speaker 1>and doesn't have as many leaf hairs. But this thing
<v Speaker 1>evolved on the thin soiled prairies and hill country of
<v Speaker 1>Texas where the limestone is right at the surface. So
<v Speaker 1>what did it do well the landscape over a few
<v Speaker 1>th thousand generations, probably slowly bred for longer leaves, reduced
<v Speaker 1>surface area, and a shit ton of hairs on that wire.
<v Speaker 1>Hair is good for plants. What do they do if
<v Speaker 1>you're growing in a hot and dry area? What do
<v Speaker 1>they do? Let's make this a dialogue. We'll make it fun.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck the hairs do for plants? Why do
<v Speaker 1>you see hairy plants? As you start going further west?
<v Speaker 1>U V protections. Nice to see her by the way. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>u V protection. That's that's good. You see that. Up
<v Speaker 1>with it because hairs on high elevation plants in the
<v Speaker 1>tropics too, where it doesn't get hot and dry. But
<v Speaker 1>u V protection. But but what do they do? Like?
<v Speaker 1>This is what they teach you in botanical in botany school,
<v Speaker 1>they say it he creases boundary layer of humidity. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>what the fuck does that mean? Boundary layer? Human? It
<v Speaker 1>doesn't mean anything, right, But start thinking about this. Say
<v Speaker 1>this new puppy, I'm taking care of, not her, not you.
<v Speaker 1>You knows. I got my jeans in a corner as
<v Speaker 1>I'm sleeping. He peas all over him. I got am.
<v Speaker 1>I put them in a washing machine. The fucking dryer
<v Speaker 1>is broken. I gotta dry them in a garage. Right.
<v Speaker 1>It's hot in the garage because it's summer in Chicago, right,
<v Speaker 1>So they should dry quick, right, So I put them
<v Speaker 1>in the garage and they'll dry eventually. But if you
<v Speaker 1>really want to speed up how fast they dry, what
<v Speaker 1>do you do? You put a fan on it? Right,
<v Speaker 1>because that airflow pulls the moisture out of the pissed jeans, right.
<v Speaker 1>It's the same thing with the plant. So so we
<v Speaker 1>know that increasing the airflow across something helps pull the
<v Speaker 1>moisture out of it. Right. For Still, where do the
<v Speaker 1>hairs come in? Though? How do how do how do
<v Speaker 1>the hairs help reduce airflow? Right? Now, Let's pretend you
<v Speaker 1>live in a you know, a farmhouse in Nebraska out
<v Speaker 1>there on the open planes, and the winds just come
<v Speaker 1>barreling across that that that landscape that's got no topography
<v Speaker 1>to it, right, high wind gusts. Right, what if farmers
<v Speaker 1>do if they're they got a farmhouse and they want
<v Speaker 1>to the wind is rattling the windows and keeping them
<v Speaker 1>up at night, and it's fucking loud and it just sucks. Right,
<v Speaker 1>it does, by the way, too, it's harsh. Winds can
<v Speaker 1>really fucking you know, harsh your mellow when you're trying
<v Speaker 1>to sleep. So what would they do? You plant trees,
<v Speaker 1>you get like some shitty Lombardy poplars, and you plant
<v Speaker 1>the wind break, right, what a hairs look like in
<v Speaker 1>cross section on a leaf. They look like shitty Lombardy poplars.
<v Speaker 1>They break up the airflow that moves across the leaf,
<v Speaker 1>and they're gonna prevent that wind, coupled with the heat
<v Speaker 1>and the one hundred and five degree Texas heat from
<v Speaker 1>pulling moisture out of that. And it's crazy because I
<v Speaker 1>forgot to put the fucking slant up again. I should have.
<v Speaker 1>But as you go further west, As you go further west,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, you go to the Mojave Desert, the driest
<v Speaker 1>desert in North America, and there's plants that are so
<v Speaker 1>covered in hair, so covered in hair, the leaves look
<v Speaker 1>white like funeral sage, so called because it's from the
<v Speaker 1>Funeral Mountains in Death Valley. It only grows out of
<v Speaker 1>cracks and limestone. It's got tiny flowers because again you
<v Speaker 1>gotta shrink the surface area that's losing more. Sure, but
<v Speaker 1>the leaves look like fucking point the Q tips. There's
<v Speaker 1>no green. You can't see any green on this plant.
<v Speaker 1>It's entirely white and it's just the sun is so
<v Speaker 1>intense it's still reaching the epidermal tissue in the mesa
<v Speaker 1>phil cells where the chloroplasts are. But it's the mojaved
<v Speaker 1>death Valley has built a plant that looks like a
<v Speaker 1>fucking Q tip. You know it's crazy. And you see
<v Speaker 1>this everywhere. You see the same traits in different plants
<v Speaker 1>wherever you go. If it's like South Africa, similar climate
<v Speaker 1>to parts of California, I see the same traits, completely
<v Speaker 1>different plant families. You see the same traits. I gotta
<v Speaker 1>get a better thing. No offense to the Vernonia lyndheimrit
<v Speaker 1>but I need a better example. I really should have
<v Speaker 1>put the feuderal stage photo of so we know it
<v Speaker 1>feels good to be in nature. Here's all the fucking
<v Speaker 1>peer viewed studies pulled off Google scholar that show we
<v Speaker 1>don't really need these. This is just eye candy fluff filler.
<v Speaker 1>But it feels good. You know, Like where would you
<v Speaker 1>rather spend your time like against like a fucking Amazon warehouse,
<v Speaker 1>you know wall, or like a in a prairie? What's
<v Speaker 1>pretty er scenery? Right? So now we get how to
<v Speaker 1>kill right how to kill a lawn, And there's a
<v Speaker 1>number of different methods you could do. A sod cutter.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even really advise that anymore. Cardboard and truckle
<v Speaker 1>at a mold, stop watering bit by bit. This was
<v Speaker 1>a friend's lawn. My couple friends of mine, their school teachers.
<v Speaker 1>They don't make a lot of money. I did this
<v Speaker 1>for them for free, just because I would go to
<v Speaker 1>visit them and I got tired of looking at their
<v Speaker 1>fucking lawns. So I said, if you rent me a
<v Speaker 1>sod cutter, I will go rip that shit up. And
<v Speaker 1>so that's what I did. You rent one of these things.
<v Speaker 1>It's like one thirty from home, despot. It's a pain
<v Speaker 1>in the ass. It's like it's harder than moving a body.
<v Speaker 1>It's got to weigh like three hundred pounds, and it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, you're worried it's gonna fall on you or
<v Speaker 1>it's just a pain in the ass. You gotta get
<v Speaker 1>in the truck. But it works overnight. This took an
<v Speaker 1>hour to do. It's just like mowing a lawn and
<v Speaker 1>then you flip the lawn over so that the sod
<v Speaker 1>is exposed to kill the roots. And then you just
<v Speaker 1>use it as mulch. It makes your yard look like
<v Speaker 1>the trenches a Kent from World War One. It's nice
<v Speaker 1>if you got stiff neighbors, you know, cause it's kind
<v Speaker 1>of I kind of do spiteful shit like that. It's like, hey,
<v Speaker 1>you fucking motherfucker, you look at I know you look
<v Speaker 1>up every time you drive by my yard. It pisces
<v Speaker 1>you off and and it makes me a little happy. Right.
<v Speaker 1>So that's one way, But an easier way is just
<v Speaker 1>that I just call it the shovel at a low
<v Speaker 1>angle method, and I'll show you the shovel I used to.
<v Speaker 1>It's the best. It's I got one on my truck
<v Speaker 1>right now. Right. So this is after this is in Lagrange.
<v Speaker 1>This is somewhere on the north side, after we filmed
<v Speaker 1>Kill Your Lana had a bunch of plants left over
<v Speaker 1>from the nurseries we worked with. Landscapers kind of sucked
<v Speaker 1>except for one or two of them, but the nurseries
<v Speaker 1>were all cool, and so I just was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>let's go plant this shit. Like who's who's got like
<v Speaker 1>a hell strip, you know, between the sidewalk and the
<v Speaker 1>street and is down to let me plant and a
<v Speaker 1>number of people hit me up, like five or six people,
<v Speaker 1>and so there I was like a tweaker at nine
<v Speaker 1>thirty pm at night on the north side and just
<v Speaker 1>digging up, coming at like a low angle with this
<v Speaker 1>narrow shovel. You're coming at a low angle. And this
<v Speaker 1>is the This is how I know the grassroots don't
<v Speaker 1>go there deep because you can just literally just pry
<v Speaker 1>under like a crowbar and just start just fucking jabbing
<v Speaker 1>it and then rip it up. It's a pain in
<v Speaker 1>the Assid's that you're sweating like a pig. It's a
<v Speaker 1>good workout, but it works. And you don't have to
<v Speaker 1>rent the sod cutter, right and you can do this.
<v Speaker 1>I mean this took me like twenty minutes. It's looked
<v Speaker 1>like shit. It doesn't look like anything right now. Someone
<v Speaker 1>sent me photos of this from two months ago and
<v Speaker 1>it's like a fucking dense prairie. It looks amazing. You
<v Speaker 1>just got to get the shit in there. Their natives
<v Speaker 1>they'll do fine. Get the shit in there, mulch around them,
<v Speaker 1>don't fucking worry about it. You know, maybe you put
<v Speaker 1>a rock in front of or something so no one
<v Speaker 1>comes and mows it. Later on or some you know,
<v Speaker 1>dogs don't piss on whatever, but just get it in
<v Speaker 1>the ground. That took me twenty thirty minutes. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, same thing here. I wasn't finished with this.
<v Speaker 1>I actually did the whole thing. But you know, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>sure it's you know, the cons are it's not instant.
<v Speaker 1>It looks messy, but SODA's a fucking lawn so and
<v Speaker 1>then mulch. Mulch is so important. The benefits of mulch
<v Speaker 1>are threefold. Right, you can get it for free from
<v Speaker 1>chip drop dot com. It's like a website they will
<v Speaker 1>hook you up with. It's really good in big cities
<v Speaker 1>because you know, there's more of a they work with Arborius,
<v Speaker 1>and there's more of an Arborius based there for them
<v Speaker 1>to work with it. Chip Drop doesn't work where I live.
<v Speaker 1>It's too I'm too like back back corner of the country.
<v Speaker 1>But you can also call Arborius and say, hey, you
<v Speaker 1>need a dump some mulch. I got a spot for you.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of cities. I know in Chicago they got
<v Speaker 1>municipal yards where you can go pick up mulch. But
<v Speaker 1>you know you can also go get cardboard, throw cardboard down.
<v Speaker 1>It acts as like a biodegrade of a weed fabric.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even do that anymore. Right, I've got different
<v Speaker 1>methods now, and I'll get into them. But the mult
<v Speaker 1>is important because it keeps the sun from hitting the ground.
<v Speaker 1>If you've just if a lawn is a disturbed environment, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's disturbed every week when they mow. It's bare ground, right,
<v Speaker 1>And so that sun is just hitting it and heating
<v Speaker 1>it up, and it's heating up the roots. And you
<v Speaker 1>can plant stuff there. But say you're not able to
<v Speaker 1>plant stuff in the cool season like here, it will
<v Speaker 1>be April or May. You don't get it till till
<v Speaker 1>July or August. Right, those plants are getting stressed. I
<v Speaker 1>mean they'll grow, but they're gonna be stressed. Roots don't
<v Speaker 1>like to be hot, and they're getting cooked in the
<v Speaker 1>solar oven every day. And so what do you do.
<v Speaker 1>You put mulch over it, and it prevents the sun
<v Speaker 1>from hitting the ground and helps keep the ground cool. Right.
<v Speaker 1>And then the other thing too, is that you have
<v Speaker 1>to water less. It's there's less of apple transpiration because
<v Speaker 1>the water can't can't as easily evaporate from the ground
<v Speaker 1>because it's got this top dressing emotion. And the third
<v Speaker 1>benefit is as this shit breaks down, and I always
<v Speaker 1>recommend don't don't you know, don't be uh, don't be
<v Speaker 1>shy about it. You put it thicker than you think
<v Speaker 1>you'll need, because it breaks. It breaks down quick. Like
<v Speaker 1>you put it eight inches of mulch, it'll break down
<v Speaker 1>to four inches by the end of the season. The
<v Speaker 1>microbes and the fung guy, all that shit goes quick,
<v Speaker 1>and so you get this massive blossom. It's like a
<v Speaker 1>compost teep oh, this massive blossom of microbial life. But
<v Speaker 1>then as that microbial life dies, it releases a ton
<v Speaker 1>of nutrients into the soil and it improves the soil quality.
<v Speaker 1>So it's great. You just want to keep it away
<v Speaker 1>from the ends of the plants because fungi will go
<v Speaker 1>for the mulch, and if it's right up against the
<v Speaker 1>stem of a young sapling or something, you know, those
<v Speaker 1>enzymes will eventually they can start eating the sapling, they
<v Speaker 1>can start eating the cambium of the sampling. This is
<v Speaker 1>a beautiful lawn right here. This is just neglect, which
<v Speaker 1>brings us to our third way to kill. Just stop watering,
<v Speaker 1>right and this is what all the lawns look like
<v Speaker 1>around me, because I mean I fly a drone over
<v Speaker 1>it's still it was a fucking one hundred and three
<v Speaker 1>degrees where I live today, Like I get weather updates,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just hot as balls. This motherfucker. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's kind of funny. You're out there, You're like Jesus
<v Speaker 1>christ Man, holy fuck. And so this is what you get,
<v Speaker 1>this patchy shit and maybe there's grubs in there or
<v Speaker 1>a fungus. I love it. It looks fucking terrific. It's
<v Speaker 1>like a nice mosaic. It's a mosaic. It's not this monoculture.
<v Speaker 1>And so with this, what I would do. I wouldn't
<v Speaker 1>even rip up the lawn. I wouldn't go spray round
<v Speaker 1>up on the little bits that are still alive. I
<v Speaker 1>wouldn't do any of that. I just go start, Okay,
<v Speaker 1>what's them? We'll plant some stuff here. And then the
<v Speaker 1>two things I think about when I plant it is
<v Speaker 1>where's the sun? And how big is what I'm planting
<v Speaker 1>going to get? Because if you know, maybe I want,
<v Speaker 1>if I want something that's going to create shade, I'll
<v Speaker 1>you know, I'll think about where I plant that. I
<v Speaker 1>think about that how big is it gonna get and
<v Speaker 1>where's the sun? And then how is that sun going
<v Speaker 1>to affect everything else? If you're doing a prairie landscape,
<v Speaker 1>you don't. You're obviously not planting a lot of trees
<v Speaker 1>and shit. Just start throwing it in there, fuck it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and then you create a little path or
<v Speaker 1>something because you want to bring people in here to
<v Speaker 1>hang out. It's not about it's not just like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>plant it and hands off. If you want to get
<v Speaker 1>motherfuckers in there to hang out and enjoy the things
<v Speaker 1>and look at the stuff, and maybe someone's gonna go
<v Speaker 1>in there and sit on a bench and smoke a doobie,
<v Speaker 1>either gonna go fucking hang out and relax or have
<v Speaker 1>a phone call or whatever you want to invite people
<v Speaker 1>into it. Right, So this is great. So I would
<v Speaker 1>just start planting shit here in all the bear spots
<v Speaker 1>and then water it, mulch around it, and then as
<v Speaker 1>the lawn continues to grow, I'll come in and maybe
<v Speaker 1>I'll weed whack the shit out of the lawn leave
<v Speaker 1>alone the stuff that I planted, Right, You just make
<v Speaker 1>it easier for the off I planted to outcompete the
<v Speaker 1>lawn and just keep doing that until the lawn is
<v Speaker 1>so weakened because now the stuff is not letting it
<v Speaker 1>get any light. It's so big the natives that I
<v Speaker 1>planted that then you can just go in with a
<v Speaker 1>shovel and remove it. This is great. This is near
<v Speaker 1>Jerry Wilhelm's spot. It was in Glenn Ellen or glen
<v Speaker 1>View or Glenn fucking whatever the fuck that one of
<v Speaker 1>the Glenn suburbs on the northwest side. And we rolled
<v Speaker 1>up here this is for kill your lawn. And I
<v Speaker 1>was going through the neighborhood and I'm like, oh god,
<v Speaker 1>these look like some fucking stiffs. This does not look good,
<v Speaker 1>you know, this is like a e and and then
<v Speaker 1>uh in Jerry's house is on the other on the
<v Speaker 1>other side of the block. But we said, we met
<v Speaker 1>this lady. Her husband's a member of the cult. Still
<v Speaker 1>that's not him, that's our producer, David Back. They're really
<v Speaker 1>nice guy. He's loose, but uh but but her husband's,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a member of a cult. He likes the
<v Speaker 1>lawn probably needs to be dosed. Maybe she'll get to
<v Speaker 1>it one day. But but you know, so he wouldn't
<v Speaker 1>let her kill the whole lawn. But she was really
<v Speaker 1>into plants. And gardening and bees and whatever and shit.
<v Speaker 1>So he said, ah, you can have this little section.
<v Speaker 1>And it's like the size of a bathtub, maybe a
<v Speaker 1>little bit bigger, but it was I couldn't believe. It
<v Speaker 1>was covered in like, you know, there's twenty different species
<v Speaker 1>of prairie plants there. It was covered in cool insects.
<v Speaker 1>It was fucking alive. You could hear it. It was dope.
<v Speaker 1>I was sitting there looking at'im like, oh, you got this,
<v Speaker 1>and you got this, and you got this, uh this,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the Sympio tricum and all these different I mean,
<v Speaker 1>all these plants I know and love, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>so you can do this. This probably took her maybe
<v Speaker 1>a weekend. You know. You go get the plants, preferably,
<v Speaker 1>I like the plant plugs, like the smaller stuff. You know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe you put a temporary you know, couple sticks around
<v Speaker 1>it to prevent people from stepping on or whatever, give
<v Speaker 1>it some visual gravity. And then you you know, she
<v Speaker 1>got the nice flagstone around it, you know, as a margin.
<v Speaker 1>And so maybe as her husband slowly starts to come around,
<v Speaker 1>she can start doing that bit by bit and the
<v Speaker 1>rest of the fucking thing. I mean, you know, really
<v Speaker 1>you got you gotta those people. I'm not against it,
<v Speaker 1>you know. It's so they're a little scared at first.
<v Speaker 1>You got to sit there with them, you know. But
<v Speaker 1>it's work, but it's the outcome is good. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>here's some long kills we did. It's just ecological secession.
<v Speaker 1>Well before you eat the longkas. So it's just ecological secession. Right,
<v Speaker 1>This is just this is there's a science to this
<v Speaker 1>ecological secession. Same thing like a lava flow in Hawaii,
<v Speaker 1>a fucking or a human clearcut, or a wildfire. You
<v Speaker 1>knock everything down, annihilate everything. It's a process. So what
<v Speaker 1>do you get happening? Right? The lawn is right here?
<v Speaker 1>You get a wildfire coming through. Right, what comes back
<v Speaker 1>the shit that can take the full sun, the full exposure,
<v Speaker 1>that can grow happy as a pig and shit in
<v Speaker 1>full sun and heat and takes off right. And what
<v Speaker 1>they're doing is they're breaking up the soil. They're creating
<v Speaker 1>a little microclimate of humidity, they're keeping the sun from
<v Speaker 1>hitting the ground. They're a thing like a living mult
<v Speaker 1>It's that first step. They're prepping the land for the
<v Speaker 1>ship that can't get established that easily. Maybe the seedlings
<v Speaker 1>of a certain tree can't take full sun when they're little.
<v Speaker 1>They can only take it when they reached you know,
<v Speaker 1>a meter or too high. Those would be like the
<v Speaker 1>secondary succession species. And this is what they teach you
<v Speaker 1>in ecology class. This is out of a fucking ecology textbook, right,
<v Speaker 1>So that's what you're doing. It's the pioneer species, the
<v Speaker 1>primary secessional species, the shit that can take the full sun.
<v Speaker 1>It lives fast, it dies young, and produces a shit
<v Speaker 1>ton of seas. These are not long lived plants. Not surprisingly,
<v Speaker 1>most of the invasive species that you get all over
<v Speaker 1>the world are important pioneer species where they're native, the
<v Speaker 1>same way that our pioneer species like box elders and
<v Speaker 1>golden rods are invasive as hell in Europe. Right, it
<v Speaker 1>makes sense. They can deal with you know, having weed,
<v Speaker 1>having constantly being weed whacked or mode or you know,
<v Speaker 1>they're resistant to glycysa nervous sides, and they can tolerate
<v Speaker 1>growing out of cracks and sidewalks. So ecological secession, right,
<v Speaker 1>nice little diagram. Upatorium serotonum is another good one. You
<v Speaker 1>might have seen it, little white flower, a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>tiny white flowers. It gets like this tall. See it
<v Speaker 1>growing on them. You could probably find some growing in
<v Speaker 1>the fucking end behind here. Right. So this is a lot.
<v Speaker 1>This is in La Grange Park, Beautiful Lagrange Park, nice,
<v Speaker 1>nice bedroom community. Right. And so this was a bad case.
<v Speaker 1>So we had the landlord. He was one of these
<v Speaker 1>fucking indoctrinated motherfucker's no offense to him. You know, he
<v Speaker 1>probably needs to be dose too, but he he you
<v Speaker 1>know this is for kill your lawn. And we showed up.
<v Speaker 1>He showed us the plan he had and it was
<v Speaker 1>that paint by number ship, like this court is gonna
<v Speaker 1>be all yellow and then we'll put all the red
<v Speaker 1>flowers over here and then the blues over here. We said, no, no, no,
<v Speaker 1>we're not doing that. That's ridiculous. We know what the
<v Speaker 1>prairie looks like. This is a show about trying to
<v Speaker 1>mimic that we're going to recreate the prairie. And he
<v Speaker 1>didn't even do this. Hell strip man, I dug all
<v Speaker 1>this out by hand, right because we showed up, they'd
<v Speaker 1>already they'd already had the guys that did the sod
<v Speaker 1>cutter removal dip out the sod cutter wasn't there anymore,
<v Speaker 1>and he left this whole strip and I said this,
<v Speaker 1>you know what the fucking show is called, right, It's
<v Speaker 1>called kill your lawn. You guys left half the lawn.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck is this? And so I asked the
<v Speaker 1>guy that lives there, it's like get electrician or something.
<v Speaker 1>Really nice guy. He's like, you care if we take
<v Speaker 1>care to hellstrip? He's like, here, go ahead. So I
<v Speaker 1>went and did that, and that's what it looks like. Now,
<v Speaker 1>it's like it's lit up. This was like this is
<v Speaker 1>a year after it was planted. Right. Sylphium porfoliatum. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the fucking rebeccy is milkweeds, upatoriums, Sylphium terrament and nacum
<v Speaker 1>right there, you know. And I do this. I've done
<v Speaker 1>this a lot. I always get messages from people or
<v Speaker 1>from people that just saw, you know, they've heard me
<v Speaker 1>ranting about this for the last five years, and they're
<v Speaker 1>always excited, like, man, I did it. It was It's
<v Speaker 1>fucking great. I get these cool insects. They're always excited. Right.
<v Speaker 1>I spent like the first thirty five years of my
<v Speaker 1>life as a dedicated missing throw and then now I
<v Speaker 1>mean I feel more hopeful than I've ever felt when
<v Speaker 1>I get individual people writing me and telling me just
<v Speaker 1>the excitement. They're like little kids. Man. You know, It's
<v Speaker 1>like seeing my daughter like, go, you know, excited to
<v Speaker 1>tell me about some dinosaur while we're in the museum
<v Speaker 1>where someone else she's like, like, it's fucking great to see.
<v Speaker 1>You get like a dopamine and serotonin rush. It's what
<v Speaker 1>I feel when I get people sending me letters like this.
<v Speaker 1>It's crazy, man, It's crazy. I used to mean. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you spend time reading the news and focusing on the news,
<v Speaker 1>you're gonna think everything shit, the world is shit. You
<v Speaker 1>spend time in nature, you're gonna think, you're gonna think
<v Speaker 1>the world's incredible. Right, That's how it goes. I'm saying
<v Speaker 1>you shouldn't read the news. You gotta get a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of the salt, you know. But fucking a So
<v Speaker 1>that was that was this? I mean, this fucking yard
<v Speaker 1>is this is like a yard I would rubber neck
<v Speaker 1>as I'm driving by. I'm a fucking horrible driver too,
<v Speaker 1>by the way, just for that reason, I'm really good
<v Speaker 1>at you know, if I know, I'm really good at
<v Speaker 1>the whole element of surprise thing. Unless there's plants around, right,
<v Speaker 1>then I'm a hazard. But I slowed down. I slowed down.
<v Speaker 1>Then it pisses off the meatheads and the giant trucks
<v Speaker 1>behind me, and then I go slower. So anyway, so
<v Speaker 1>there's Monarda. We got coreopsis, we got we got Joe pieweed, eutropium,
<v Speaker 1>all this good shit, tons of insects you can't see,
<v Speaker 1>tons of cool shit, can't see. Here's someone someone's sent
<v Speaker 1>this in. See. This looks nice though. I really like
<v Speaker 1>the lines. I like every time I mow, I get
<v Speaker 1>those lines in it. It's very uniform and it's very
<v Speaker 1>pleasing to the eye. You sick. Fuck all right, so
<v Speaker 1>this I don't know where this is. It looks like
<v Speaker 1>it's somewhere. It's somewhere with seasons, and that's what it is.
<v Speaker 1>Now fucking incredible. And they got a little path they
<v Speaker 1>can walk through it and shit, and I bet it
<v Speaker 1>smells amazing, man, little prairie garden. And again it's all
<v Speaker 1>gone by November. It's eight inches tall in November. Just
<v Speaker 1>all maybe you get some sticks sticking up still. This
<v Speaker 1>is in California. This guy was really excited. I guess
<v Speaker 1>it's California by these hideous camellia bushes in the background,
<v Speaker 1>the topiaried camellias. But I like this guy's approach too.
<v Speaker 1>We put the rock in there so if the city
<v Speaker 1>comes and tries to mow it, they're gonna fuck up
<v Speaker 1>all the mowers. There's for booby traps. It's great. You
<v Speaker 1>could do rebar. You could get spools of thin gauge
<v Speaker 1>wire and just just sprinkle it in the gray. You said,
<v Speaker 1>that'll fuck up a mower. It goes around, it catches
<v Speaker 1>the wire. Now that there's like looks like the John
<v Speaker 1>Wayne Gacy house. And here's but now it doesn't look
<v Speaker 1>like the gaycy house so much more. You know, gay
<v Speaker 1>Sy was not in the native plants. I'll tell you that.
<v Speaker 1>You could tell, and you could see what it did
<v Speaker 1>to him, right, all these symptoms of the death cult.
<v Speaker 1>So you see, you got some fucking grass left over.
<v Speaker 1>But whatever, it's a process, man, it's a process, and
<v Speaker 1>you get to do it. You don't need to spend
<v Speaker 1>ninety k in fucking landscaping. I don't know where this was,
<v Speaker 1>but I was really impressed that they had comp TONI
<v Speaker 1>a pair of gree this is a rare plant. It's
<v Speaker 1>related to oaks. The seeds can last for one hundred
<v Speaker 1>years in the soil. That's an their fire sprout or
<v Speaker 1>they grow. I tend to grow on sand. I think
<v Speaker 1>there's some at. Someone told me there's some at. Who's
<v Speaker 1>your state natural area in northwest Indiana, which is uh
<v Speaker 1>I think like thirty minutes from from here. But great plant.
<v Speaker 1>It smells really good too. But yeah, it's related to oaks.
<v Speaker 1>I first saw in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I
<v Speaker 1>was like, what the fuck is this. I've never seen
<v Speaker 1>this before. It's amazing. And then I learned what it was,
<v Speaker 1>looked it up and yeah, it was blown away the
<v Speaker 1>species diversity. So yeah, we can't. We can't prevent habitat destruction.
<v Speaker 1>We can't stop the tumb work from growing. We can't.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we're not going to stop. We're not going
<v Speaker 1>to change the culture overnight. But you don't need to
<v Speaker 1>just do your bit. You know what you can do
<v Speaker 1>is you can create habitat. You can if you if
<v Speaker 1>you if you have respect for something, you learn about
<v Speaker 1>it right, you have you like a person, you want
<v Speaker 1>to know their name, right. It's the same thing with
<v Speaker 1>the plants. You just go out there and you don't
<v Speaker 1>got to memorize Latin names overnight. Just know what the
<v Speaker 1>fuck it is. Just go out there and look at it.
<v Speaker 1>Question and what is it doing? What is this flower doing?
<v Speaker 1>Why is it shaped like that? What this insect doing
<v Speaker 1>on it? What are these peats? What are these parts
<v Speaker 1>of the flower? What do they do? Right? If you're
<v Speaker 1>not asking questions about the world you live in, that
<v Speaker 1>means you're probably just following rules. That's fucking bleak, you know,
<v Speaker 1>It's what American schooling does follow rules. Don't critically think,
<v Speaker 1>memorize stuff, don't critically think I put this in there,
<v Speaker 1>because this is just the geologic time scale for you know,
<v Speaker 1>humans have been a species for three hundred thousand years
<v Speaker 1>about and for the vast majority of that time, we
<v Speaker 1>grew up knowing the plants around us, right wherever it was,
<v Speaker 1>whatever communities it was, Right and slowly that's been taken
<v Speaker 1>from us, right, we grew up knowing names of the plants,
<v Speaker 1>We grew up knowing what they did, or just being
<v Speaker 1>around them, being actually able to like walk outside our
<v Speaker 1>domiciles and seeing them growing. Right, it's only for the
<v Speaker 1>last two or three hundred years that that hasn't been
<v Speaker 1>the case, and much much less than that in other
<v Speaker 1>parts of the world. Right, So this stuff is part
<v Speaker 1>of our DNA. This is what we've been doing right
<v Speaker 1>the way we're living now from it. Living thirty five
<v Speaker 1>years of your life not knowing what the plants that
<v Speaker 1>grow around you are is a pretty new development in
<v Speaker 1>human civilization. And you can see what it's doing to us.
<v Speaker 1>If you think it's not connected to the fucking mental
<v Speaker 1>health of people that you see around you, your naive
<v Speaker 1>as hell, you know. I just you can see the
<v Speaker 1>effects of it. It's all tied together. How sick human
<v Speaker 1>civilization is is tied to how far apart we've gotten
<v Speaker 1>from what gave birth to us. So it is all shit.
<v Speaker 1>I've said out before. This is just as if you
<v Speaker 1>download a pdf. So what the plants that? What's the
<v Speaker 1>alternative to the gaudy, asked, tasteless landscaping of the death culf?
<v Speaker 1>What a fucking poet I am. I go outside and
<v Speaker 1>learn your local force. So here's a great thing to do.
<v Speaker 1>I naturalist. I tell this all the time. I used
<v Speaker 1>to not use it. Alan Rockefeller, a friend of mine
<v Speaker 1>who studies fun he got me into use it, and
<v Speaker 1>he said, you you should upload the eye naturalists. I said, hey,
<v Speaker 1>it sounds like a corny fucking thing to do. Actually,
<v Speaker 1>I'm not gonna do that. And then we were in
<v Speaker 1>the desert and Mexico together and he's like, you should
<v Speaker 1>upload this. This is a cool plant. And I was like, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you're right, I should, And so I started doing that.
<v Speaker 1>And what this has done to help me learn about
<v Speaker 1>the things around me is and say it. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's in so many other people, right, I mean
<v Speaker 1>I read I look at her barrier specimens, I read
<v Speaker 1>research papers like I like far down the Wormhole. Now.
<v Speaker 1>But if you don't have time for any of that,
<v Speaker 1>just look at this. There's a fucking app in a website.
<v Speaker 1>This is the website, right. So you want to explore
<v Speaker 1>your local floor. You go to the I naturalist dot
<v Speaker 1>org and then you hit explore and it comes up
<v Speaker 1>with these two field species and location. You type in
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family for species. It doesn't have to be a species.
<v Speaker 1>It can be a family, it can be an order,
<v Speaker 1>it can be whatever. Location put in Cook County, right,
<v Speaker 1>and then you get a list of everything in the
<v Speaker 1>sunflower family or the p family or whatever you look
<v Speaker 1>up that lives and that's been observed growing in Cook County.
<v Speaker 1>You know, some of that stuff will be invasive, but
<v Speaker 1>a lot of it will be native. If it's invasive,
<v Speaker 1>it'll have a little pink square up here with the
<v Speaker 1>with I in on it. It'll say I in or invasive.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you gotta you gotta do your research a
<v Speaker 1>little bit. You can. You can do that by clicking
<v Speaker 1>on the the species name and then I'll take you
<v Speaker 1>to the taxon page. The species page. You look at
<v Speaker 1>where the map is and if there's a big fucking
<v Speaker 1>splotch in Europe, you know, okay, this thing's probably invasive,
<v Speaker 1>right or or it's you know, or it's invasive in
<v Speaker 1>Europe or whatever. But you know, it's pretty easy to
<v Speaker 1>figure out what's native, what's invasive, and then you can,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, there are possibilities are endless. You can check
<v Speaker 1>out the taxonomy of it, what family it's in. Anytime
<v Speaker 1>you're learning a new plant, ask what family it's in.
<v Speaker 1>Why is that important? Because you'll start to see traits,
<v Speaker 1>shared traits as a result of ancestry, of shared inheritance
<v Speaker 1>that are that are symbolic of the family. And why
<v Speaker 1>is that beneficial? Because then you can be on vacation
<v Speaker 1>in fucking Mexico or California and you'll see a plant
<v Speaker 1>with a similar flower shape. We pay attention to flowers
<v Speaker 1>when grouping plants. It's what we look at mostly, not leaves.
<v Speaker 1>Flowers will tell you everything. Someone sells me a picture
<v Speaker 1>of leaves and I don't know that plant yet I
<v Speaker 1>always done the same thing. I gotta see flowers or fruits.
<v Speaker 1>That's the dead giveaway, right. And so you can be
<v Speaker 1>in California and you can if you've been paying attention
<v Speaker 1>to the plants in that family back home, You'll see
<v Speaker 1>that family in California and you say, I know what
<v Speaker 1>that that's a fucking legume. That's a p It's a
<v Speaker 1>p flower, you know, or it's a that's a sunflower. Family.
<v Speaker 1>You know what family it's s in, right, Maybe it's
<v Speaker 1>even the same genus, depending on how the level of similarity, right,
<v Speaker 1>So always ask what family it's s in. So this
<v Speaker 1>is stuff that's native to the Chicago region. These are
<v Speaker 1>all photos I took. We got cardinal flower down there
<v Speaker 1>on the South Side. We got this is invasive mostly
<v Speaker 1>along the freeways teasel, we got some of the Dahlia's
<v Speaker 1>lead plant, et cetera. But it's also when you observe
<v Speaker 1>stuff on our Naturalist, you're also creating your own log
<v Speaker 1>of everything you've seen. So you forget shit, you forget
<v Speaker 1>what the name of something is. You can look it up.
<v Speaker 1>What was that plant I saw in December of twenty
<v Speaker 1>twenty three? You can search by date, you can search
<v Speaker 1>by family. It's immensely helpful. I use it all the time.
<v Speaker 1>I've got so many fucking plant names in my head.
<v Speaker 1>What was that member at a legume family I saw
<v Speaker 1>in Chile in twenty nineteen. I can type in Chile
<v Speaker 1>legume family. I'll give me a list of everything I've seen. Boom,
<v Speaker 1>I see it, I get, I get reminded with the
<v Speaker 1>genus species. It's super helpful. Right. Illinois wildflowers is another
<v Speaker 1>helpful one. I don't like the word wildflowers because it
<v Speaker 1>puts the emphasis on the flower, right, And that's kind
<v Speaker 1>of what got us into this whole mess. It's just
<v Speaker 1>the flower, that's all that's important. Who cares about what
<v Speaker 1>that thing feeds or what feeds on it? Just about
<v Speaker 1>the flower? How's it? The flower? Pretty? I don't like
<v Speaker 1>the word wild flowers. But either way, this is a
<v Speaker 1>great fucking website and it's it's even cooler. It's organized
<v Speaker 1>by habitat prairie savannah. This would be like full sun,
<v Speaker 1>part shade woodland shades, like a shady, shady backyard in Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>You want to know what the plant plants? Some fucking
<v Speaker 1>trilliums there. You go go to woodland wildflowers and then
<v Speaker 1>it'll tell you what grows in that habitat. Genus species
<v Speaker 1>an uncommon name if you're not you know, a Latin
<v Speaker 1>nomenclature person, But I really suggest you at least learn
<v Speaker 1>the genus name because like onions, alium, there's like three
<v Speaker 1>hundred species of alium. Right, if you learn what an
<v Speaker 1>onion is, what makes something an onion, you'll know what
<v Speaker 1>an onion is. If you see a species in California, right, Oh,
<v Speaker 1>that's an alium. So anyway, here's some cool native plants,
<v Speaker 1>big blues them and your Pogon gerardii, dolpe fucking grasses,
<v Speaker 1>the tedstone again, feel the wildflowers that the wildflowers at
<v Speaker 1>the Pizzo So doing a show there tomorrow. Solidago and
<v Speaker 1>Cynthio trichum. This is just this is just weeds, right.
<v Speaker 1>It's get someone from the square community. They look at
<v Speaker 1>it's just weeds. It's not. It's just just a wasteland. Right.
<v Speaker 1>But then a month or two later, this whole thing
<v Speaker 1>lights up into that. It's just having context, right, my
<v Speaker 1>geriatric dog who's taken to shitting on the floor, and
<v Speaker 1>I'm not fully convinced it's not a matter of protest.
<v Speaker 1>Phisostigia obedient plant, that's an easy one to remember. Mint family,
<v Speaker 1>lay Ace monarda. All this shit, Pynanthemum, this thing is
<v Speaker 1>mint family too. It smells like a regano. It's a
<v Speaker 1>fucking great plant. Man. It smells so good. It's one
<v Speaker 1>of those things like you brush up against it, you
<v Speaker 1>can smell it. Bernonia that's the plant that was using
<v Speaker 1>this Texas species is comparison. Look at this. You can
<v Speaker 1>compare that leaf to that thin hairy leaf I showed
<v Speaker 1>you on the desert species. Delia purpurea. That's a legume.
<v Speaker 1>You look at the flowers, you can see when you
<v Speaker 1>look up close at the flowers, it's just a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of tiny flowers aggregated into a cone. Probably one hundred
<v Speaker 1>flowers right there, right, Joe pieweed, that's fucking banger all
<v Speaker 1>the time. These are what we're planted outside the Field Museum.
<v Speaker 1>This is kind of a pioneer species. This is tears
<v Speaker 1>a lot. This will show up one of the bell flowers.
<v Speaker 1>Try to scant the cardinal flowers. These like it. We
<v Speaker 1>they like a lot of moisture. But it's hummingbird crack,
<v Speaker 1>butterfly crack. You see a red tube shaped flower and
<v Speaker 1>that's hummingbird pollination. Just know it immediately. Same reason. If
<v Speaker 1>you see a flower that smells like jasmine, blooms at
<v Speaker 1>night and is white, what pollinates that moths? Right? That
<v Speaker 1>jasmine smell. The reason it smells like jasmine is because
<v Speaker 1>moths can pick that up. They got really good sensory
<v Speaker 1>receptors for old factory receptors, and then they've got a
<v Speaker 1>proboscis they've always got. Those white flowers always have the
<v Speaker 1>same traits to a tiny hole too small for a
<v Speaker 1>bee to get in in a long tube. Why because
<v Speaker 1>that moth has a proboscis that can unroll and stick
<v Speaker 1>right in there right. I mean, the specialization you see
<v Speaker 1>is the same thing like you see that you see
<v Speaker 1>a white flower that smells like jasmine, tiny hole in
<v Speaker 1>southeastern China. You know it's gonna be pollinated by a moth.
<v Speaker 1>You see a white flower, tiny whole, smells like jasmine.
<v Speaker 1>In the Chihuahua Desert, it's pollinated by a month. Right,
<v Speaker 1>There's so much you can learn from this. Red flowers, butterflies,
<v Speaker 1>and hummingbirds likeatrius. That's the fucking dope one. This was
<v Speaker 1>me and Al went down here. We had a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of pot seeds and we were gonna we had found weed,
<v Speaker 1>feral cannabis growing down here like five five years ago,
<v Speaker 1>you know, because you'll still find weed in the Chicago.
<v Speaker 1>There used to be a big patch of weed on
<v Speaker 1>Western and eighteenth at the railroad Diamond there, and it
<v Speaker 1>was psychoactive too. It wasn't like the feral hemp you
<v Speaker 1>see in Kansas. I know because I took some seeds
<v Speaker 1>and grew something when I lived in California, and so
<v Speaker 1>we went down there. We had a bag of weed.
<v Speaker 1>We're like, yeah, we're just gonna spread this seed everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>And when I got down there, I saw the fucking
<v Speaker 1>prairie was in such good shape. I was like, I
<v Speaker 1>don't want to spread weed. That would be a you know,
<v Speaker 1>sacrilege like this, right, So then we took it to
<v Speaker 1>Western eighteenth and threw it all up all over there.
<v Speaker 1>You know you got a trespass. It's on the west
<v Speaker 1>side of the railroad embankment. There's a big North South
<v Speaker 1>railroad embankment east of Western and eighteenth. Go check it out.
<v Speaker 1>See if the pot is still growing there. Right. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know how it got there. It was amazing. I
<v Speaker 1>used to hang out there as a kid and there'd
<v Speaker 1>always be a paddy wagon park there, like these cops
<v Speaker 1>getting I don't know what the fuck they were doing,
<v Speaker 1>like getting hammered, parked alone on the fucking hill right
<v Speaker 1>there by the anyway, I'm more of a kanessence lead
<v Speaker 1>plant again, Why is it so fuzzy? Because it tends
<v Speaker 1>to grow in hotter, drier prairies, full sun. That's a
<v Speaker 1>great fucking species too, really cool sent up poricytal anthers.
<v Speaker 1>The anthers have holes in them, right, that's another example
<v Speaker 1>of a pollination syndrome. If you're in Ecuador and you
<v Speaker 1>see a flower that's got anthers with holes in it, right,
<v Speaker 1>it's not necessarily a senna, but it is buzz pollinated.
<v Speaker 1>If you were to take a tuning fork, hit it
<v Speaker 1>on a rock and hold it up to this, a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of pollen would come spilling out of those anthers, right,
<v Speaker 1>And how does that apply to bees? Bees go up
<v Speaker 1>and they vibrate their wings and all the pollen comes out.
<v Speaker 1>You see a hole in the distal end of an
<v Speaker 1>anther like that, That is buzz pollination. Tomatoes do the
<v Speaker 1>same thing. Tomato flowers, potato flowers, blueberries, they've all got
<v Speaker 1>buzz pollination. What's the benefit of that? It's like it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, if you're like running like a motel six,
<v Speaker 1>you're doing the free breakfast thing, right. You don't want
<v Speaker 1>these fucking squirrely little kids to come out there and
<v Speaker 1>empty you out of all the fruit loops or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna put those little dispensers on it, right, like
<v Speaker 1>a little lever. So the cereal dispenser only lets out
<v Speaker 1>a little bit at a time. That's what the plant
<v Speaker 1>is doing. You know. It's preventing bees from because bees
<v Speaker 1>don't just go for an nectar, they go for pollen too.
<v Speaker 1>It's preventing the bee from going in and taking all
<v Speaker 1>the pond. It's saying, no, take it easy. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 1>ration it out so the pollen supply lasts longer and
<v Speaker 1>I can pollinate more flowers and produce more seeds. So anyway, Oh,
<v Speaker 1>this is a great one, arnold glossom, really cool flower
<v Speaker 1>A triplisifolium. This is out of Schulenberg Prairie. Relative of
<v Speaker 1>Points Setia. You for me, a corolada. This is all
<v Speaker 1>over that lowie garden down on the Loop too, right
<v Speaker 1>just north of the Art Institute. This is the family
<v Speaker 1>of Rubber and Points set he is. It's mostly tropical.
<v Speaker 1>We got it. It was a hard toilet hit out there.
<v Speaker 1>Who's fucking That's when you know someone's gotta go. They're like,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta fucking get out the way. Anyway. Anyway, So
<v Speaker 1>mostly tropical family, but it's got a couple temperate species.
<v Speaker 1>This is one of them. This thing gets like three
<v Speaker 1>or four feet tall. It's a great fucking one. You'll
<v Speaker 1>see it. It really intact prairies, like ones that never
<v Speaker 1>got cleared in the first place, like Wolf Road prairie,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. But no, every time I see this stuff,
<v Speaker 1>no one's grown it. You know. This is the thing
<v Speaker 1>Chicago now compared to ten years ago. I mean, it's crazy.
<v Speaker 1>It's there's actually a native plant movement here. People grow
<v Speaker 1>these things like the awareness of how we view plants
<v Speaker 1>in societies and just away is it medicinal or is
<v Speaker 1>it pretty? Does it flower all the time? The variegated
<v Speaker 1>leaf bullshit. There's less of that and there's more of this,
<v Speaker 1>you know. They plants don't need to be what's seen
<v Speaker 1>as conventionally showy to some fucking you know, rich housewife
<v Speaker 1>from eighteen seventies Victorian England. It's not the point anymore now.
<v Speaker 1>It's the point of context for ecology and just creating,
<v Speaker 1>like a putting the living machine back together after it's
<v Speaker 1>been disassembled by the fucking death cult, right, And that's
<v Speaker 1>what's that's what we're seeing, right. So that's why you
<v Speaker 1>grow things like this, And I mean you can you
<v Speaker 1>can buy these plants at any number of the native
<v Speaker 1>nurseries around erythroniuml bi. It I'm a member of the
<v Speaker 1>lily family. Incredible fucking flowers. It's like it's like a
<v Speaker 1>flower probably that big. It's a true lily. It's a
<v Speaker 1>native fucking lily. Man. We have native orchids in Illinois
<v Speaker 1>you know, not just the dime store ones you'd get
<v Speaker 1>you know, at the fucking hospital gift shop. And so
<v Speaker 1>you get like the you know, so we've got these
<v Speaker 1>cool native versions of plants I maybe would call horticultural atrocities,
<v Speaker 1>but there's no context for them. This thing grows. This
<v Speaker 1>is what the leaves look like. They got these cool
<v Speaker 1>speckled patterns on them. That's what the flower looks like.
<v Speaker 1>They're called spring ephemerals, right, because here at the temperate latitudes,
<v Speaker 1>the weather worms up before the leaves on the trees
<v Speaker 1>and the forest preserves have fully leafed out, right, So
<v Speaker 1>in that short window of time, that's when these things
<v Speaker 1>take advantage of it. They get going. There's a bulb
<v Speaker 1>in the ground right there. It sends up a big
<v Speaker 1>leaf as soon as the weather worms up, it flowers.
<v Speaker 1>By May, it's done, and then you don't see it
<v Speaker 1>again till the following April. And that's the whole there's
<v Speaker 1>there's like, you know, twenty different plants that do this,
<v Speaker 1>and they're all fucking dope. Some of them are really cool, right,
<v Speaker 1>but a lot of them are gone. Why because of
<v Speaker 1>invasive species buckthorn? You know, you see, does anybody not
<v Speaker 1>know what buckthorn is. It's probably the worst invasive you
<v Speaker 1>get here. It was I remember, you know, when I
<v Speaker 1>was a kid, i'd go I was like, I didn't
<v Speaker 1>want to go to the forest reserves because they were
<v Speaker 1>just they were just infested with buckthorn. And curiously enough,
<v Speaker 1>buckthorn is actually kind of rare in Europe. It's like
<v Speaker 1>it's like an important native plant in Europe that needs
<v Speaker 1>to be conserved and grown, but here it's fucking brutal,
<v Speaker 1>and it forms these impenetrable thickets and it's got spines
<v Speaker 1>on it too, that's the name buckthorn, and it's shades
<v Speaker 1>out all this stuff, and so there have been huge
<v Speaker 1>reductions in the amount of cool spring ephemerals like Erythronium
<v Speaker 1>albeiom and the forest preserves of uh of Chicago. So
<v Speaker 1>that's another good thing to do is go in and
<v Speaker 1>cut intreat with herbicide the buckthorn. Just spot applications, you know,
<v Speaker 1>we're not talking about dumping round up on crops. We're
<v Speaker 1>talking about small spot applications to remove invasive species, all right.
<v Speaker 1>Cympio tricumdrumaldia another cool native. This was planted outside the
<v Speaker 1>fight near millennium park. I couldn't believe it. I saw
<v Speaker 1>like two hostas. I saw a whole bed full of
<v Speaker 1>these things, right cool native aster I was blown away
<v Speaker 1>like the fucking hostas man, like the brutal I remember
<v Speaker 1>being brutalized with those, just visually assaulted as a child. Hasta,
<v Speaker 1>they got the you like the hastess, they got the
<v Speaker 1>they got the variegated leaves so you could eat them,
<v Speaker 1>you could eat them. I don't give a fucking want
<v Speaker 1>to eat that. When the fun want to eat that,
<v Speaker 1>I'm wanna eat a hostas nabulist asper another great species.
<v Speaker 1>You see this, you know it's a fucking good prairie.
<v Speaker 1>It's never been root plowed. Rare member related to chickers
<v Speaker 1>and sunflowers gets five feet tall. Cool cool. These are
<v Speaker 1>flowers are a little post. You can see they're a
<v Speaker 1>little whether this should be going off right now. And
<v Speaker 1>Lobilia's cyphilitica. I don't know where that name comes from,
<v Speaker 1>but uh, a fucking dope plant. And it's each one
<v Speaker 1>of those flowers produces, you know, one hundred and two
<v Speaker 1>hundred tiny seeds. And there's lobilias all over the place.
<v Speaker 1>There's Lobilia's in the cloud forest of Tanzania. There's twenty
<v Speaker 1>foot lobilias in Brazil and Mina Jerias. I was just
<v Speaker 1>seeing them last year, you know. So it's cool. It's
<v Speaker 1>you see that flower. You see this little pollen tube
<v Speaker 1>with the anthers all pointing inward. You know it's a libilia.
<v Speaker 1>You're in Brazil on vacation or somewhere and you see
<v Speaker 1>the same fucking lobilia. Right. That's so I always recommend
<v Speaker 1>they get to know the genus at least if you
<v Speaker 1>really get into this stuff. If not, at least just
<v Speaker 1>appreciated impatience can penses. That's a great one. This is
<v Speaker 1>supposed to be a good ass rash anadoltic. You get
<v Speaker 1>poison ivy, you take some leaves and you can supposedly
<v Speaker 1>it's what I've heard, But that's not why I like it.
<v Speaker 1>I like it because it's just a fucking dope flower,
<v Speaker 1>and it's got a really cool floral structure, and it's
<v Speaker 1>got this little nectar spur at the base that produces nectar.
<v Speaker 1>So pollinators going there to try and get it that
<v Speaker 1>and come out with pond on their head. Hit the
<v Speaker 1>next flower, and then these little fruits, because the fruits
<v Speaker 1>just an ovary, the ovaries inside the flower. It's unpollinated
<v Speaker 1>ovaries are back there. Then the flower falls off. That's
<v Speaker 1>the fruit. They explode when they're ready. They violently the hits,
<v Speaker 1>they explosive the hissians. They shoot seeds everywhere. Great method
<v Speaker 1>for getting your seeds out there. This is Iliam, the ramota.
<v Speaker 1>This thing was a victim of fire suppression. It wasn't
<v Speaker 1>seen for a couple decades down ear and Kinka Ki,
<v Speaker 1>and then they started burning and then it just took off.
<v Speaker 1>I mean the seeds, the seeds were probably in that
<v Speaker 1>soil for god knows how long, and but nobody was burning,
<v Speaker 1>and it was smothered in invasive buck thorn and honeysuckle,
<v Speaker 1>and they started burning and they came back and it
<v Speaker 1>does great in the fucking garden. It's I planted some
<v Speaker 1>of my friend Jonathan's house on the northwest side, full sun.
<v Speaker 1>They're fucking great. Like, there's no reason this shit should
<v Speaker 1>be rare. It's not hard to grow. Just nobody pays attention,
<v Speaker 1>nobody cares about it. There's no context for it. And
<v Speaker 1>people want the fucking variegated leaves Helianthus gross to seratus.
<v Speaker 1>This is just a sunflower that gets like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>ten feet tall in some cases, really fun to beat
<v Speaker 1>your friends with after the after the tops have died
<v Speaker 1>and they got like a stick left Sylphium. This is
<v Speaker 1>I mean, that is like a this is what the
<v Speaker 1>really what got me into natives in Chicago? I was,
<v Speaker 1>I was in California. I came back to Chicago at
<v Speaker 1>age thirty five. Once I had context for what a
<v Speaker 1>native plant was, and I was, you know, what is it?
<v Speaker 1>What is I wonder if the natives of Chicago were right,
<v Speaker 1>that's the same thing I do all over the globe.
<v Speaker 1>And I wonder what the native plants of this region are,
<v Speaker 1>what evolved here, what has context for the land and
<v Speaker 1>although their life that grows here? And I found this
<v Speaker 1>plant and that's I was fucking blown away. I was
<v Speaker 1>like four foot long leaves and these flowers that get
<v Speaker 1>fifteen feet tall because they got to get up above
<v Speaker 1>the tall grasses of the prairies to get pollinated. And
<v Speaker 1>I couldn't believe I'd never seen this plant before. You know,
<v Speaker 1>three hundred years ago where my house stood, there were
<v Speaker 1>probably there was probably a huge colony of them growing,
<v Speaker 1>but they've all been wiped away. That's when I got
<v Speaker 1>kind of pissed off. That wasn't good for my uh
<v Speaker 1>my anger management when I learned that. But you know what,
<v Speaker 1>I just started growing a shit ton of them and
<v Speaker 1>spreading them around. So even if you don't have a yard,
<v Speaker 1>there's shit you could do. This is for a different
<v Speaker 1>regional biota anyway. There's plugs of little blue stem This
<v Speaker 1>is epizzo. I love plugs because they just roots want
<v Speaker 1>to go deep. They don't want to go out so much.
<v Speaker 1>I like planting plugs. So this is my house and
<v Speaker 1>we're finishing up soon. If you've got a nice you know,
<v Speaker 1>you got like a bunch of ash sweat, or it's
<v Speaker 1>hot in here. It is getting a little hot in
<v Speaker 1>I want to take a break. We'll be done soon.
<v Speaker 1>But this is my house. I moved here in July
<v Speaker 1>of twenty two. First thing I did, I threw a
<v Speaker 1>fouton a filthy fuuton mattress on the floor of the
<v Speaker 1>living room. And then I got to work removing the lawn.
<v Speaker 1>And so I didn't know what I was doing yet
<v Speaker 1>because I hadn't I had just moved to South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>I moved there for family, needless to say, it wasn't
<v Speaker 1>for the culture, and so I I didn't know what
<v Speaker 1>I was doing. You probably don't know what you're doing either.
<v Speaker 1>Who gives a fuck. Just get the fuck out there
<v Speaker 1>and start doing it. That's how you learn. There's no book.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, sure there are books to tell you, but
<v Speaker 1>the best way fuck all that though. No. No people
<v Speaker 1>write me and they're like, what books should I learn
<v Speaker 1>to get into plants? And I was telling the same
<v Speaker 1>thing Bonnie in the day and plants systematics. But just
<v Speaker 1>to get out there and start taking pictures of shit
<v Speaker 1>with your little pocket device, of stuff that you're interested in,
<v Speaker 1>and then ask questions. If you're not asking questions, you
<v Speaker 1>can read as much as you want. If you're not
<v Speaker 1>asking questions, you're not going to learn shit. Right again,
<v Speaker 1>it's just memorizing. That's the American schooling. Memorize this year
<v Speaker 1>you can get a job. Don't think about it, don't
<v Speaker 1>ask questions why does it do? This's just memorize it
<v Speaker 1>so you can pass the test and get the good
<v Speaker 1>grades and get a job that you hate for the
<v Speaker 1>next thirty years of your life. So this is what
<v Speaker 1>I did. So I went and I removed the one
<v Speaker 1>and I just started a long time of planting shit everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>This is like, this is the stuff that drives the
<v Speaker 1>lens scape architects crazy. They don't like it right, there's
<v Speaker 1>no plant to it. I just thought about where's the sun.
<v Speaker 1>The sun is that way, as you can tell by
<v Speaker 1>the shade cloth and the palette I stole from Walmart
<v Speaker 1>to line, you know, to shade the stuff that I planted.
<v Speaker 1>I had no idea. I was just learning. I would
<v Speaker 1>do it differently now because I've spent a few years
<v Speaker 1>living here, But that's what I did, and that was
<v Speaker 1>just what I just wanted to get all these plants
<v Speaker 1>in the ground. I had already been living there for
<v Speaker 1>a year. I knew a lot of the cool plants
<v Speaker 1>from the Peyote gardens. I wanted to see what they
<v Speaker 1>how they grew. This was a learning that was the
<v Speaker 1>most That was the thing that was most excited about.
<v Speaker 1>Is this was like a lab. To me, My yard
<v Speaker 1>was a lab and that's what it should be for
<v Speaker 1>you too. You learn so fucking much when you do this,
<v Speaker 1>because when you do this, all the life comes back
<v Speaker 1>and you start seeing shit that you had no idea
<v Speaker 1>lived in your region. I've got four species of lizards
<v Speaker 1>living here. I've got three species of amphibians. I've got oh.
<v Speaker 1>I had a tarantula. They're harmless tarantula. You can let
<v Speaker 1>them craw on you. They just look scary whatever. I
<v Speaker 1>had a tarantula show up once. I don't know where
<v Speaker 1>the fuck she came from, but I was delighted to
<v Speaker 1>see her. You know, everything comes back. So that's what
<v Speaker 1>it looked like when I first set it up. There's
<v Speaker 1>the shovel. I used, the sharpshooters. They're like thirty bucks.
<v Speaker 1>The whole thing's made out of metal. If you get
<v Speaker 1>a shovel, don't. I don't like the wood because the
<v Speaker 1>wood shrinks and then it starts wiggling around and shit
<v Speaker 1>breaks and whatever. Get the metal ones. I use Fisker.
<v Speaker 1>That's what all the weed growers use, and California Fisker brand.
<v Speaker 1>Remember when the illegal weed business was still let's not
<v Speaker 1>talk about that anyway. There's me looking like a tweaker
<v Speaker 1>with an augur. The fucking thing broke six months later.
<v Speaker 1>Don't get an auger. So that's but that was what
<v Speaker 1>I was doing. You can see I just left all
<v Speaker 1>the side there there's it like a like a month
<v Speaker 1>after plant thing. I put the bamboo in there just
<v Speaker 1>to get you know, because I like the plants small.
<v Speaker 1>You put the bamboo steaks there. I would go to
<v Speaker 1>an alley. I'd saw down this lady's bamboo. She actually
<v Speaker 1>didn't care either. She had it grown into the alley,
<v Speaker 1>and I would use those to just give it some
<v Speaker 1>visual gravity so I wouldn't step on at or so,
<v Speaker 1>you know, just so people and then you take them
<v Speaker 1>away later as the stuff grows up, right, that's what
<v Speaker 1>it looks like now, right, And this is this is
<v Speaker 1>actually I took this photo a year ago. It's now
<v Speaker 1>it's huge, and I've had, you know, as it grows,
<v Speaker 1>I took stuff out, like I removed one of these
<v Speaker 1>trees back here. I shaved this up. I get the
<v Speaker 1>All I use are electric hedgers and a weed whacker,
<v Speaker 1>and I cut shit back and I like how overwhelming
<v Speaker 1>it is. But after a while it doesn't get to
<v Speaker 1>be maybe it gets to be a little too much.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't have to be forever. You got to enjoy
<v Speaker 1>that thing for that tree for two years. Take it out,
<v Speaker 1>remove it, cut it the fuck down, you know. I
<v Speaker 1>don't live in the prairie. I live in the thorn scrub,
<v Speaker 1>so my stuff doesn't die at the end of November.
<v Speaker 1>It's you know, a little bit more to think about there.
<v Speaker 1>But it's amazing, and so I come out. I get
<v Speaker 1>distracted walking to my truck. I see all kinds of
<v Speaker 1>cool shit growing. I can tell you the genus and
<v Speaker 1>species name of all these plants, A good three quarters
<v Speaker 1>of them. I grew myself. Right, you don't have to
<v Speaker 1>go here. You don't have to go nuts like I do,
<v Speaker 1>but I recommend it. But you can. But this is
<v Speaker 1>just this is what's I mean. And now it's now
<v Speaker 1>it's massive, right, and it's so I mean. And if
<v Speaker 1>you're a bird flying overhead through a bleak landscape of
<v Speaker 1>parking lots and dying lawns, right, and then you see
<v Speaker 1>this massive green oasis, and that's what my yard looks
<v Speaker 1>like from above. Where are you gonna go? Right? Like
<v Speaker 1>I live right on the Mexican border. All this stuff
<v Speaker 1>that's coming from the Sierra Madre and going north for
<v Speaker 1>the summer or going back to the Sierra Madre actually
<v Speaker 1>had the monarch migration to two weeks ago. Right, this
<v Speaker 1>stuff's flying up there. You're gonna go here, right, That's
<v Speaker 1>where the food is. It's green, it's alive, it's where
<v Speaker 1>the that is. Here's my friend Hector's house. He had
<v Speaker 1>a burrow Corcus macrocarpa. They grow here. They grow in
<v Speaker 1>North Texas too, on the Mexican border of South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>They don't like it so much, as evidenced by the
<v Speaker 1>fact that it's dying back. So he said, what what
<v Speaker 1>can I do? I said, just let it die slowly
<v Speaker 1>and cut it as the branches that you know you're
<v Speaker 1>not going to save it. I mean, if you want,
<v Speaker 1>you can spend ten fifteen grand for an arborus to
<v Speaker 1>come by and you know, rip you off and take
<v Speaker 1>it down. But I would just leave it. It's good habitat,
<v Speaker 1>take it back six feet as at a time as
<v Speaker 1>it dies, and you know, say goodbye to it, and
<v Speaker 1>then let's plant the native garden in your yard, which
<v Speaker 1>is what we did. This is like the two days
<v Speaker 1>after planting. I need to get new photos. And then
<v Speaker 1>this is like three months after planting, and now it's
<v Speaker 1>fucking dope. And this dude is like he's like an
<v Speaker 1>immigration attorney, right, he had no interest in plants. Before.
<v Speaker 1>It's kind of an alcoholic doing nofing you. I've been
<v Speaker 1>trying to get him into the program or something, but
<v Speaker 1>but you know, but he was he started messaging me
<v Speaker 1>like i'd be out out of the country. So I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I get a like, man, look at what I saw
<v Speaker 1>in my yard. Holy shit, it's so cool, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh fuck, yeah, man, it's great. Keep
<v Speaker 1>coming back, you know. And so now all this stuff
<v Speaker 1>is you know, and then you just you go in.
<v Speaker 1>You're you're the disturbance that enables the diversity. You head
<v Speaker 1>shit up, you cut stuff. Maybe this thing got too big.
<v Speaker 1>I planted these things. I like to plant the dense, right.
<v Speaker 1>I like it. And if I got a knowing full well,
<v Speaker 1>I might have to remove something in two years, big
<v Speaker 1>big deal. I got to enjoy it. When it was
<v Speaker 1>growing there. It was acted as a nice screen. It
<v Speaker 1>served the purpose. It kept the sun off the ground,
<v Speaker 1>vital cool insects to the yard. Whatever. So I'll remove it,
<v Speaker 1>say goodbye to it. Thanks nice knowing you remove it
<v Speaker 1>and then let other stuff grow so that, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>this whole thing now is just filled up. This is
<v Speaker 1>my friends that we're teachers. This is yard it's only
<v Speaker 1>like one year of growth too. They put a path
<v Speaker 1>in there. That's it. Now. They're really big on the
<v Speaker 1>Halloween decorations too. Yeah, I gotta get new photos because
<v Speaker 1>these trees are much taller now and we've had to
<v Speaker 1>remove some stuff. And you know, some of these landscape
<v Speaker 1>architects and people, you know, the American ideas about horticulture
<v Speaker 1>and landscaping are fucked up. You know, it's kind of
<v Speaker 1>been the if you haven't grasped that yet from this
<v Speaker 1>this this presentation, you know. But the thing is to
<v Speaker 1>just get your ass out there, you know, get your
<v Speaker 1>ass out to think about it. Oh, should I remove it?
<v Speaker 1>You'll just get you outside. I mean, it's the fucking
<v Speaker 1>dopamine that comes from interacting with the life around you.
<v Speaker 1>You know. It's it's not unique to certain people. It's
<v Speaker 1>pretty widespread. I have found a lot of people experience this.
<v Speaker 1>This is just some West Texas stuff. Tetraonus kaposa Stemodia lenati.
<v Speaker 1>You can't find those plants and nurseries unfortunately. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's the same thing I encounter everywhere. Why the fuck
<v Speaker 1>is nobody growing this? Man? It does so well? Then
<v Speaker 1>you plant it in a yard, and it does even
<v Speaker 1>better because it's it's a less stressful environment than the
<v Speaker 1>native Chihuahua desert. Right, Why is nobody growing this? Because
<v Speaker 1>American horticultures wanted this same bullshit, this fluffy pulp bullshit,
<v Speaker 1>for the last one hundred and fifty years. And that's
<v Speaker 1>why the living the world is fucking dying. Part of
<v Speaker 1>the reason, you know, all these great planets, this is
<v Speaker 1>right here. It's in Chicago. Man. I almost fell in
<v Speaker 1>the river getting chased by crackheads twenty years ago. Right,
<v Speaker 1>I have an intimate relationship with the Chicago River. I
<v Speaker 1>know this smell very well, but it doesn't smell like
<v Speaker 1>that anymore. It's amazing. Me and Al were kayaking down
<v Speaker 1>this one day just for shits and giggles, and we
<v Speaker 1>saw this dock of all these floating native plants and
<v Speaker 1>I was like, these are fucking natives, Man, who did this?
<v Speaker 1>This is amazing, you know? And then of course, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's urban rivers. And you know, then we saw the
<v Speaker 1>giant fucking snapping turtle. And now they got beavers and
<v Speaker 1>coyotes and all this shit, and they're expanding, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and this is something I mean, I'm waiting
<v Speaker 1>for the day that someone just gorilla starts doing this.
<v Speaker 1>You know, someone on the south side is like, I'm
<v Speaker 1>just gonna build a floating mat and start planting natives
<v Speaker 1>on it. This is Christy Weber's nursery on the west side.
<v Speaker 1>This is up in Evanston. This is great. Like, I
<v Speaker 1>see shit like this and I'm like, that's fucking great.
<v Speaker 1>But again, you know, a lot of has and cities
<v Speaker 1>would see that and it's methy. It's methy. I hate it.
<v Speaker 1>It's messy the fuck out of here. You're a fucking poodle,
<v Speaker 1>You're a guinea pig. Do you stay inside where it's safe.
<v Speaker 1>Don't go into nature, right, stay inside drinking, drinking the
<v Speaker 1>fucking doctor pepper and hitting the vape pen and playing
<v Speaker 1>call of duty. Don't go outside, right. You know, this
<v Speaker 1>is a native garden in Maryland. Homeowner moved out after
<v Speaker 1>planting this, and the lady that moved in it was
<v Speaker 1>so fucking great. She's like, I'm gonna keep it covered.
<v Speaker 1>In life, all these plays are all the same. You
<v Speaker 1>can smell them, you can hear them. They're alive. We
<v Speaker 1>already went through that and the tools I use this
<v Speaker 1>hedge clippers. I like the electrics because the gas, you
<v Speaker 1>don't use it for a month to fucking filter clogs
<v Speaker 1>up and you're there pulling the goddamn then cursing to
<v Speaker 1>yourself like the gas. Just get a weed whack or
<v Speaker 1>a sharp shooter and hedgecutters. I do mainance in my
<v Speaker 1>yard like once a month if that, if it hasn't
<v Speaker 1>been raining, I don't have to do anything. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>out there mowing it like a sap every week. And
<v Speaker 1>then you get one of these. I made signs of these.
<v Speaker 1>I put PDFs of this up on uh. I'll put
<v Speaker 1>them on the website too, so you can, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you you can. There's places that do custom signs. You
<v Speaker 1>just you know. This is just if you live in
<v Speaker 1>a city where you know your neighbors are kind of
<v Speaker 1>staff or you know, you got you living next to
<v Speaker 1>some fucking Becky. You SnO of fence to anybody named Becky,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and and and the city hall is going
<v Speaker 1>to breathe down your neck. It's just an explanation, you know.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, hey man, this is intentional, right. My city
<v Speaker 1>tried fucking with me. You see that yard. You could
<v Speaker 1>bet your ass they were fucking with me, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and what was my What was my response? The same
<v Speaker 1>thing again, another thing I lived from Alan Rockefeller. Just
<v Speaker 1>fucking be really polite and kind and just talk and
<v Speaker 1>just keep talking and talking and talking until you're driving
<v Speaker 1>them away. It's the same thing he did when he
<v Speaker 1>got stopped by the cops in Tennessee for having a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of mushrooms on his dashboard. I just told them,
<v Speaker 1>I just you don't plead the fifth, I'll fucking tell
<v Speaker 1>you everything you want to know about mushrooms or fucking
<v Speaker 1>native plants. No, please, come come check out my fucking yard.
<v Speaker 1>You know, city administrators that smell like farts in cologne
<v Speaker 1>and fucking botox or whatever, you know it. Come let
<v Speaker 1>me tell you about about these plants. And they fucked
<v Speaker 1>me for like a month, and then they said they
<v Speaker 1>were gonna come check out my yard. And then one
<v Speaker 1>morning I got a call and they said, just don't
<v Speaker 1>worry about it. You fucking take get the fuck out
<v Speaker 1>of it's right, yeah, right, So anyway, that's it. So
<v Speaker 1>if we could do a Q and A, if anyone
<v Speaker 1>still has the energy, how long was that? It was
<v Speaker 1>a two hours? Jesus Christ you know, I'm sorry two
<v Speaker 1>hours two hours. You guys all did really well. You know,
<v Speaker 1>we're very proud of you. More more attention span than
<v Speaker 1>I have. Oh yeah, yeah to his soul man. I
<v Speaker 1>think he's like a veteran or something. And and his
<v Speaker 1>daughter and it's just them too. And you know they
<v Speaker 1>had like a baron They had like a barren lot,
<v Speaker 1>and you know they have like a lawn service come by. God,
<v Speaker 1>I had to think what they were charging them. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they'd come by because they're not loaded, and so they
<v Speaker 1>would come by and they'd fucking hear the lawnmowers and
<v Speaker 1>the leaf blowers and all this shit going around. Then
<v Speaker 1>finally I just I caught her outside one day and
<v Speaker 1>I was like, I got this A gave you know,
<v Speaker 1>can I do you want this? And she's like, oh yeah, sure, okay,
<v Speaker 1>And so I put it in the ground. And then
<v Speaker 1>I got a text a week later and she's like,
<v Speaker 1>my dad really likes that. You know, do you have
<v Speaker 1>any more? And I was like, yeah, got a bunch more. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I'll be there tomorrow, you know. Fucking so now like
<v Speaker 1>I've already I've planted up a bunch of cool shit,
<v Speaker 1>like cool columnar cacti, and you know more a gave
<v Speaker 1>species and a tepawaii really fast growing native legume we
<v Speaker 1>get in South Texas. And so now their yard is
<v Speaker 1>in the gaves grow fast on there because it's so
<v Speaker 1>fucking hot. They're in full sun. So yeah, man, I
<v Speaker 1>mean that's and and it's you know, they're like thank you,
<v Speaker 1>They're like, thank you for doing this. I'm like like, meanwhile,
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, this is entirely selfish. Like I I got
<v Speaker 1>tired of seeing the you know, the bleakness and the
<v Speaker 1>fucking lawnmowers, and like, ill, I'm stoked cause I get
<v Speaker 1>to live next to this now and and you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's I can see you guys are happy. And then
<v Speaker 1>you know, now there's like cool fucking woodpeckers hanging out
<v Speaker 1>in the tepewahe and stuff. And so it's entirely selfish.
<v Speaker 1>I mean it's you can see my work around town. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and that's part of that's part of the
<v Speaker 1>fun of it. I mean, I think like planting shit.
<v Speaker 1>This is what I tell people who don't have a yard.
<v Speaker 1>It's like, you know, you can't draw, you can't make art,
<v Speaker 1>you don't you know, whatever, you don't you don't, you
<v Speaker 1>say you can't draw whatever. It's the same urge that's fulfilled,
<v Speaker 1>the same dopamine receptors are fulfilled by planting. Shit. You
<v Speaker 1>know you don't have a yard, Go get some fucking seeds.
<v Speaker 1>I got seeds right now in my pocket. You know,
<v Speaker 1>my dryer lint trap every time I do laundry is
<v Speaker 1>just fucking exploding. It's a it's a fire hazard. Right,
<v Speaker 1>get some seeds, right, just interact with it, touch it,
<v Speaker 1>feel it, look at them. Okay, this is what alatrac
<v Speaker 1>seed looks like. And then you go stuff them in
<v Speaker 1>the fence line. They cant lie near your house, railroad embankment.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you start learning where it's gonna get mote
<v Speaker 1>or sprayed and what won't and where. I mean, just
<v Speaker 1>you know, you're acting as a dispersal mechanism for the plants,
<v Speaker 1>human assisted dispersal. Right, there's always something to do, is
<v Speaker 1>just get out there and interact with it. So, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean it, Chicago's really cool. I mean, the stuff
<v Speaker 1>I've been seeing here is wild, and it wasn't even
<v Speaker 1>like this ten years ago. There were little bits. I
<v Speaker 1>think Lurry Garden has been there a long time. But
<v Speaker 1>like you know, in front of Field Museum. I remember
<v Speaker 1>seeing native plants there when I was a kid. I
<v Speaker 1>don't remember, you know. I mean it's yeah, it's it's pretty.
<v Speaker 1>Uh it's it's a fucking blank canvas, you know, so
<v Speaker 1>anybody else, yeah, uh, mastications than the next beec's thing.
<v Speaker 1>So that just means chewing it up, like that's what
<v Speaker 1>they did at a forest preserved near my mom's house.
<v Speaker 1>They need to burn because the ticks are bad. But
<v Speaker 1>you know, those suburbanites get a little they don't. They
<v Speaker 1>don't like the and I understand why, you know, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>you know, so they don't so grazing maybe it's better
<v Speaker 1>than nothing. But they went in and they masticated all.
<v Speaker 1>I think they had a brushog or something like a
<v Speaker 1>big machine that chews stuff up, but just something, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, and I'm sure that's why native people burned.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, as humans, we don't like these like dense
<v Speaker 1>you know, under stories that you can't walk through like
<v Speaker 1>the best. We like, you know, we evolved in the savannah.
<v Speaker 1>We like spending time in open habitats like canopy of shade.
<v Speaker 1>And then I'm sure the ticks and sugars were a
<v Speaker 1>huge reason why people burned as well, because those get
<v Speaker 1>out of control if you don't burn. You know, that's
<v Speaker 1>why the ticks in the northeast are so bad. Two
<v Speaker 1>hundred and fifty years of fire suppression. So yeah, mo Or,
<v Speaker 1>you can take That's This fucking tool is great because
<v Speaker 1>I mean, I'll take it, you know. It's I use
<v Speaker 1>it to like basically when stuff is growing into the path,
<v Speaker 1>I'll shave it up. But you can also it can
<v Speaker 1>get thick material too, you know, if it's not like
<v Speaker 1>I mean, if it's a pinky finger is kind of
<v Speaker 1>like the size at which the blade stop cutting if
<v Speaker 1>it's hard wood. But if it's just like old cellulose
<v Speaker 1>or like old sunflower stock or something, you can take
<v Speaker 1>that and just for prairie, for herbacious perennials and the prairie,
<v Speaker 1>just take it and just cut. You know, I would say,
<v Speaker 1>leave shit up till December so the birds can get
<v Speaker 1>some seed and maybe some insects over winter, and then
<v Speaker 1>you can just go and just you know, I'm sure
<v Speaker 1>there's more efficient machines that can do it if you
<v Speaker 1>want to, if you've got a huge area. But for
<v Speaker 1>just the front yard, Like that's that's a great fucking tool.
<v Speaker 1>It's like one hundred and twenty bucks and it comes
<v Speaker 1>to the big ass battery or something. But there's other
<v Speaker 1>ways to do it too, you know, Like you go
<v Speaker 1>to Mexico, you see the guys on the side of
<v Speaker 1>the road using those handheld like it looks like a
<v Speaker 1>scythe basically cut it. You just cut it down, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just cut it down. But yeah, but burning is really
<v Speaker 1>the best. So anyway, anybody else, no, you guys, just like,
<v Speaker 1>let me the fuck out of here. Start growing pauty
<v Speaker 1>in your apartment, you know, or any scene, get like
<v Speaker 1>some spider farmer really d lights and a heat matt
<v Speaker 1>and humid. No, you could start a bunch of you could.
<v Speaker 1>I wouldn't start any of the natives here till like February.
<v Speaker 1>And also, like Chicago, apartments are so dry because the
<v Speaker 1>outside air is so cold. Cold air doesn't hold any moisture.
<v Speaker 1>You bring the cold air inside, you heat it up,
<v Speaker 1>it just sucks all the moisture out of everything. But
<v Speaker 1>you can just you gotta get humidity, you know, either
<v Speaker 1>a large bag or humidity them or something. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>you can grow stuff yeah, I mean, you know, under
<v Speaker 1>lights it's easy too. I remember a friend of mine
<v Speaker 1>had he he he was he always complained about his
<v Speaker 1>seasonal effective disorder. So he would get one of those
<v Speaker 1>like mood lights. You know, he'd like sit in front
<v Speaker 1>of it every winter. It looked like a fucking goof.
<v Speaker 1>But but yeah, I would grow. I would grow stuff,
<v Speaker 1>you know, I would just experiment and and you know,
<v Speaker 1>maybe you'll kill a bunch of shit at first, but
<v Speaker 1>you'll learn. I mean, you're not gonna learn if you're
<v Speaker 1>not trying. That's like the main the main thing. Or
<v Speaker 1>just yeah, just collect seeds and just scatter them around.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you got someone else's backyard or a park
<v Speaker 1>you like to go to find an area and it's
<v Speaker 1>neglected and just clear some clear some of the dirt
<v Speaker 1>away and throw the seeds down. Whatever. So anyway, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>do you like stems and gold clubs? Stems or this
<v Speaker 1>percentage of moment that you're growing is patch in New
<v Speaker 1>York called till like marsh. So those type of insight Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I think that's what they do in the Lowry garden.
<v Speaker 1>Someone I know who's yeah, I mean, people just gotta
<v Speaker 1>get used to that. Man you know, that's the thing,
<v Speaker 1>and just be nice about it and just be no,
<v Speaker 1>this is like, this is what's here, and you tell them, no,
<v Speaker 1>this is feeding insects and birds and there's probably some
<v Speaker 1>bumblebees living in the stems, and that's just what it is.
<v Speaker 1>I mean again, it's it's this whole, this whole world.
<v Speaker 1>And it's not just the United States too. I go
<v Speaker 1>to Brazil to you know, the second most bio diverse
<v Speaker 1>place I've ever been to, and like I try to
<v Speaker 1>find anything about the native plants and the dominant culture.
<v Speaker 1>There's nothing there. They don't even have guide books, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and they're planting booga and v's and crape myrtles and
<v Speaker 1>the dumb shit that you see in areas here. It's
<v Speaker 1>just it's just disconnection. It's that disconnection, you know, fostered
<v Speaker 1>by you know, the last few hundred years of civilizations.
<v Speaker 1>So that's what you gotta kind of ract. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>all right, well you guys can go, Thanks a lot.
<v Speaker 1>I'll be selling merch and uh shit, we got shirts
<v Speaker 1>and mugs and all that bullshit. Or if you just
<v Speaker 1>want to come shoot the ship, that's fine too. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>thanks a lot for coming. Out. I can't believe you
<v Speaker 1>guys all stayed, so you know