Texas' Rarest Plant, Caliche Gardens & Crested Peyote

<v Speaker 1>And and you should see what they do with some of
<v Speaker 1>these cocow ceremonies. My niece, he's been doing these for
<v Speaker 1>a while now, you know. And and she's she's making
<v Speaker 1>good money. They're doing one hundred and twenty dollars for
<v Speaker 1>these cocow ceremonies. They get you in there, they lay
<v Speaker 1>you back in his seat. They just slap you around
<v Speaker 1>with the hot towels, you know they do. And I
<v Speaker 1>they they they got these rags, you know, they slap
<v Speaker 1>you around with their the hot rags. They're they're like
<v Speaker 1>like a warm uh lukewarm rag. You know. They slap
<v Speaker 1>you around with these. They get the shaving brush out.
<v Speaker 1>Phoam me up and stuff, you know, pop pop pop.
<v Speaker 1>It's really it's some really you know, look it's luxuriant.
<v Speaker 1>You know they do that. You slap you out with
<v Speaker 1>the hot towels with the shaving brush out. Uh. They
<v Speaker 1>they're pouring there, just throwing these dabs, you know, with
<v Speaker 1>a little spoon or the hot cocoa on you, just
<v Speaker 1>slapping your eyes, slapping it right on air and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>Even get somebod they get some of the whipped creams
<v Speaker 1>and stuff. I mean, it's just it's just something. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they do some breathing stuff. You know, they got to
<v Speaker 1>doing a nice warm breath. You know, there's someone ripping
<v Speaker 1>farts in the back, you know, but it's okay because
<v Speaker 1>everyone's comfortable. It's it's a really relaxed atmosphere in her
<v Speaker 1>They got the you know, it's the same stuff they
<v Speaker 1>do for the Yoni temples. They got the you know,
<v Speaker 1>they got one of them bowls that they put the
<v Speaker 1>you know, the wooden wind around. Then it makes a wow.
<v Speaker 1>It's they get into some chanting and stuff. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it's one hundred and twenty bucks and they do it
<v Speaker 1>goes around for about forty minutes, and then they you know,
<v Speaker 1>after they've done you know, hitting you around with the stuff,
<v Speaker 1>they just you know, give you a little tap, gets
<v Speaker 1>your ass out the door, and they sends you on
<v Speaker 1>your way. It's really nice. The Cacaw ceremonies have really
<v Speaker 1>been great for the rejuvenation you know, ancestral feelings and stuff.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it just gets you get you really keyed
<v Speaker 1>up and tuned in. Anyway, Welcome to another episode of
<v Speaker 1>the Crime Past, But Bony doesn't podcast. My name's Brad.
<v Speaker 1>Joey's dead and I'll be your host for today. Really
<v Speaker 1>appreciate you listening. You're really doing a great job. Boy,
<v Speaker 1>we got a deal for you. So today's episode is
<v Speaker 1>sponsored by knuckle Boxer. It's kind of like a makeshift
<v Speaker 1>a penis pump is what you's a spiritual penis pump.
<v Speaker 1>It's kind of like a figurative thing, okay, to make
<v Speaker 1>you feel more important than you really are. And that's
<v Speaker 1>what we do here. And we're really anyway. Uh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so I'm just the welcome to the podcast. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I was really on one today, as I have been lately.
<v Speaker 1>You know, it's kind of it's a coping mechanism. Really.
<v Speaker 1>I'm back in South Texas, bec in the death cult,
<v Speaker 1>where there's very little native habitat left. It's just the
<v Speaker 1>you know, I was looking at some landscaping today because
<v Speaker 1>I was potentially gonna do a native planting job here,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, it's just the fucking just wonder about
<v Speaker 1>the logic. I mean, everywhere you go you see the
<v Speaker 1>fundamental issue of human disconnection from the actual living war old.
<v Speaker 1>What is the real world? You know that we evolved
<v Speaker 1>out of that, we're still part of everywhere you see it.
<v Speaker 1>You know, these weird ideas about what should belong in
<v Speaker 1>a landscape, what a landscape should look like. Uh, deranged
<v Speaker 1>ideas if you will, about what uh what what a plant?
<v Speaker 1>What a plant? What a plant's place is in a
<v Speaker 1>in a human landscape. It's crazy, Like we all get
<v Speaker 1>these weird ideas about what a human landscape should look
<v Speaker 1>like with plants in it, either from TV or from
<v Speaker 1>the horticultural garbage that gets planted that's taken right out
<v Speaker 1>of the fucking home home depot, big box store. You know,
<v Speaker 1>like they plant palm trees in South Texas. There's only
<v Speaker 1>one native palm tree to South Texas. That's not the
<v Speaker 1>one that gets planted. They the people in power who
<v Speaker 1>are making these decisions, and then the landscape companies who
<v Speaker 1>are going for a contract often decide, uh, the palm
<v Speaker 1>tree should be the non native ones that get really
<v Speaker 1>tall and make it look like you know, Miami b
<v Speaker 1>Each circa nineteen eighty seven, you give that kind of vibe,
<v Speaker 1>you know, or they plant the fucking box woods. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>just all this silly shit. So you end up getting
<v Speaker 1>this landscape that looks like it's out of a fucking
<v Speaker 1>video game. Like where everything's neatly hedged, evenly spaced, and
<v Speaker 1>then planted in uniform lines. It looks like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>Minecraft website. It looks it literally looks like something a
<v Speaker 1>nine year old would design. If you told them, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you gave them a set of a set of like
<v Speaker 1>nine options, they could plant on a sixty four bit
<v Speaker 1>graphic landscape, but it could only be planted in rows
<v Speaker 1>and in you know, perfect little squares. It's fucking weird,
<v Speaker 1>and then you wonder. Of course, while you don't wonder,
<v Speaker 1>it's readily apparent to you why the living world is
<v Speaker 1>dying around us, and you know, so much life is
<v Speaker 1>continuing to disappear. Like I was talking to my daughter's
<v Speaker 1>grandparents today here in South Texas, and I was showing
<v Speaker 1>them a picture of a tarantula hawk. You know, a
<v Speaker 1>really cool native wasp. It's got a really powerful sting.
<v Speaker 1>They are like an iridescent blue with orange wings. Really
<v Speaker 1>cool native wasp. They're not going to bother you unless
<v Speaker 1>you're fucking with it and trying to eat it or something.
<v Speaker 1>But it's really easy to just avoid it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>they're not going to come at you, but they parasitize tarantulas,
<v Speaker 1>and so, you know, her grandpa was talking about how
<v Speaker 1>there used to be tarantula's everywhere, the cool native Texas tarantula.
<v Speaker 1>What is it a fano palma. I forget the species name,
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, it was they're all gone. They're like, oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>he was saying. When I when I was a kid,
<v Speaker 1>we used see them all the time. They're all gone.
<v Speaker 1>Same thing with the horned lizards. There used to be
<v Speaker 1>horned lizards everywhere. They're all gone. You know, is the
<v Speaker 1>is human civilization. The current human civilization spreads everything else
<v Speaker 1>gets plowed to make way for it, rather than trying
<v Speaker 1>to live with it and foster it and stewart it
<v Speaker 1>and make space for it in our landscapes because it's
<v Speaker 1>you know, the living world. There is this giant, well
<v Speaker 1>oiled machine that you know, serves a number of purposes
<v Speaker 1>like retaining soil, preventing flooding and erosion, enriching the soil,
<v Speaker 1>cooling the landscape via evapotransporation of moisture from leaf stomata,
<v Speaker 1>preventing the sun from baking the ground that alone, shading
<v Speaker 1>the ground, providing a living cover over the ground so
<v Speaker 1>that the sun doesn't just bake it, heating it up,
<v Speaker 1>and then once the sun goes down, that ground, of course,
<v Speaker 1>continues to emanate heat. Whether it's a giant asphalt parking
<v Speaker 1>lot or even a lawn, it's still a giant battery
<v Speaker 1>of heat. It's a giant heat radiator. All those and more,
<v Speaker 1>all those services are provided by retaining the living fabric
<v Speaker 1>around you, not having stupid shit like lawns or plants
<v Speaker 1>that are not native to the ecosystem that comprises your
<v Speaker 1>surrounding region. You know that evolved five thousand miles away.
<v Speaker 1>That kind of shit. So we're dismantling this wonderful living
<v Speaker 1>machine and garbage up in its place, and then wondering
<v Speaker 1>why why everything around us is collapsing, Why weather systems
<v Speaker 1>are fucked up, Why you know there's been record heat,
<v Speaker 1>why there's been massive flooding. I mean, all it goes
<v Speaker 1>on and goes I'm pretty to the choir here, I know,
<v Speaker 1>but it still just blows my fucking mind. So, and
<v Speaker 1>it's indicated to me every day when I look at
<v Speaker 1>the things that we plant in our landscaping, and then
<v Speaker 1>I talk to people in charge, Like the landscape bit
<v Speaker 1>I was looking at and I would I don't care
<v Speaker 1>about making money. I want to just see this shit
<v Speaker 1>look nice. I mean, I care about being comfortable. I
<v Speaker 1>want to see spots that I'm going to be exposed
<v Speaker 1>to look nice. That's how I end up getting involved
<v Speaker 1>in this. And at this point, I'm just gonna like
<v Speaker 1>give them consulting. I don't even probably won't even end
<v Speaker 1>up planting anything because I don't have time and I
<v Speaker 1>don't have the resources, and I'm stretched pretty thin right now.
<v Speaker 1>But I just don't want to see them rip out
<v Speaker 1>what's their half of which is native at this particular site.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you've got hummingbirds and all these cool butterflies
<v Speaker 1>coming by to pollinate things like the Ruellia and the
<v Speaker 1>Amelia patents which are there. They're native to this region,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, they're kind of standard horticultural fair The
<v Speaker 1>ones they've got are probably all the same clone, but regardless,
<v Speaker 1>you know, instead of different phenotypes. But regardless, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>benefiting the pollinators, it's providing life in this Like this,
<v Speaker 1>one of the guys in charge decided he wanted to
<v Speaker 1>put a desert scape in and I was like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>well that's great for places like Phoenix and Tucson, but
<v Speaker 1>like we're not really a desert we get twenty two
<v Speaker 1>inches of rainy ear. If you rip this stuff out,
<v Speaker 1>like putting in a desert scape when there's nothing there,
<v Speaker 1>you could do that. That makes sense. But if you're
<v Speaker 1>like ripping out native shrubs that are providing food for
<v Speaker 1>all these cool pollinators, and then you're you're replanting it
<v Speaker 1>with non native columnar cacti in a gaves, then you're
<v Speaker 1>gonna have all this barren space. You're gonna lose all
<v Speaker 1>those pollinators because they're those agaves are not you know,
<v Speaker 1>they'll flower or very intermittently versus these things which are
<v Speaker 1>flowering constantly. Then you can have all this barren space
<v Speaker 1>in between that's just gonna get infiltrated with all the
<v Speaker 1>fucking horrible non native grasses and h and quote weeds
<v Speaker 1>that infiltrate any landscape. I know because I've tried to
<v Speaker 1>do this. So you're gonna require maintenance. It's gonna look
<v Speaker 1>like shit without maintenance. Why do you want to rip
<v Speaker 1>this stuff? But anyway, the reasoning for wanting to rip
<v Speaker 1>this stuff out was that it like the flowering plants,
<v Speaker 1>the amelia and the ruellia ruellias. E can't they see?
<v Speaker 1>For those of you that don't know, Amelia Pattens is
<v Speaker 1>a coffee family rubiac. The reason for ripping it out
<v Speaker 1>was that it grew over the sidewalk. That it grew
<v Speaker 1>over the Sidewalkay, well, you get a fucking hedger and
<v Speaker 1>you just cut the thing. It's not that hard. You
<v Speaker 1>just go in there and you just just hedge it up.
<v Speaker 1>It looks silly, it's not what I would do. But
<v Speaker 1>if you're really that worried about it, you know, these
<v Speaker 1>these ideas about like I don't want to plant that
<v Speaker 1>tree because it's gonna drop stuff in the parking lot, Well, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's what plants do. They drop seeds, how they reap.
<v Speaker 1>You're not going to change four hundred and fifty million
<v Speaker 1>years of land plant evolution because you don't like a
<v Speaker 1>messy parking lot. Gets someone to fucking sweep the park,
<v Speaker 1>or get someone to sweep the sidewalk or what. You know.
<v Speaker 1>There's ways around this besides just removing these things. And
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, I deal with this all the time too,
<v Speaker 1>the way that we view plants as just they're esthetically
<v Speaker 1>pleasing their background imagery for a shitty photo or or
<v Speaker 1>someone's canned idea about how something should look. There's not
<v Speaker 1>We're not integrating the life that surrounds us, the living
<v Speaker 1>fabric that we're a part of. We're not integrating that
<v Speaker 1>into our our lives. You know, the way to look
<v Speaker 1>at this should not be just I'm going to plant
<v Speaker 1>whatever I whimsically think is attractive, even though I have
<v Speaker 1>no experience in ecology and natural sciences or and I'm
<v Speaker 1>not even familiar with what this landscape looked like two
<v Speaker 1>hundred years ago before my ass or my ancestors stilly
<v Speaker 1>asses got here. You know, I'm going to I'm just
<v Speaker 1>gonna plant for what what is attractive? Well, what's attractive?
<v Speaker 1>Difference depends on who differs depending on who you talk to.
<v Speaker 1>But what doesn't change depending on who you talk do
<v Speaker 1>is how the things that you plant, the choices you make,
<v Speaker 1>affect all the surrounding life around you. If you choose
<v Speaker 1>to plant things, if you choose to plant things that
<v Speaker 1>nurture and foster life and other life forms, that's not
<v Speaker 1>a subjective opinion. That's a fact. That's what's going to happen.
<v Speaker 1>You're gonna nurture and foster other life forms. You're gonna
<v Speaker 1>get the cool hummingbirds and the cool fucking sulfur butterflies,
<v Speaker 1>and the cool beetles and all the other stuff. And
<v Speaker 1>you know what, the pest insects. You're gonna have less
<v Speaker 1>of those two because you're gonna have the things that
<v Speaker 1>eat them. Right, same shit. If you got like a
<v Speaker 1>roach problem outside, we get these big non native African
<v Speaker 1>cockroaches or German cockroaches, whatever the fuck they're called. The
<v Speaker 1>common name's basically it's a big red roach, all right.
<v Speaker 1>I have less of those now because I've got all
<v Speaker 1>the cool lizards and toads that eat them, and so
<v Speaker 1>I don't get any in my house because they can't survive.
<v Speaker 1>I don't get them in my house. I don't even
<v Speaker 1>see them outside that much because everything else eats them.
<v Speaker 1>Why do I get Why do I have those things
<v Speaker 1>that eat them there? Because I've got the diverse native
<v Speaker 1>plant community that they want. There's places for them to hide,
<v Speaker 1>for them to hang out in, for them to lurk in,
<v Speaker 1>for them to make and reproduce in I mean, my yard.
<v Speaker 1>This little parcel is an oasis of life in a
<v Speaker 1>sea of shit, in a sea of human fucking garbage
<v Speaker 1>of like modern human societal garbage. The lawns, the cordy
<v Speaker 1>palm trees, the fucking the roads, the fucking parking lots,
<v Speaker 1>the dumb you know, the fucking commercial shit. There's like
<v Speaker 1>nine pawn shops, you know, five blocks away, nine fucking
<v Speaker 1>pawn shops. That tells you about the quality of the culture,
<v Speaker 1>right anyway, Uh, I really need some car dealerships. I
<v Speaker 1>need some car dealerships. You could do a couple more. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, loan places, those are nice. Some pawn shops
<v Speaker 1>and loan loan places are always nice. So like a
<v Speaker 1>little loan storefront, you know, payday loans really increase the
<v Speaker 1>intellectual rigor that's evident by just taking a walk in
<v Speaker 1>the neighborhood. You know this that the the intellectual stimuli.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, man, you know what's the But what's
<v Speaker 1>the what's the answer is because I'm not just complaining
<v Speaker 1>to talk ship. The answer is to normalize talking about
<v Speaker 1>this kind of shit. But knowing that there's a solution
<v Speaker 1>for talk about this, make it a point. Throw in
<v Speaker 1>those little fucking comments here and there. That's good. Don't
<v Speaker 1>be a don't be a don't be a silent mouth,
<v Speaker 1>be a squeaky fucking wheel, right, that's what That's what
<v Speaker 1>makes this normal. But instead of just being a negative dick, though,
<v Speaker 1>that does have its time and place. Okay, Uh, you know,
<v Speaker 1>offer a mix up, a little bit of comedy or
<v Speaker 1>a fucking cynical, cynically humorous statement, uh, and then offer
<v Speaker 1>a solution. And you offer a solution by changing the
<v Speaker 1>ship that we plant. Okay. It's not just the fucking
<v Speaker 1>esthetic landscape, not just the way it looks. It's literally
<v Speaker 1>the way we fucking live. It's this, it's the life
<v Speaker 1>that we surround ourselves with. To demean it and just
<v Speaker 1>say it's not it's just a pretty plant or whatever
<v Speaker 1>the shit, it's not about that. It's about the way
<v Speaker 1>that we live. It's about the way that we foster
<v Speaker 1>and relate to the landscape around us, which a lot
<v Speaker 1>of human societies have done in a positive manner for
<v Speaker 1>thousands of years. All right, But this one, the one
<v Speaker 1>that we're living, and the roots that this civilization came
<v Speaker 1>from are all fucked up and painted, Okay, and they
<v Speaker 1>can potentially, I mean, I still think we're on a
<v Speaker 1>sinking shit, but at least we can maybe increase the
<v Speaker 1>quality of the sink on the way down, you know,
<v Speaker 1>increase the quality of the sinking. We're still going down,
<v Speaker 1>but it might be a little bit more tolerable, you
<v Speaker 1>know what I mean? By fostering a connection to the
<v Speaker 1>living world, the world that we're part of, this well
<v Speaker 1>oiled machine that takes care of all of us. You know,
<v Speaker 1>that's the kind of mindset to have normalized. Talking about that,
<v Speaker 1>you can change something by talking about that, By convincing
<v Speaker 1>your neighbors to kill the law, by convincing your city people,
<v Speaker 1>whatever the fucking city managers to put plant native plants
<v Speaker 1>in the park. By being familiar and educated on what
<v Speaker 1>native plants grow around you, and what things pollinate them,
<v Speaker 1>and what things have an obligate host relationship with them,
<v Speaker 1>what insects do you know? Pay attention to that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>It really does. It really doesn't matter. I mean, really,
<v Speaker 1>it can be as simple as just having a fucking
<v Speaker 1>eigh naturalist account and paying attention to this. Collecting seeds,
<v Speaker 1>sewing them in the cracks beneath a fence line. Fence
<v Speaker 1>lines are good places to sew seeds because he can't
<v Speaker 1>mow there because the fence is in a way, you know,
<v Speaker 1>sowing seeds anywhere, keeping them in your pocket. You got
<v Speaker 1>a couple of acorns off of fucking what you know
<v Speaker 1>is the native oak, try go stash them somewhere. Be
<v Speaker 1>like that little scrub jay, that little mischievous bastard scrub ja.
<v Speaker 1>That's plant and acorns around. There's stuff you could do.
<v Speaker 1>It's really it's not that fucking art. Don't don't be drolled,
<v Speaker 1>don't be boring. Use your imagination that shit you could do,
<v Speaker 1>but certainly make it a part of of your life
<v Speaker 1>and just your daily life, and talk about it. Be
<v Speaker 1>educated on it. If you're educated about it, that gives
<v Speaker 1>you the opportunity to educate others, to share with them
<v Speaker 1>how cool this stuff can be. A right because there's
<v Speaker 1>obviously a reason you're into it. It's if you're listening
<v Speaker 1>to this fucking podcast. Yeah, you get a little burst
<v Speaker 1>of dopamine looking at this stuff. Share that with other
<v Speaker 1>people that'll get turned onto it. Two anyway, uh man,
<v Speaker 1>I've had a cool couple of days. I went and
<v Speaker 1>saw Texas's rarest plant yesterday, well one of them. There
<v Speaker 1>are so many now, so with all the developments, so
<v Speaker 1>many plants are becoming rare all the bulldozing. It was
<v Speaker 1>Perinikia congesta. It's carriophilesi, the carnation family, same order as Cacti,
<v Speaker 1>spinach and beets caryophilelees. But Perinikia congesta, I know the
<v Speaker 1>genus Perinikea. You get Perinikia james I. There was another
<v Speaker 1>Perinickea species I've seen in Colorado. There's actually six. I've
<v Speaker 1>seen about six Perinika species, as my eye naturalist account
<v Speaker 1>is telling me right now. Perinika Virginica. So I think
<v Speaker 1>I saw at the shale bearings out with that cool
<v Speaker 1>ariagonum in Virginia, on those those shale slopes in Appalachia.
<v Speaker 1>Perinikia erecta. Where'd I see that? Peraniki assess La flora
<v Speaker 1>and Peranikia Wilkinsonia. Oh, that looks like a cool one, Wilkinsonia.
<v Speaker 1>Where the fuck was that? Anyway? These are small, little,
<v Speaker 1>often matted plants, tufts of plants six inches tall by
<v Speaker 1>like ten inches wide. Oh that was in Marathon, No ship,
<v Speaker 1>Oh that wasn't. Then evacuate Peraniki Wilkinsonia. It's cool. Their
<v Speaker 1>flowers are tiny. They look like little stars. Maybe three
<v Speaker 1>millimeters five millimeters wide, little five pedaled, often tapered to
<v Speaker 1>a point each petal flowers. But you know it's once
<v Speaker 1>you see a peranike, won't you see a parke? You've
<v Speaker 1>seen them all. Uh No, once you've seen a peranickea,
<v Speaker 1>you get a you get a feel for you get
<v Speaker 1>a gist for it. They often like rocky areas. Uh
<v Speaker 1>they're they don't get too tall, so they can get
<v Speaker 1>they can get over, they can get out competed by
<v Speaker 1>and smothered by taller growing stuff. So they like areas
<v Speaker 1>where taller growing stuff can't grow, like shale, Baron's rocky outcrops,
<v Speaker 1>cliff edges, cliff faces, et cetera. So it already tells
<v Speaker 1>you this is gonna be a weird daphic situation. Remember
<v Speaker 1>a daphic refers to soil. So certainly I got to
<v Speaker 1>this fucking site. I was following old orbarium records because
<v Speaker 1>it's only been collected from two sites in Texas, both
<v Speaker 1>in Jim Hogg County. Who the fuck was Jim Hogg.
<v Speaker 1>Let's figure this out. Now, let's get to the Jim Hog.
<v Speaker 1>What the fuck tell me? That's a fucking oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Jesus Christ. That guy looks like a Jim Hogg. My
<v Speaker 1>name is Jim Hogg. Fucking born in eighteen fifty one,
<v Speaker 1>croaked in nineteen oh six was an American lawyer and
<v Speaker 1>statesman in the twentieth governor of Texas. I already don't
<v Speaker 1>like him. Oh god, Yeah, he looks kind of like
<v Speaker 1>an asshole. He got a funny little beard. You want
<v Speaker 1>to tug on it. See if he was Scottish, she'd
<v Speaker 1>probably be cool. But he was one of his old
<v Speaker 1>school Texas bros. So might have been an asshole and
<v Speaker 1>probably a racist though he was. Maybe Jim Hogg was
<v Speaker 1>trying to decolonize his his you know, his local community
<v Speaker 1>gardeners something I don't know. Maybe he's trying to decolonize
<v Speaker 1>the farmer's market. You know, this could have been a
<v Speaker 1>decolonizer anyway, Jim Hogg safe to say he was. Probably
<v Speaker 1>he could probably dig up some dirt on him. Oh.
<v Speaker 1>Hog was a follower of the conservative New South Creed.
<v Speaker 1>Oh that doesn't sound good. The New South Creed, which
<v Speaker 1>became popular following the US Civil War. It was also
<v Speaker 1>associated with populism. Yeah, yeah, he was a fucking clansman.
<v Speaker 1>Probably anyway. The New South, create New South democracy, or
<v Speaker 1>New South creed is a slogan in the history of
<v Speaker 1>the American South, first used after the American Civil War.
<v Speaker 1>Reformers used it to call for a modernization of society
<v Speaker 1>and attitudes, to integrate more fully with the United States
<v Speaker 1>as the whole, reject the oh you know what, this
<v Speaker 1>don't sound too bad, and integrate more fully with the
<v Speaker 1>United States as a whole, reject the economy and traditions
<v Speaker 1>of the Old South and the slavery based plantation system
<v Speaker 1>of the pre warp. All right, well, I'm you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Maybe
<v Speaker 1>Jim Hogg was indeed trying to decolonize anyway, whatever the fuck,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. The point is, Jim Hogg County is
<v Speaker 1>now a mostly Hispanic county in South Texas. It's also
<v Speaker 1>home to a large Payote population. Uh and I think
<v Speaker 1>one of the only licensed payotero's yout Jim Hog Webb County,
<v Speaker 1>Jim Hogg County, Webb County, and then Star County out
<v Speaker 1>right there, and then Sapata County to the west. Those
<v Speaker 1>are the four counties in South Texas that peyote grows in,
<v Speaker 1>as well as a wealth of other cool cactus species
<v Speaker 1>that few people, whether it's the native users of payote
<v Speaker 1>or the drug bros, don't give a shit about at all,
<v Speaker 1>generally speaking. But that can be changed. We can change
<v Speaker 1>that just by talking about it more and getting people
<v Speaker 1>into this stuff. You say, hey, come here, look at this.
<v Speaker 1>Look at this cool shit. We got sniff on this.
<v Speaker 1>A bunch of other nice stuff over here, A bunch
<v Speaker 1>of cool plants like Perinikia congesta or that liatrous punk
<v Speaker 1>tata variety mexicana. You just call it a fucking blazing
<v Speaker 1>star if you don't want to remember all that. Though,
<v Speaker 1>if you do get into botany or plants at all,
<v Speaker 1>you should familiarize yourself with genus names. At least. Don't
<v Speaker 1>need to learn the whole fucking binomia, but you could
<v Speaker 1>learn the genus these topo chicos with a twist. The
<v Speaker 1>lion is really weird. I'm gonna crack open my giant
<v Speaker 1>forty of green tea now, you know, so you don't
<v Speaker 1>get the ass cancer. You know, a come from the
<v Speaker 1>line of Daego's always always get prone to the colon
<v Speaker 1>cancer because they're eating a lot of nasty shit. All
<v Speaker 1>that had mozzarella and the fucking you know, those meatballs
<v Speaker 1>and shit. You know, it's really reeks havoc on your
<v Speaker 1>colon if you're not leading an active life. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so Jim Hogg County is mostly Hispanic. There's a large Hispanic.
<v Speaker 1>The box you check on like a fucking job application
<v Speaker 1>doesn't go into the depth of heritage. You know, generally
<v Speaker 1>cole Tekan mixed with or lepan Apache mixed with Spanish.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, it's mostly Hispanic county and it is rife
<v Speaker 1>with cool thorn scrub plants, thorn scrub plant communities, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, I was a following an older baring record
<v Speaker 1>to this spot and I look at it the satellite map.
<v Speaker 1>I could tell this was gonna be a good good
<v Speaker 1>spot because the satellite map indicated that the whole area
<v Speaker 1>where it is reported to grow was I mean, you
<v Speaker 1>could see it from this like I was saying, you
<v Speaker 1>could see it was all this white soil, which turned
<v Speaker 1>out to be calleche. I would assume in other other
<v Speaker 1>places that maybe it was gypsum. I did not see
<v Speaker 1>any selenite there. Selenites gypsum in crystal form that you'll
<v Speaker 1>frequently see in gypsum areas. Remember, gypsum is a highly
<v Speaker 1>soluble just like limestone sedimentary rock. That indicates deposition in
<v Speaker 1>a marine environment. Generally when you see gypsum, though it's
<v Speaker 1>not just ocean environment. It generally and iticates more like
<v Speaker 1>near shore evaporate pools, like more estuarying, you know, like waters.
<v Speaker 1>It'll be inundated with the ocean for a little bit,
<v Speaker 1>then it'll evaporate like more estuary. You know. It just
<v Speaker 1>indicates there was more evaporative precipitation going on there at
<v Speaker 1>some point, generally speaking, but you'll frequently see gypsum with limestone.
<v Speaker 1>Limestone is calcium carbonate. Gypsum is calcium sulfate. There's a
<v Speaker 1>lot of cool plants that grow on gypsum. Gypsum is
<v Speaker 1>one of those soils that those geologic settings that induces
<v Speaker 1>speciation in plants. It causes new plant species to evolve
<v Speaker 1>over long amounts of time, just like serpentine, just like
<v Speaker 1>sand dunes. All right, It's not a straight soil set up.
<v Speaker 1>It's a really weird mix both chemically and mechanically. The
<v Speaker 1>way it behaves when it's wet versus when it's dry.
<v Speaker 1>Just like clay soils, there's clay endemics, there's clay endemic plants,
<v Speaker 1>plants that are only that are restricted growing on vertict
<v Speaker 1>clay soils. In places like the California Coast Range Mountains,
<v Speaker 1>which has a lot of clay sedimentary deposits full of clay.
<v Speaker 1>Shout out the Ryan O'Dell who works for a BLM
<v Speaker 1>out there, a cool botanist who knows a ship ton
<v Speaker 1>about all of those what is it fucking region? It's
<v Speaker 1>off Pinocchi Road, which is off the I five in
<v Speaker 1>central California, and it's all this verdict clay. You get
<v Speaker 1>these really cool plant species that germinate when the clay
<v Speaker 1>is moist and are able to take the stresses induced
<v Speaker 1>by the clay As it dries out and bakes, and
<v Speaker 1>those molecules, well, not the molecules, but the clay itself
<v Speaker 1>starts contracting, because that's what verdict means. It means it
<v Speaker 1>expands and contracts regard in relation to how much moisture
<v Speaker 1>it holds. So when it's wet, it expands and as
<v Speaker 1>it dries out it shrinks. A right, you can see
<v Speaker 1>the same shit in places where houses have been built
<v Speaker 1>with a cement foundation in clay soils. That's why they'll
<v Speaker 1>tell you sometimes in Texas like water the area around
<v Speaker 1>the prime of your house, so that because you know,
<v Speaker 1>as that soil contracts, it starts, it doesn't hold up
<v Speaker 1>the foundation as well. In certain places it's not uniform throughout.
<v Speaker 1>You know, there's where the cement foundation is laid, so
<v Speaker 1>the foundation can then start the crack since there's an
<v Speaker 1>uneven way balance since the ground has literally shifted beneath it.
<v Speaker 1>But then when it gets wet again after a good rain,
<v Speaker 1>it's the ground swells back up. It's pretty cool, but
<v Speaker 1>it's obviously very stressful if your roots are and you're
<v Speaker 1>a plant. Well, gypsum kind of does the same thing.
<v Speaker 1>When it's wet, it will be very spongy and moist.
<v Speaker 1>Then when it when it gets dry, it feels like,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it feels like some Jersey gweedo mixed the
<v Speaker 1>bad batch of concrete. Basically, it's what I'm saying here.
<v Speaker 1>It's a fucked up harsh It's hard to kneel on.
<v Speaker 1>It hurts your knees, you know, if you're kneeling on it, it
<v Speaker 1>feels like like really shitty concrete, like uneven concrete, not
<v Speaker 1>the mooth shit that Vinie did a good job on
<v Speaker 1>when he was out there with the little trowel and shit,
<v Speaker 1>you know, making it all smooth and nice. He could
<v Speaker 1>run a hand alongside it, you know, you could lick
<v Speaker 1>it when it's dry, and you wouldn't get any dust
<v Speaker 1>in your in your mouth, you know, like that, and
<v Speaker 1>not that kind of concrete, like the concrete that's all
<v Speaker 1>gravelly and wardy and sucks and it's. Yeah, it's really
<v Speaker 1>hard for a lot of plants to grow, and so
<v Speaker 1>you get a lot of cool gypsm endemic plants in
<v Speaker 1>places like Nuevo Leone and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and anywhere
<v Speaker 1>in the Chihuahua Desert where there's gypsum. There's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of gypsum in the Chihuahua Desert and apparently on down
<v Speaker 1>into South Texas well. I could see this from the
<v Speaker 1>satellite image that this was already going to be a cool,
<v Speaker 1>uh setting for plants, because it looks remarkably different from
<v Speaker 1>the surrounding thorn scrub and it's bright white and whatever.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, I got there and I'm already. Fucking I'm
<v Speaker 1>seeing a bunch of cool, cool plants. Already. It's generally sparse.
<v Speaker 1>There's it's you know, sparse ground and between. It wasn't
<v Speaker 1>super thick. There's like sparse ground in between these islands
<v Speaker 1>of vegetation. Caliandra conferta. Was it conferta or confert to floor?
<v Speaker 1>I always fucked this up? On let me look it up. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>there we go. It was Caleandra conferta Calliandra areophyla. Where
<v Speaker 1>is that? These are the feather dusters they call them.
<v Speaker 1>I saw a bunch of cool calanders in Brazil and
<v Speaker 1>in Mexico that are hummer pollen eate of their bright
<v Speaker 1>red all those long all those stamens get super long,
<v Speaker 1>the petals and sepals are reduced, and it just looks
<v Speaker 1>like a dust, like literally like a fucking duster, you know.
<v Speaker 1>And that's just again the stamens and a couple styles
<v Speaker 1>many stamens releasing pollen, and a few styles receiving pollen.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a floral form that seems to work. But
<v Speaker 1>that Calandra conferta is cool. It's got this kind of
<v Speaker 1>divaricate branching, it's got you know, those mimosa like pinnate leaves,
<v Speaker 1>and it's forming this mat all over this not mat.
<v Speaker 1>It gets like ten inches tall. A beautiful butterfly outside
<v Speaker 1>hitting the amelia. I got a amelia in my fucking yard.
<v Speaker 1>Oh shit, that's a swallow fuck yeah, nice zebra swallow tail. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you fucking know what that is. It's good looking and
<v Speaker 1>so uh the caliander conferd to me as an indicator plant.
<v Speaker 1>That Okay, this is gonna be a reduced shrub community.
<v Speaker 1>It's not very tall, it doesn't like competition, it needs
<v Speaker 1>full sun. That's been another fucking plant I'd love to
<v Speaker 1>see in cultivation. There are so many I would love
<v Speaker 1>to see in cultivation. Lucophylum minus is another plant I'd
<v Speaker 1>love to see in cultivation. Little leaf saniso with those
<v Speaker 1>chalky mint green leaves, like so many of the plants
<v Speaker 1>in West Texas. This is in South Texas. This is
<v Speaker 1>a West Texas plant. We're talking about South Texas. I'm
<v Speaker 1>just going on a diet tribe here because this is
<v Speaker 1>a wonderful species and I want to make sure I
<v Speaker 1>don't forget to mention it. But Lucophylum minus is a
<v Speaker 1>West Texas plant. That's going. It's going off right now.
<v Speaker 1>It's like a late summer, early fall bloomer purple flowers.
<v Speaker 1>It's little leaf siniso. Lucophylum minus is opposed to Lucophylum protestens,
<v Speaker 1>which you get in the Edwards Southern Edwards Plateau and
<v Speaker 1>the Paloti gardens of South Texas. Lucophiling for testants has
<v Speaker 1>pink flowers and larger leaves. But again, as you're moving
<v Speaker 1>west in the continent, it dries out, and so you
<v Speaker 1>start seeing the trademarks of more drought adapted plants, like
<v Speaker 1>smaller leaves, thinner leaves, more hair, et cetera. But lucophile
<v Speaker 1>and minus is fucking going off. God, it looks good.
<v Speaker 1>The whole fucking landscape is lighting up with purple and
<v Speaker 1>I don't know anyone growing it, and that to me
<v Speaker 1>is a fucking travesty. Home despot's not gonna grow it.
<v Speaker 1>These shitty you know, wholesale nurseries aren't going to grow it.
<v Speaker 1>There's no wholesale native plant nurseries in Texas yet. There
<v Speaker 1>should be. I'm hoping there will be at some point.
<v Speaker 1>They got them in California, where the native plant movement
<v Speaker 1>is much bigger, but they don't have them out here.
<v Speaker 1>Someone needs to start. Man, someone could start a wholesale
<v Speaker 1>native plant nursery in Texas and make a fucking killing.
<v Speaker 1>That is that is a fucking gold mine nobody's sitting
<v Speaker 1>on yet. I'll do your promos for you. You maybe
<v Speaker 1>don't want to be associated with me. I can't blame it,
<v Speaker 1>but I will mention you. Okay, we'll do an unauthorized
<v Speaker 1>sponsorship because I just want more people knowing about this stuff. Oh,
<v Speaker 1>by the way, James Lovegren is gonna have prudace Texaan already.
<v Speaker 1>I gave him a bunch of seed. The radicals are
<v Speaker 1>starting to sprout and so he's gonna sew them. Uh.
<v Speaker 1>He's in South Texas. He's in uh what is it,
<v Speaker 1>the home of Freddy Fender? You know, you know, Freddy Fender?
<v Speaker 1>Right home of Freddy Fender. Beautiful Sam Benito, Texas. That's
<v Speaker 1>where James love Grin is located. And he's got prunus
<v Speaker 1>text Ayanna, damn. Look at a frow on that guy.
<v Speaker 1>Look at Freddy he's got a fro. Fuck. Yeah, that's nice.
<v Speaker 1>Like at you fro it's a daygo fro. Yeah, Look
<v Speaker 1>at he's got that mustache till Okay, I'm going I'm
<v Speaker 1>really getting distracted now. But anyway, James love Gren, located
<v Speaker 1>in beautiful San Benito, Texas, is gonna have Prunas Texana.
<v Speaker 1>So I'm gonna try to do some promo for him
<v Speaker 1>to sell him because I don't think there's enough people
<v Speaker 1>in South Texas that want it. You never know, but
<v Speaker 1>people have been asking me about that. I've been getting
<v Speaker 1>emails left the right. You got any pruce text on
<v Speaker 1>a seeds you get? No, you slept on that, buddy,
<v Speaker 1>It's gone. I'm sorry it doesn't keep well. I tried
<v Speaker 1>to do a hot stratification on some because I thought
<v Speaker 1>that's what they wanted, so I left it in a
<v Speaker 1>bag and let it get to the point that it
<v Speaker 1>smelled like vomit, like literally like Ginko fruits. And then
<v Speaker 1>it turns out they had just rotten. Doesn't need hot stratification.
<v Speaker 1>The seed just needs removal of that seed coat, which
<v Speaker 1>bacteria and fungal organisms do in the soil when it's
<v Speaker 1>sitting there throughout the hot summer waiting to germinate. But
<v Speaker 1>I got some that germinated already. But remember when those
<v Speaker 1>seeds germinate and they'll be more available next June. That's
<v Speaker 1>when the seed is ready. They flower in early spring
<v Speaker 1>and then which in South Texas is like February, and
<v Speaker 1>then the seed is ready. The fruits are ready by June,
<v Speaker 1>and they're fucking delicious. You go out there, you pick
<v Speaker 1>a bucket, you eat all of them. You spit the
<v Speaker 1>seeds out. That's how you harvest those things. They're so
<v Speaker 1>fucking good. But yeah, that then you'll sew them and
<v Speaker 1>then they germinate in late summer early fall, so they
<v Speaker 1>sit out that hot summer. But I wasn't sure if
<v Speaker 1>it was a chemical or mechanical inhibitor on those seeds,
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, they're popping now. I got a couple. When
<v Speaker 1>that seed germinates, you got to get them in a
<v Speaker 1>ten inch pot, if not straight in the ground, because
<v Speaker 1>they send seeds, they send roots down super deep as
<v Speaker 1>fast as they can because they're trying to get you know,
<v Speaker 1>they grow in really hot places that are prone to
<v Speaker 1>you know, you could have a fucking eighty degree day
<v Speaker 1>on Christmas, you know, throughout the year, so the heat
<v Speaker 1>can come whenever. So you want to get that root established.
<v Speaker 1>And then once that roots established, and then start growing.
<v Speaker 1>Someone sent me a photo of one they had germinated.
<v Speaker 1>Whoever did that, thank you, By the way, I forget
<v Speaker 1>who it was because my mind is overloaded. But they
<v Speaker 1>sent me a picture of when they had germinated. The
<v Speaker 1>vegetative parts above ground were two inches tall and the
<v Speaker 1>roots were like eleven inches deep into the ground. Fucking
<v Speaker 1>cool strategy. It works for him. But uh, anyway, I'm
<v Speaker 1>picking Manfreda. I'm opening the manfred to lunge of flora
<v Speaker 1>fruits from my yard as I talk to you. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>the point is there's not enough cool native plants uh
<v Speaker 1>uh in cultivation. So it's up to you figure out
<v Speaker 1>when this stuff flowers, when it fruits and sets seed
<v Speaker 1>and then grows. Shit done of it, and collect more
<v Speaker 1>seed than you think you'll need. Scatter some as you're
<v Speaker 1>collecting it. That's what the plant wants and you're helping
<v Speaker 1>it out. But scatter more seed than you think you'll need,
<v Speaker 1>because you can always give it to someone who will
<v Speaker 1>grow it, or give it to a native plant nursery
<v Speaker 1>that'll grow it or whatever. But get I've been given
<v Speaker 1>see to James Peace, I've been given seeded bart and
<v Speaker 1>springs nursery up in Austin. I just want to see
<v Speaker 1>more of this shit and cultivation. Why because the habitat
<v Speaker 1>where's where it grows is dying and being undervalued, underappreciated,
<v Speaker 1>and destroyed. So anyway back to Perinikia, Congesta and those
<v Speaker 1>cool caliche soils that it grows on. Collich is just
<v Speaker 1>kind of a natural cement. It's basically what happens when
<v Speaker 1>you take calcareous rock and calcarious soils, introduce a little
<v Speaker 1>bit of rain water, well sometimes a lot of rain
<v Speaker 1>water in a very hot place where it evaporates really quickly,
<v Speaker 1>and so that water reacts with the limestone because it's
<v Speaker 1>calcium carbonate, and the calcareous soils, even if it's just
<v Speaker 1>like you know, the limestone that weathered long ago, it's
<v Speaker 1>still you know, still builds a calcarious soil. The weather
<v Speaker 1>reacts with it, picks up figuratively speaking, well actually quite literally,
<v Speaker 1>picks up, dissolves that those calcium carbonate minerals and then
<v Speaker 1>carries them aways. And then because it's so hot, that
<v Speaker 1>water evaporates, leaving them behind, and so you get this
<v Speaker 1>kind of natural cement forming. And this cement will cement
<v Speaker 1>rocks together. You'll see like road cuts with all these
<v Speaker 1>conglomerate rocks and pebbles in it, cemented together by caliche
<v Speaker 1>where kalechi, as Christy David says, those kalechi soils, you
<v Speaker 1>gotta say it loves those kalechi soils. Joey gotta love
<v Speaker 1>that woman. So anyway, I could see the collechi was
<v Speaker 1>fucking everywhere. Plant community changed, and it's so hard to
<v Speaker 1>not get distracted when I'm looking at I mean, it's
<v Speaker 1>so hard to not get distracted on this fucking podcast,
<v Speaker 1>as you can clearly tell. But it's so hard to
<v Speaker 1>not get distracted when I'm out looking for a plant
<v Speaker 1>because in any of these areas, because there's so much
<v Speaker 1>other cool stuff that's growing there and it's so underdocumented,
<v Speaker 1>you're not getting a lot of people going out to
<v Speaker 1>Jim Hogg County, Texas to document the native plants there.
<v Speaker 1>As you might have guessed, we need more people doing it,
<v Speaker 1>even if it just means parking your car and walking
<v Speaker 1>along a roadside, which is what you got to do
<v Speaker 1>in Texas most of the time because ninety six percent
<v Speaker 1>of the land is fucking private here. You can still
<v Speaker 1>learn a lot of cool shit and see a lot
<v Speaker 1>of cool shit just by parking your fucking car and
<v Speaker 1>walking with your dog along a fence line for a mile,
<v Speaker 1>all right, because those areas between the fence and the
<v Speaker 1>road there can still be a lot of cool shit
<v Speaker 1>growing there. Sucks, that's what it's come to. It sucks.
<v Speaker 1>You can't go out on like an actual hiking trailer,
<v Speaker 1>hike off in some blm land looking for stuff like
<v Speaker 1>me and sheriff. What do you used to do? But
<v Speaker 1>it beats It beats nothing, you know, beats not doing anything.
<v Speaker 1>It beats sitting on your sitting at your home with
<v Speaker 1>your thumb and your ass, complaining about shit on social media.
<v Speaker 1>Fucking god forbid. Playing video games no offense if you
<v Speaker 1>played the video games. But you got to at least
<v Speaker 1>reduce them, all right, You should get them out of
<v Speaker 1>your life and go enjoy the real world. But I
<v Speaker 1>get I get it. The real world's depressing. But at
<v Speaker 1>least cut them down a little bit. Do something, you know,
<v Speaker 1>Go build some shit, go fucking whatever. I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>Go do some kettle bell swings, you know, so the
<v Speaker 1>coleaches everywhere I park It already looks good. I was
<v Speaker 1>surprised to see this fucking blew my mind. Liatris punk Hata,
<v Speaker 1>the Blazing Star growing in South Texas in jim Hogg County,
<v Speaker 1>and it was now you never see Liatrius growing in
<v Speaker 1>thorn scrub's mostly thorn scrub. It's dense, but it only
<v Speaker 1>it only gets six feet eight feet tall. This type
<v Speaker 1>of plant community the time of leaping thorn scrub, but
<v Speaker 1>it gets super fucking dense. And my actress is a
<v Speaker 1>sun needy plant, and there was so much of it
<v Speaker 1>growing here. I did dig some. I fucking dug some,
<v Speaker 1>you bet your ass I did. I would never do
<v Speaker 1>that in California or another state where that actually values
<v Speaker 1>its native flora and protects it. But I've seen too
<v Speaker 1>many places in Texas where you're out there looking for
<v Speaker 1>cool plants and uh, you know, you decide I'm not
<v Speaker 1>gonna dig or whatever, and then you come back six
<v Speaker 1>months later and it's destroyed. It's been mowed, it's been sprayed,
<v Speaker 1>or the landowner it just decided to bulldoze it because
<v Speaker 1>he's trying to sell the plot. And cleared land is
<v Speaker 1>more valuable than land with living skin on it than
<v Speaker 1>land with plants on it. So I dug a couple
<v Speaker 1>of iatriss. The population was robust. I'm gonna try to
<v Speaker 1>get them going, and once I do, I'm either gonna,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, try to get them the one of
<v Speaker 1>the botanic gardens here, or basically the idea is to
<v Speaker 1>dig them and then get a seed source going, get
<v Speaker 1>two plants, get a seed source going, so you can
<v Speaker 1>get seed of this. I also collected an erbarium specimen
<v Speaker 1>because I don't even know if this population has been documented,
<v Speaker 1>but apparently this liatrius. One of the only reasons it
<v Speaker 1>was growing here is because it was this open white
<v Speaker 1>landscape of Colichi Calichi's soil, but it was I'm so
<v Speaker 1>surprised to see Liatris punk tata growing down. I've seen
<v Speaker 1>it out by Terlingua on some of those you know
<v Speaker 1>barren desert areas, but of course that's a different landscape
<v Speaker 1>that's not as humid. You get cooler night temperatures where
<v Speaker 1>you don't have humidity. The temperature is cool off at night.
<v Speaker 1>That affects the plant metabolism, you know, over evolutionary time,
<v Speaker 1>so there are plants that have evolved to take those
<v Speaker 1>cool nights. But then you bring them to a hot
<v Speaker 1>humid environment and they can't take the warm nights. And
<v Speaker 1>again the air doesn't cool off because it's got water
<v Speaker 1>vapor in it. Water vapor holds onto heat. It's got
<v Speaker 1>a high heat capacity, so anyway, the water molecules hold
<v Speaker 1>on to heat. But I fuck, it was so cool
<v Speaker 1>to see. I was so stoked. I'm like, God, damn,
<v Speaker 1>this is a liatris growing in South Texas, growing in
<v Speaker 1>the fucking payote gardens. Like there's peyote, you know, five
<v Speaker 1>minutes away from here, and there's liatris growing with it.
<v Speaker 1>So a blazing star that grows simpatrick with payoti, which
<v Speaker 1>is crazy. Like, you know, people in the Midwest that
<v Speaker 1>are familiar with liatris and love it and plant that
<v Speaker 1>in their native plant gardens. Whatever the shit, would be
<v Speaker 1>amazed to learn that there's a liatris species that co
<v Speaker 1>occurs with payoti. So cool, you know, or grows within
<v Speaker 1>a breadth of it. What else was here? That Callandra Conferda,
<v Speaker 1>Like I said, there was a weird Oh god, what
<v Speaker 1>was that plant? There was a weird member of malt
<v Speaker 1>piggy ac that I had never seen before. Let's see
<v Speaker 1>this aspect. Karfa was that what it was. Normally when
<v Speaker 1>you see malpiggy ac, you think it's gelfimia. What is
<v Speaker 1>it in gusta foia which you get in the Edwards
<v Speaker 1>plateau to it builds a big root like many of
<v Speaker 1>these plants do, you know, from a dry area they
<v Speaker 1>build a big root that they can dive back to.
<v Speaker 1>You know, cut their cut up, close up shop, cut
<v Speaker 1>off vasculature to their to their leaves. When it gets
<v Speaker 1>too hot, you know, basically just close it up. Tissue
<v Speaker 1>dies and they just die back to the root, go dormant. Yeah.
<v Speaker 1>Aspacarpa Hysopatholia malpiggy a ce malpiggy ac, for which the
<v Speaker 1>order malpiggy Alies is named, which you know rubber is
<v Speaker 1>in points setis are in U four B A C.
<v Speaker 1>The family is in as well as willows too or
<v Speaker 1>in this order malpiggy Alies male piggy ac the family.
<v Speaker 1>Remember orders and an alies families and an ac mal
<v Speaker 1>piggy ac is all the male piggy is I see
<v Speaker 1>have this general flower shape, five petals. The petals look
<v Speaker 1>like a padal, so they're they're much broader at the
<v Speaker 1>distal ends, and then they have this tiny little looks
<v Speaker 1>like an ore, you know, like, ah, they've got this
<v Speaker 1>tiny little it's called being a clawed pedal, I believe.
<v Speaker 1>So it looks like a spatula shaped petal, an oor
<v Speaker 1>shaped petal, or like a spoon shaped petal. And then
<v Speaker 1>they've got these little nectar glands, not nectar, excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>lipid glands at the base of the flower that produce
<v Speaker 1>fats I believe for bees that collect oils. Is that correct,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, but there are these weird glands. They
<v Speaker 1>look like little buttons or little knobs. It's pretty cool.
<v Speaker 1>But this aspacarp I had never seen before, And because
<v Speaker 1>all Malepigia flowers generally look the same, having the same
<v Speaker 1>flower structure, it's really easy to see it and just
<v Speaker 1>be like, oh, yeah, that's a uh, that's just the galfimia.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you always you assume it's what you already know,
<v Speaker 1>but it was not. It was a whole different species.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool And anyway, so what else did I see? Oh?
<v Speaker 1>You Ploca torri i Uploca is barrage and acy. So
<v Speaker 1>the inflorescence has that kind of scorpion, the way that
<v Speaker 1>it curves, you know that scorpioid cyme structure very slightly
<v Speaker 1>not as big as like in a facilia, but you
<v Speaker 1>could still see it. But it's got these yellow flowers
<v Speaker 1>that are somewhat tube shaped. They look like they're probably
<v Speaker 1>pollinated by a small moth or a small fly, something
<v Speaker 1>that's got a long proboscis that can get in there.
<v Speaker 1>And I saw that uploka and I thought that was
<v Speaker 1>this perinikea at first, because I just was ahead of
<v Speaker 1>my mind, tiny yellow flowers. I didn't I didn't look
<v Speaker 1>close enough. And then I looked at them more and
<v Speaker 1>I was like, oh wait, this is not a perinike
<v Speaker 1>at all. Whatever. And then a little bit further along
<v Speaker 1>at this site I was looking at the liatrus. I'm like, okay,
<v Speaker 1>this thing isn't going to be easy to find. It's
<v Speaker 1>a small plant anyway, but it's surely going to be there.
<v Speaker 1>So I just walked a little bit further out into
<v Speaker 1>a more barren area, and sure enough there was Perinikia congesta,
<v Speaker 1>which I just, I guess just got in dangered species
<v Speaker 1>status because it's so rare. It's only known from two places.
<v Speaker 1>But of course Texas is so ass backwards too. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>the conservation is here can be's ass backwards. So now
<v Speaker 1>it's since it's in danger, it's illegal to grow or
<v Speaker 1>they don't want you to grow it. Some of the
<v Speaker 1>state bondists might harass you for growing it. I guess,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. At the same time, they're not actively
<v Speaker 1>engaging in any X city conservation or trying to propagate it.
<v Speaker 1>Oh god, it's so weird, man, It's so silly to me.
<v Speaker 1>If I'm wrong, correct me, and I will gladly, you know,
<v Speaker 1>put it in the next podcast that I'm giving you
<v Speaker 1>out giving out bad dope. This is bad, you know,
<v Speaker 1>bad info. But I'm pretty sure. I mean, I know
<v Speaker 1>people who've been harassed for growing endangered plants before, which
<v Speaker 1>is fucking madness. It's insane. California, with all the stupid
<v Speaker 1>shit they can do out there, sometimes doesn't do that.
<v Speaker 1>Like California doesn't have policy where it's illegal. Three are
<v Speaker 1>plenty of plants that are endangered in the wild in
<v Speaker 1>California are actively in abundantly grown and cultivation. It's our
<v Speaker 1>best hope for a lot of the stuff, you know,
<v Speaker 1>in a state where there's no protections for a lot
<v Speaker 1>of these plants, growing things in cultivation is the best hope.
<v Speaker 1>Why would you make it harder to do that. That's
<v Speaker 1>crazy to me, because it's gonna be incentivizing poaching. No,
<v Speaker 1>it's not gonna be incentivizing poaching. It's gonna be incentivizing
<v Speaker 1>if a plant is endangered, it's gonna be incentivizing growing
<v Speaker 1>it more. People want to have that. It's no one's
<v Speaker 1>gonna come out and try to poach a fucking little
<v Speaker 1>this little turd of a plant that no one probably
<v Speaker 1>cares about, just because it's rare, come on flood the market.
<v Speaker 1>That's how the thinking goes. Like when the same thing,
<v Speaker 1>when the Dudley appoaching was going on in California, they
<v Speaker 1>didn't outlaw growing Dudley. They fucking growers just grew a
<v Speaker 1>shit ton more. They're really easy to grow from seed.
<v Speaker 1>Dudley is a cool little succulent plant that's got a
<v Speaker 1>rosette that a lot of people love. They do grading gardens.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, Yeah, I was stoked to see this plant.
<v Speaker 1>I was stoked to get good photos of it. Put
<v Speaker 1>them on a naturalist, put them up in a database,
<v Speaker 1>and make them available to the public. Under creative common ZEUS.
<v Speaker 1>You know all my photos. If you're not trying to
<v Speaker 1>make money off of it, fucking use it. I don't
<v Speaker 1>care credit me, but use it. This zebra swallowtails really
<v Speaker 1>hanging out. What is he hanging out? He's hanging out
<v Speaker 1>in the set the excellem. I think he's just pollinating
<v Speaker 1>or yeah, getting some necktar off of it. So yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was a fucking cool site. I spent a few
<v Speaker 1>I spent a couple hours there. There was a physaria
<v Speaker 1>I think it was Phisaria Fendler I little mustard, So
<v Speaker 1>that means four petals and six stamens, synapomorphies of the
<v Speaker 1>mustard family. Shared traits of the mustard family, you know,
<v Speaker 1>shared traits that are shared due to shared ancestry, to
<v Speaker 1>the fact that they're inherited. It's how we grew up
<v Speaker 1>families and orders. And then earlier that day, I had
<v Speaker 1>been at this woman's land who owns god thousands of
<v Speaker 1>acres and she's really cool, she's really friendly, she's down
<v Speaker 1>for native plant people. She lives, I believe, what is it,
<v Speaker 1>Webb County, And I was exploring her land. She's got
<v Speaker 1>this cool red sand, which is another soil type here,
<v Speaker 1>and I saw Kamachrista texana growing there. This little they
<v Speaker 1>call the partridge piece Kamachrista texana. But the same thing
<v Speaker 1>mimosa flowers, same thing as that callander. Mimosa like flowers,
<v Speaker 1>so they're pinnate, they're not flowers, leaves, Mimosa like leaves,
<v Speaker 1>so those pinnate leaves. But then it's got that safe
<v Speaker 1>elpinioid flower sace. Elpinioid is a subfamily of the pea family, Fabasi.
<v Speaker 1>Senna is in that family, Erythrostemin is in that family.
<v Speaker 1>They're generally pretty cool. They almost look like a pea flower,
<v Speaker 1>but they're five big petals. They don't have that banner
<v Speaker 1>wings and keel flower morphology banner petal, wing pedals, keel
<v Speaker 1>petals and this, and they've got porcytal anthers to most
<v Speaker 1>of them. Hoffman segi A glacca is another great one,
<v Speaker 1>which it's another cool plant I saw in West Texas
<v Speaker 1>busting up through the asphalt near the Prairie dog Town
<v Speaker 1>north of Marathon. Another great, fucking underutilized plant would make
<v Speaker 1>an awesome plant in a native garden. Dope looking flowers,
<v Speaker 1>super cool flowers. Glaucus foliage hoffman Segia is a genus
<v Speaker 1>I know from the deserts of Baja to the deserts
<v Speaker 1>of Chile. The whole fucking genus is dope. They all
<v Speaker 1>look cool. There's some blood red ones in Chile. That's
<v Speaker 1>our native one hoffman Segia glacca. Why the fuck is
<v Speaker 1>nobody growing it? Once again I ask into the void,
<v Speaker 1>into the ether. I get no answer. But Cama Crista
<v Speaker 1>flexuosa variety text aina or just camachrista textena. Uh, you
<v Speaker 1>get Chama Crista flexuosa on the sand sheet. It's got
<v Speaker 1>multiple stems, comes up from another tuberous root. Those cool
<v Speaker 1>yellow flowers mimosa like foliage mimosa like leaves. This one
<v Speaker 1>was a nantios stylist, which I've been ranting about a
<v Speaker 1>lot lately because I've seen it in Solaina moro stratum
<v Speaker 1>and Heterantherra mexicana, that cool aquatic plant I did a
<v Speaker 1>video on last month. A nantiostyli aka mirror image flowers
<v Speaker 1>is a way to ensure outcrossing right and avoid self pole.
<v Speaker 1>Why do we want to avoid self pollination because that
<v Speaker 1>lowers genetic diversity. It's a great tactic to avoid going extinct.
<v Speaker 1>If there's only one or two individuals in an area
<v Speaker 1>and the rest of the population has been wiped out.
<v Speaker 1>If you can self pollinate and still make seeds, you know,
<v Speaker 1>different phenotypes of seeds, not just seeds that are the
<v Speaker 1>same clone as the parent plant. It's the whole point
<v Speaker 1>of making fucking seeds, of reproduction. Then if you can
<v Speaker 1>do that, then you're not going to go extinct. You're
<v Speaker 1>going to have a larger population. It's a good way
<v Speaker 1>to hedge your bets against extinction if you can self pollinate.
<v Speaker 1>But again, you do that enough, you do it over. However,
<v Speaker 1>many generations, like many of the salvias, can do, and
<v Speaker 1>stages can do. They can self pollinate. A lot of
<v Speaker 1>members of MALVESI can self pollinate, so like if you
<v Speaker 1>only have one plant, you'll still get good seed. Caranthodendron,
<v Speaker 1>which is a really cool tree, the monkey hand tree,
<v Speaker 1>the devil hand tree from Wahaka, from the cloud Forest
<v Speaker 1>of Wahaka. I grew then in Kell, California, there was
<v Speaker 1>only only one of them. I would still get good
<v Speaker 1>set off of it, so I could grow more and
<v Speaker 1>then share them with people. Great fucking tree, super cool.
<v Speaker 1>The birds love the shit out of it like Jay's
<v Speaker 1>would come and drink out of the flowers because the
<v Speaker 1>flowers are the size of a baseball and produce so
<v Speaker 1>much fucking nectar. And to see him in habitat in
<v Speaker 1>the cloud forest of Wahaka growing at nine thousand feet
<v Speaker 1>elevation is a fucking tree. Really cool. They grow in
<v Speaker 1>those those places where they do the mushroom tourism, you
<v Speaker 1>know where you get like you fucking white shamans with
<v Speaker 1>rich parents going to do psychedelic mushroom tourism. You know,
<v Speaker 1>it was spiritual experience. I'm just kidding. It's good. I like,
<v Speaker 1>I like that they have those places down there, and
<v Speaker 1>I think it's cool that a lot of those indigenous
<v Speaker 1>communities can capitalize on it. But you know, it's always
<v Speaker 1>a fine line between gross commercialization and actual ethical practices
<v Speaker 1>that respect heritage anyway. You know, self pollinating obviously is
<v Speaker 1>a way to head your bets, but outcrossing is the
<v Speaker 1>most beneficial because if you're outcrossing, you're not going to
<v Speaker 1>be stacking up recessive alleles. Allel is a copy of
<v Speaker 1>a gene, right, so humans are diployd. They've got two
<v Speaker 1>sets of chromosomes, one from your parent, one from your
<v Speaker 1>one from your mother, one from your father to you know,
<v Speaker 1>one step from each parent, you get a bad gene.
<v Speaker 1>You get a bad copy on one set of chromosomes,
<v Speaker 1>while you've still got that other backup copy of chromosomes
<v Speaker 1>to make sure that you get a good copy. And
<v Speaker 1>I was just teaching this, you know, it's haploid diploid.
<v Speaker 1>That's just elementary biology. And that's why you know humans
<v Speaker 1>are diploid and spermanegg are haploid. Sperm meat sagg forms
<v Speaker 1>a new zygote, a diploid zygot anyway, so you get
<v Speaker 1>those recessive alleles stacking up if you self pollinate or inbreed.
<v Speaker 1>Eventually you will if you're self pooninating. So outcrossing is
<v Speaker 1>always more beneficial. So something in the environment was selecting
<v Speaker 1>for outcrossing with these enantiostylist flowers, these mirror image flowers.
<v Speaker 1>And so how is a flower mirror image do we
<v Speaker 1>mean by that? Well, normally in a flower, you've got
<v Speaker 1>say five stamens and a stigma, five male parts and
<v Speaker 1>a single female part. The stigma will be in the
<v Speaker 1>center and the stamens will be surrounding it. And so
<v Speaker 1>if a bee gets in there, it's dancing around the flower,
<v Speaker 1>hitting each stamen, the inside of the flower, hitting each stamen.
<v Speaker 1>It's going to get pollin on that style no matter what.
<v Speaker 1>But the ideally it's from another flower, but it could
<v Speaker 1>be from the from another plant, but it could be
<v Speaker 1>from the same plant. Okay, with mirror image flowers, most
<v Speaker 1>of them, the entire plant will only produce one type
<v Speaker 1>of flower, a style that swings to the left or
<v Speaker 1>to the right. So the style on a mere image
<v Speaker 1>flower is not going to be in the center. It's
<v Speaker 1>going to be to the left or the right. And
<v Speaker 1>generally speaking, the anthers will be on the other side.
<v Speaker 1>So the anthers swing left, the style swings right. An
<v Speaker 1>stamens same thing. The stamens swing to the left, the
<v Speaker 1>style swings to the right. The whole plant will be
<v Speaker 1>like that. Every flower on that plant will be like that.
<v Speaker 1>And then another plant will have a style that swings
<v Speaker 1>to the left and the stamens that swing to the right.
<v Speaker 1>So if a flower, if a plant is producing flowers
<v Speaker 1>that only swing to the left, that means it's going
<v Speaker 1>to have to That means the pollen is only going
<v Speaker 1>to be on the left side of the pollinator's body.
<v Speaker 1>If it hit an entirely separate plant where the stamens
<v Speaker 1>and the anthers were on the left side of the flower.
<v Speaker 1>So it's it's a way to ensure that no self
<v Speaker 1>pollination is going on, because every flower on a plant
<v Speaker 1>that produces flowers with a style that swings to the
<v Speaker 1>left is not gonna it's not going to produce stamens
<v Speaker 1>that do the same thing. So there's the pollen is
<v Speaker 1>only going to be on one side of the bee's body,
<v Speaker 1>not on the other side. In order for the pollen
<v Speaker 1>again on the other side, it's got to hit entirely
<v Speaker 1>different plants, so boom from out its outcrossing. It's pretty cool.
<v Speaker 1>You see it in Wachendorfia in South Africa, really cool
<v Speaker 1>member of the hamodo ace, the blood roof family, the
<v Speaker 1>kangaroo puff family in South Africa. You'll see it in
<v Speaker 1>Solanum rostratum, which is a species of night shade, the
<v Speaker 1>same genuses tomatoes and potatoes and eggplant that we get
<v Speaker 1>in Central Texas. And you'll see it apparently in this
<v Speaker 1>Cama crista. I don't know if all camachrista are like that.
<v Speaker 1>A lot of them are, but maybe not all. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, but yeah, Cama Crista is pea family. It's
<v Speaker 1>a sayesyl pineoid flower. So that was cool to see.
<v Speaker 1>And I've never seen this species before. I saw it
<v Speaker 1>and I was like, why the fuck? This thing is
<v Speaker 1>growing kind of prostrate, multiple stems coming up from a
<v Speaker 1>tuberous root, and apparently it's probably restricted to that red sand.
<v Speaker 1>So again we see these plants that are generally restricted
<v Speaker 1>to a certain kind of geology. They don't need that
<v Speaker 1>kind of geology. That might just be the setting, the
<v Speaker 1>geologic setting, the soil setting that they evolved on. Like
<v Speaker 1>plenty of serpentine plants you can grow on non serpentine soil.
<v Speaker 1>They just don't like competition. That serpentine soil is the
<v Speaker 1>reason they don't have any competition. It's toxic, like serpentine
<v Speaker 1>soil you get out in California, it's really colm out
<v Speaker 1>There'd be the same thing with some of this coliche
<v Speaker 1>stuff probably or whatever. You know, Like obviously like in
<v Speaker 1>the Calichi, it wasn't getting it wasn't tall thorn scrub
<v Speaker 1>because that stuff can't grow out there. It's just this
<v Speaker 1>soil is too fucked up. But that means what can
<v Speaker 1>grow there is stuff that can tolerate it, like that periniki.
<v Speaker 1>You canest out of the liatrists, et cetera. So you know,
<v Speaker 1>but you could just grow that liatris in normal soil too,
<v Speaker 1>just to make sure it doesn't get smothered by surrounding vegetation.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool, it was really really fucking nice setting both
<v Speaker 1>of these places, the red sand area and this this
<v Speaker 1>this Colleche soil area where the paraniki was growing. And
<v Speaker 1>the night before, since I'm frequently going back and forth
<v Speaker 1>between South and West Texas so much, the night before
<v Speaker 1>I had stopped at a at a place near Sanderson,
<v Speaker 1>beautiful Sanderson. Did you don't know Country Frilled Men was
<v Speaker 1>supposed to to be Sanderson. It takes place in Sanderson,
<v Speaker 1>like the Dude's trailer Park was in Sanderson, Texas. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know that. It's nice. You know what was that song?
<v Speaker 1>Oh God, what's that guy's name? Wayne Hancock? Thunderstorms and
<v Speaker 1>Neon Signs. I think that's a song about Sanderson too.
<v Speaker 1>If it's not, it should be. But the night before
<v Speaker 1>I had stopped on my way back towards South Texas
<v Speaker 1>at this spot where I know Salvia White House, the
<v Speaker 1>eye grows. This is a moth pollinated stage. There's very
<v Speaker 1>few moth pollinated sages, moth pollinated salvias. It doesn't get
<v Speaker 1>that tall in situ. In cultivation, it can probably get
<v Speaker 1>a foot and a half tall, two feet tall. The
<v Speaker 1>flowers are fucking epic though. They're like four inches long,
<v Speaker 1>three to four inches long, white, kind of like a violet,
<v Speaker 1>a violet pinkish white. And they they've got a long tube.
<v Speaker 1>They've got a long floral tube and a moth pollinated scent,
<v Speaker 1>which is a good indicator for I mean, when you
<v Speaker 1>once you know what a moth pollinated floral scent is,
<v Speaker 1>you know that thing is polinated by moths, especially if
<v Speaker 1>it's white. That tera righty I eminates that scent. Uh Mandavilla,
<v Speaker 1>Macrosciphon mandavilla, and Nu genosa. Other cool native members, other
<v Speaker 1>cool native moth polinated plants that are members of apossan
<v Speaker 1>ace to oleander family produce that scent. Jasmine kind of
<v Speaker 1>produces that scent. Jasmine is a great example. Jasmine's a
<v Speaker 1>moth pollinated You know, if you're in a spot where
<v Speaker 1>jasmine grows, either a fucking you know, botanic garden or
<v Speaker 1>glasshouse in the US or Florida anyway. So that's the
<v Speaker 1>moth polinate scent. I think it's smellst fucking great. It's
<v Speaker 1>very pleasant, almost kind of intoxicating, especially if it's like
<v Speaker 1>that that giant that ura flower or Brigmanzia flower. Really
<v Speaker 1>easy to confuse it to. Brigmanzia is are pendent flowering,
<v Speaker 1>and uh that ura produce erect flowers, and Brigmanzias are
<v Speaker 1>often like small trees. Anyway, The savvy white house the
<v Speaker 1>eye is a great, great fucking plant. I've grown up
<v Speaker 1>from seed before from seed someone had sent me, thank
<v Speaker 1>you whoever that was. I forget who it was, like
<v Speaker 1>five years ago. But it's another plant because it's got
<v Speaker 1>such kanescent leaves. They're so covered in hair and they're
<v Speaker 1>kind of white. They've got that chalky mint green color
<v Speaker 1>again due to the hairs, which you know, mitigate the
<v Speaker 1>amount of moisture loss through the leaves. Hairs are always
<v Speaker 1>a good indication that a plant is growing or is
<v Speaker 1>adapted to growing in either a hot and it can
<v Speaker 1>be comparatively hot for a region, like if it's a
<v Speaker 1>Dolomite prairie in northern Illinois, that can be a very
<v Speaker 1>hot place. The hairs are a good indication for either
<v Speaker 1>a hot a planet's adapted to hot and dry areas,
<v Speaker 1>even like West Texas. Like West Texas doesn't get as
<v Speaker 1>hot as South Texas, but it gets very windy, and
<v Speaker 1>that air is very dry, and so you got airflow
<v Speaker 1>across the leaf and the air is already really dry.
<v Speaker 1>It's got a high it's got more potential to suck
<v Speaker 1>up moisture. Okay, because it's not holding very much, it's
<v Speaker 1>not very humid. It's gonna suck up moisture like a
<v Speaker 1>dry sponge through those themata. Those hairs prevent that, right,
<v Speaker 1>same thing, well, they prevent it by increasing the boundary
<v Speaker 1>layer of humidity. But again, the fuck does that mean?
<v Speaker 1>If you're a late person, that doesn't mean anything. What
<v Speaker 1>that does is it stops the airflow from hitting the
<v Speaker 1>leaf surface, the same way that like a line of
<v Speaker 1>Lombardy poplars or other trees actually as a windbreak for
<v Speaker 1>a farmhouse on a prairie and prevents the air from
<v Speaker 1>knocking the shit out of the farmhouse if you got
<v Speaker 1>cold blush three windy days. So this salvia doesn't I
<v Speaker 1>think I let it get too overgrown or who knows
<v Speaker 1>what happened. Anyway, I lost the one I had in
<v Speaker 1>my my little garden set up. So I was going
<v Speaker 1>to get cuttings and collect some seed, and I still
<v Speaker 1>got the cuttings in the fridge. You can keep cuttings,
<v Speaker 1>I gotta travel with a cooler. Keep them in a
<v Speaker 1>fucking big gallon ziploc bag once and so they're sealed
<v Speaker 1>off from the atmosphere, so they're not gonna wilt even
<v Speaker 1>though they don't have any roots. And then you just
<v Speaker 1>put rooting hormone on them, keep them in that. You
<v Speaker 1>just got to keep that humidity up. You got to
<v Speaker 1>keep them, keep that air trapped. But again, now they're
<v Speaker 1>susceptible to rotting, so you got to control for that too.
<v Speaker 1>Use a hy perlite mix, a high pummice mix, whatever.
<v Speaker 1>So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take them
<v Speaker 1>out in a minute. So I went to go collect
<v Speaker 1>some seed. But all the kalises the Klyx singular on
<v Speaker 1>most of these plants, the aggregation of sepals was already empty.
<v Speaker 1>The sea's already fallen out. So that's why I took
<v Speaker 1>cuttings instead. But I was out there fucking around on
<v Speaker 1>these nothing more like somewhat barren, low growing limestone in
<v Speaker 1>the West Texas Desert. Fucking beautiful spot. And I saw
<v Speaker 1>Menadora longe of Flora, another moth pollinated plants. There is
<v Speaker 1>so much moth pollination going on in this region. It
<v Speaker 1>blows my fucking mind. It's crazy, like it's it's probably
<v Speaker 1>just so windy and dry, and there's so much moth
<v Speaker 1>diversity that they've become the primary pollinator in a lot
<v Speaker 1>of these areas. You will see more moths at night,
<v Speaker 1>then you will see bees during the day. And there's
<v Speaker 1>so many, and it's evident in the flora there because
<v Speaker 1>there's so many These fucking plants are moth pollinated. The
<v Speaker 1>Onatha species, the evening Primroses ootha hertwaggy eye, it's like
<v Speaker 1>a bush Onathra. There's plenty of other Onathra species, Mandavilla macrosciphon,
<v Speaker 1>Menodora lounge of flora, Salvia white house ci. You know,
<v Speaker 1>anytime again, anytime you see that long tube flower and
<v Speaker 1>all the stamens, and you know, sexy parts of the
<v Speaker 1>flower are included in the tube. They're not popping out.
<v Speaker 1>That's for a moth proboscis. Moths have those that little
<v Speaker 1>rolled up proboscis that can unfurl just like a fucking
<v Speaker 1>red carpet and tap into that. So in moth and butterfly,
<v Speaker 1>but it seems like there's way more moths because it's
<v Speaker 1>just so hot and windy during the day. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>this was fucking cool to see. I wasn't familiar with
<v Speaker 1>this species of Menadora before. Menadora is in the olive
<v Speaker 1>family Olace just like ash trees, and its anapomorphic for
<v Speaker 1>the isle of family is only having two stamens, which
<v Speaker 1>I didn't realize that either until I looked up close
<v Speaker 1>and look what the fuck they got two stamens, and
<v Speaker 1>I was looking it up in floor of North America.
<v Speaker 1>I figured it where else. It was like, oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>this is a trait for the islive family. It was like,
<v Speaker 1>fuck Jesus, how do I know this? How did I'm
<v Speaker 1>not looking at enough members of Olace? Apparently forest di
<v Speaker 1>era uh and Gustafolia another cool desert shrub with tiny leaves.
<v Speaker 1>It's in the olive family, you know. I was looking
<v Speaker 1>at it just now and I was like, those flowers
<v Speaker 1>don't have fucking two stamens each. But then I looked
<v Speaker 1>at them and what looks like one single flower is
<v Speaker 1>actually on forest the era I'm talking about, which is
<v Speaker 1>another olace member. What looks like one single stamen, how
<v Speaker 1>many stamens are there or what looks like one single
<v Speaker 1>flower is actually multiple flowers coming out of a fascicled
<v Speaker 1>like involacar. That's axile on the stem, so it just
<v Speaker 1>comes out right out the stem. That's crazy. I can't
<v Speaker 1>really see, but it does look like there's what is it,
<v Speaker 1>two to four stamens or maybe three, Yeah, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe had forest the era, which was not usual for
<v Speaker 1>the family. Maybe forest the Era has four. I don't
<v Speaker 1>fucking know. Anyway, the point is olive family, like olive
<v Speaker 1>flowers only have two stamens the same thing, and that's
<v Speaker 1>odd for a lot of angiosperms to only have two stamens.
<v Speaker 1>I guess Salvia only has two stamens, which is in
<v Speaker 1>the same order as olive and ash trees lamey aleis,
<v Speaker 1>but regardless, it's still kind of weird. I wasn't prepared
<v Speaker 1>for that, Like, for some reason, I thought a menadora
<v Speaker 1>flower had more, but I apparently have never looked at
<v Speaker 1>a flower up clothes. But this thing again, it had
<v Speaker 1>that moth ponated smell. It was long and tubular, and
<v Speaker 1>it was growing on just right out of it was
<v Speaker 1>a small shrub like two feet tall, growing out of
<v Speaker 1>these cracks in the limestone. Really cool fucking plant. And
<v Speaker 1>Menadora is cool. This is a first off. This is
<v Speaker 1>a genus. I don't have any species or any but
<v Speaker 1>there's quite a few. There was one I remember seeing
<v Speaker 1>in Nevada that was like a shrubby Menadora. They all
<v Speaker 1>smell pretty good. They've got seeds that are really easy
<v Speaker 1>to collect. The fruit looks like a little ball that
<v Speaker 1>matures inside the kalyx, like a little bead that matures
<v Speaker 1>inside the klyx. Went, you know, a month or two
<v Speaker 1>after the flowers are done being pollinated. Yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>Mendora spinessens that I remember seeing in Nevada. Photosynthetic stems,
<v Speaker 1>green stems. Just another crucifixion thrown looking plant. Oh well,
<v Speaker 1>there's Menaedora africana. Too. Where is that? Because there's twenty species,
<v Speaker 1>So there's probably twenty species on inin at there's probably
<v Speaker 1>more Menadora heterophla is another cool one you'll see in
<v Speaker 1>South Texas. Uh, Menadora scabro you'll see in West Texas.
<v Speaker 1>I saw that out at the when I was looking
<v Speaker 1>at this giant crested peyote in West Texas. That's gonna
<v Speaker 1>look really go to the tub at the collection. Those
<v Speaker 1>cactus nerds love those faciated plants anyway. Uh, God, protect
<v Speaker 1>that one at all costs. I saw like this, like
<v Speaker 1>gotta be easily three hundred year old peyote with a
<v Speaker 1>big crest, the big fasci faciation in it, which is
<v Speaker 1>just a mutation of the growing point. You know, there's
<v Speaker 1>all kinds like saguaros do that. Sometimes it ends up
<v Speaker 1>producing like a weird fan shape, like a squiggly fan,
<v Speaker 1>so that the lobes on the stem as the stem
<v Speaker 1>is growing, because that's all any cactus is is just
<v Speaker 1>a photosynthetic stem. The growing tip gets mutated so that
<v Speaker 1>it's instead of producing a single growing point and then
<v Speaker 1>tubercles and areoles and that kind of thing, it just
<v Speaker 1>produces these weird twisted almost looks like a brain, really
<v Speaker 1>cool twisted with lobes in it. But yeah, there was
<v Speaker 1>Menadora scabra all over there. Menadora flowers are generally yellow,
<v Speaker 1>and so this Menadora lounge of flora that was moth polinated.
<v Speaker 1>It was the same way yellow flowers, except they had
<v Speaker 1>a moth polinated smell and they had that long tube.
<v Speaker 1>So this thing obviously adapted via natural selection of moth pollination,
<v Speaker 1>the moths selecting for it. This thing obviously evolved with
<v Speaker 1>the you know, it was selected for by moths. They
<v Speaker 1>selected for longer floral tube and that scent. And it's
<v Speaker 1>just so cool how that same shit evolves. Great example
<v Speaker 1>of convergent evolution. The same thing evolves in unrelated plants
<v Speaker 1>that grow in the same habitat that's subject to the
<v Speaker 1>same stresses. Really cool. Another thing I was noticing out
<v Speaker 1>in this habitat is that there's so many plants. When
<v Speaker 1>I was in West Texas, there's so many plants that
<v Speaker 1>occur both in South and West Texas. Sydney Attenua, foliajotrophidioeca,
<v Speaker 1>what is it, the Hamado cactus hamatacanthus, there's easily like
<v Speaker 1>a dozen more. There's so many plants that have a
<v Speaker 1>distribution that is in both places. But the West Texas
<v Speaker 1>ecotypes are an entirely different thing like, to the point
<v Speaker 1>that it almost looks like a different species. I was
<v Speaker 1>looking at Sydney Attenuafolia aka skeleton leaf really cool shrubs,
<v Speaker 1>dirty shrub down here in the in the cactus gardens,
<v Speaker 1>and also out in West Texas. You know, widespread grows
<v Speaker 1>in northern Mexico produces a little daisy like flour and
<v Speaker 1>a ten inch long scape dope fucking plant in the
<v Speaker 1>West Texas variety looks so different at first glance you
<v Speaker 1>almost think it's a different species. You're like, what the fuck.
<v Speaker 1>The leaves are way thinner. They've got a thicker like
<v Speaker 1>epidermal wax on the underside on the West Texas plants.
<v Speaker 1>So you see more adaptation for drier, not necessarily hotter,
<v Speaker 1>but drier climate in West Texas. South Texas is certainly hotter.
<v Speaker 1>We get more cumulative heat, but it's close to the Gulf,
<v Speaker 1>so it's somewhat humid. The West Texas you get more
<v Speaker 1>wind and you get much less humidity, and so it's
<v Speaker 1>much more stressful for plants in that way, even though
<v Speaker 1>it doesn't get as hot and the nights are cooler.
<v Speaker 1>Jo Trophi dioheca the leather stem as they call it.
<v Speaker 1>Same thing. The South Texas plants have big, broad leaves.
<v Speaker 1>The West Texas plants have very narrow ones. They all
<v Speaker 1>behave the same way. They get a big tuber in
<v Speaker 1>the ground. It's supposed to be good for toothaches as well.
<v Speaker 1>You got a big tuber in the ground, and they
<v Speaker 1>form colonies. They spread rhizominously. Dope fucking plant. But the
<v Speaker 1>West Texas ciccat type is different. Same thing with Hamato
<v Speaker 1>cactus Hamato cactus hamatacanthus. The Rio Grand Valley barrel cactus
<v Speaker 1>looks way different. It's darker green, it's not as blue.
<v Speaker 1>The spines, the hooked spines aren't as mean quote unquote,
<v Speaker 1>aren't as long and as hooked as they are in
<v Speaker 1>the West Texas plant and in a drier place, the
<v Speaker 1>Hamato cactus hamatacanthus out there can actually like snag you.
<v Speaker 1>It sucks. It's like it sucks to touch. Whereas you know,
<v Speaker 1>the ones down here in the Rio Grand Valley are
<v Speaker 1>a little bit easier to handle. I know from planting them.
<v Speaker 1>They're really easy to grow from fucking seed too. They
<v Speaker 1>grow fast. I've got a bunch like they're one of
<v Speaker 1>those cacti that you grow from seed. You end up
<v Speaker 1>having to repot at every fucking, I don't know, six
<v Speaker 1>months because they get so big, especially if you can
<v Speaker 1>put them in the ground, and they'll in South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>the South Texas ecotype will literally grow in mud like
<v Speaker 1>they'll grow in very somewhat wet areas. You know, but
<v Speaker 1>it's so hot again that they're metabolizing and their quote,
<v Speaker 1>you know, their physiology is moving so fast they can
<v Speaker 1>use it. The hotter it is, the more you can
<v Speaker 1>water a cactus, the cooler it is, the more you
<v Speaker 1>should hold off. You should never water any cactus if
<v Speaker 1>the soil is still wet. Let the surface of the
<v Speaker 1>soil dry out at first. So anyway, I was surprised
<v Speaker 1>that nobody has written about that phenomenon, that there's no
<v Speaker 1>papers published on that phenomena of the South and West
<v Speaker 1>Texas ecotypes and how it literally because southern West Texas
<v Speaker 1>that region in between straddles the one hundredth meridian, which
<v Speaker 1>is where the continent dries out, and you can begins
<v Speaker 1>to dry out as you move west, and you can
<v Speaker 1>see this on a satellite map. It's such a cool phenomenon.
<v Speaker 1>I should really be comprising a list of all the
<v Speaker 1>plants that grow in both places and how the the
<v Speaker 1>ecotypes differ. God, it's so fucking cool to see it.
<v Speaker 1>It's really remarkable. But anyway, and then I was in
<v Speaker 1>Alpine at a site there, this mountain that I've been
<v Speaker 1>to many times that was super dry. It's always super
<v Speaker 1>dry when you go there. The oaks up top are
<v Speaker 1>slowly dying. Their quirkis grissia. They are these like oaks
<v Speaker 1>that probably in cultivation could get you twenty five foot
<v Speaker 1>tall tree, but on this hill they're topping out at
<v Speaker 1>like ten feet if that. They're blue. The leaves have
<v Speaker 1>tiny hairs on them, no surprise again, adaptation to the
<v Speaker 1>dry air and the drought and the wind where the
<v Speaker 1>bouts of drought in the wind. But I want to
<v Speaker 1>get acorns off of them, and they weren't. They were
<v Speaker 1>not putting out. The trees are slowly dying. They had
<v Speaker 1>just gotten juiced up from a recent rain. But there
<v Speaker 1>was a lot of dead branches on most of the trees.
<v Speaker 1>And it's sat to see. Man, it's again, it's like
<v Speaker 1>that shifting baselines thing, Like if you don't mention this
<v Speaker 1>and write about it and photograph it and document that
<v Speaker 1>future generations won't know how much things have changed since
<v Speaker 1>they were born. You know that you don't know that
<v Speaker 1>you're kind of inheriting this this this landscape that's been
<v Speaker 1>looted and somewhat destroyed. You know, you think that the
<v Speaker 1>way that what you're growing up with is normal, and
<v Speaker 1>it's not. You know, you have no idea, it's crazy
<v Speaker 1>so this stuff. You know, having that perspective helps people
<v Speaker 1>zoom out a little bit, which again is something I'm
<v Speaker 1>always always advocating figuratively zooming out. Don't be a dummy,
<v Speaker 1>don't live in your own small little world, don't assume
<v Speaker 1>that what you know is the way that everything is.
<v Speaker 1>Zoom out and gain a variety of different perspectives and
<v Speaker 1>actually think about things. That's something I've been trying to
<v Speaker 1>talk about as I teach too. It's like, because so
<v Speaker 1>much of school is just fucking memorizing things, which is useless,
<v Speaker 1>that's garbage. It's not It shouldn't be about memorized seeing
<v Speaker 1>things to good good test scores. It should be about
<v Speaker 1>understanding things and critically thinking about them and asking questions
<v Speaker 1>and then thinking about what is the logical answer with anything,
<v Speaker 1>without the pressure of a fucking test score or whatever
<v Speaker 1>the fuck, just logically thinking about the world in front
<v Speaker 1>of you, so you're not a fucking idiot. But again,
<v Speaker 1>being an idiot is good for the economy, it really is,
<v Speaker 1>you know, whether you're like poisoning yourself with shitty food
<v Speaker 1>and lack of exercise, or you're or in many cases,
<v Speaker 1>people are just trapped. And let's be honest, it's not
<v Speaker 1>even choice. And people are often just trapped in the
<v Speaker 1>infrastructure that's provided for them, especially if it's like the
<v Speaker 1>vehicle slum strip mall landscape and there's no opportunity for
<v Speaker 1>walking unless you go to the gym. You can go
<v Speaker 1>to the gym. You could drive your Dutch charger to
<v Speaker 1>the gym and take sophies of your six pick and
<v Speaker 1>you're you you fucking weightlifted, juiced up shoulders in the mirror. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you know, don't just don't just be a dummy, you know,
<v Speaker 1>think about the world around you. That's what really makes
<v Speaker 1>life rich too. This is the whole thing though too.
<v Speaker 1>It's like co occurring with this stupidity, is this culture
<v Speaker 1>of wealth worship and fucking wealth idolization. Is if that's
<v Speaker 1>going to bring you some sort of happiness. Like, it's
<v Speaker 1>good to have money and be comfortable, but at a
<v Speaker 1>certain point you don't fucking need anymore, and certainly don't
<v Speaker 1>spend it on dumb shit that you don't need. Like
<v Speaker 1>I totally judge people on it. I'm sorry you're buying
<v Speaker 1>fucking eighty thousand dollars cars that you don't you know
<v Speaker 1>that are just status symbols or because it's a brand identitything.
<v Speaker 1>I think you're a fucking moron. Sorry, no offense, And
<v Speaker 1>it's fine, you could be a moral I'll still treat
<v Speaker 1>you with respect and be kind to you, but I'm
<v Speaker 1>gonna be wondering about your potential, you know. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you've got this culture of wealth worship, and that's like
<v Speaker 1>this fucking carrot on a stick that leads people away
<v Speaker 1>from like a really rich life, which is creativity intellect,
<v Speaker 1>you know, being able to look at the world around
<v Speaker 1>you and know what you're looking at and have a
<v Speaker 1>context for it and share that with others and make
<v Speaker 1>cool art and study things and learn more. Like that's
<v Speaker 1>what leads to an enriched life. You could spend your
<v Speaker 1>whole life accumulating shit you don't need, and you're still
<v Speaker 1>gonna feel fucking empty on your deathbed and realize that
<v Speaker 1>you wasted the best seventy or eighty or ninety years.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. That's way. You got a dosum dosum
<v Speaker 1>the same way that booze makes you a numb moron.
<v Speaker 1>Just one psychedelic trip in your life will wake you
<v Speaker 1>up out of your slumber and get you questioning things.
<v Speaker 1>But not everybody wants that. That's why people have bad trips.
<v Speaker 1>You know, they realize they've been living a lie. Sometimes
<v Speaker 1>they're just clinically insane too, or prone to a sociopathic
<v Speaker 1>tendencies or or you know, psychosis, which in that case
<v Speaker 1>definitely stay away. But uh, fucking a man, you know
<v Speaker 1>there's a weird I see this shit all around me.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know the lack of intellect, the wealth, worship,
<v Speaker 1>but all goes hand in hand. That's not what makes
<v Speaker 1>for a well lived human life. Be smart about shit, man,
<v Speaker 1>Do better, that's what they say. What they say, do better,
<v Speaker 1>Just do better anyway. I saw Ayenya pylosa on this
<v Speaker 1>hill too. Aena is a cool genus, a y e
<v Speaker 1>n i a. It's a member of malvesi, the cotton
<v Speaker 1>and the chocolate family, and this was I've seen some
<v Speaker 1>really cool ones in Puebla and Wahaka. Weird fucking mallows
<v Speaker 1>they've got. I think they're polinated by gnats or some
<v Speaker 1>sort of fucking I don't know. They got some weird ecology,
<v Speaker 1>some weird relationship with a unusual pinator. Not all of them,
<v Speaker 1>but some of them. But this thing was a tiny ayena.
<v Speaker 1>It's cool to see that this genus made it this
<v Speaker 1>far north as well, because this is normally a lower latitude,
<v Speaker 1>dry land subtropical genus, at least the ones that I'm
<v Speaker 1>familiar with. You also get. There's a rare ayena from
<v Speaker 1>the Rio Grande Valley as well. That one is a limitaris.
<v Speaker 1>I think I've got that in my yard. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know if I kind of lost track of it. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. It was growing beneath one of the papyas.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know if it's still alive. I hope so
<v Speaker 1>it was a cutting anyway, But that, yeah, man, there
<v Speaker 1>there's so much good shit up there. I saw that,
<v Speaker 1>like actress punk Tata up there as well, beautiful western
<v Speaker 1>diamondback rattlesnake as well. That was so kind to warn
<v Speaker 1>me because I didn't see him. It was so kind
<v Speaker 1>to warn me that we were nearby. And Louis, you know,
<v Speaker 1>one of my two dogs, knows not to fuck with them.
<v Speaker 1>She listens really well, so you know, I was nice
<v Speaker 1>to see she still got it in her and knows
<v Speaker 1>to avoid things that can kill her. So I just
<v Speaker 1>hung out there and took some photos and lurked on
<v Speaker 1>this thing. I was so happy to see it, too, Like,
<v Speaker 1>I'm so happy these little things you see sometimes, whether
<v Speaker 1>it's a fucking horned lizard or a snake or whatever,
<v Speaker 1>you're like, oh my god, all life hasn't been wiped
<v Speaker 1>out from this area that you know has a somewhat
<v Speaker 1>large human population. It's so nice to see, God, damn.
<v Speaker 1>I just in conversely, it's so depressing to realize what's
<v Speaker 1>been lost. You know that you're looking at a paucity
<v Speaker 1>of life that was once there, as is the case
<v Speaker 1>with the tarantulas and the Rio Grande Valley or the
<v Speaker 1>horned lizards throughout all of Texas, et cetera. Lastly, a
<v Speaker 1>few days ago, I was contacted by someone who's the
<v Speaker 1>caretaker for what's her last name, Amada Cardenas. I think, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Amada Cardenas, the first licensed paote dealer from the first
<v Speaker 1>of the federally licensed payote dealers from South Texas. There's
<v Speaker 1>a book out called Amada's Blessings from the Payote Gardens
<v Speaker 1>of South Texas by Stacy B. Schaeffer. It says Amada Cardenas,
<v Speaker 1>a Mexican American woman from the borderlands of South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>played a pivotal role in the little known history of
<v Speaker 1>the payote trade. She and her husband were the first
<v Speaker 1>federally licensed payote dealers. They began harvesting and selling the
<v Speaker 1>Sacramento plant the followers of Native American Church in the
<v Speaker 1>nineteen thirties, and after her husband's death in the late
<v Speaker 1>nineteen sixties, missus Cardanis continued to befriend and help generations
<v Speaker 1>of Native American Church members until her death in two
<v Speaker 1>thousand and five, just short of her one hundred and
<v Speaker 1>first birthday. Wow, that's amazing. She was born in nineteen
<v Speaker 1>oh four, nineteen oh five. Excuse me, she didn't make
<v Speaker 1>it to one oh one, but anyway. Author Stacy B. Shaeffer,
<v Speaker 1>a close friend of Amada, spent thirteen years doing field
<v Speaker 1>work with this remarkable woman. Her book weeps together the geography, biology, history, cultures,
<v Speaker 1>and religions that created a unique life of Missus Cardenis
<v Speaker 1>and the people she knew. Shaefer includes their words to
<v Speaker 1>help the story of how Mexican Americans, Deehano's Gringos, Native Americans,
<v Speaker 1>and others were touched and inspired by Amada Cardanis's embodiment
<v Speaker 1>in the core. NAC values faith, hope, love and charity,
<v Speaker 1>and that's what the well did. Sign above her house says.
<v Speaker 1>It says faith, hope, love and charity. Really cool sight.
<v Speaker 1>And her house is beautiful in this really uh cathartic way.
<v Speaker 1>I guess. This old old greenhouse made out of wood.
<v Speaker 1>It's on peer and beam floor kind of slants slightly
<v Speaker 1>in one end. You go inside, there's all this NAC
<v Speaker 1>paraphernalia everywhere. I mean, just old photos of Native American
<v Speaker 1>church members, photo of Quanta Parker, Quanta Parker, excuse me,
<v Speaker 1>above this little stand. It's just a cool house. And
<v Speaker 1>it's I mean, man, it's it's in the site. You know.
<v Speaker 1>There's beautiful Miski trees. There was a guyacn there, like
<v Speaker 1>a really old one guyacum angusta folium, and there's a
<v Speaker 1>little peyoti garden right there, like a prayer garden that
<v Speaker 1>people aren't supposed to take from, but apparently they do,
<v Speaker 1>which I hope they need to get a camera on that.
<v Speaker 1>You know, anybody who takes from that, it's kind of
<v Speaker 1>a disrespectful Jesus man, you know, really, you get really,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, Native people when they're coming to get
<v Speaker 1>medicine from the dealer in the region, we'll stop by
<v Speaker 1>Amada's house and pray at at the place, and pray
<v Speaker 1>at the garden and say hello to the caretaker whatever.
<v Speaker 1>And I was looking over letters that were written to
<v Speaker 1>this woman from like the seventies and eighties, back from
<v Speaker 1>people all over the United States, from Native Americans all
<v Speaker 1>over the United States, writing her about, you know, purchasing
<v Speaker 1>medicine or just to say hi, or Christmas cards or whatever.
<v Speaker 1>It was really beautiful and it was so weird and
<v Speaker 1>a really cool way to be able to sit there
<v Speaker 1>in her house and read these things. Anyway, the whole
<v Speaker 1>reason I was there was to help plant some other
<v Speaker 1>native plants in their payote garden and their prayer garden.
<v Speaker 1>And so I suggested to the caretaker, why don't you
<v Speaker 1>go to Mike Heap's nursery and pick up a guahio,
<v Speaker 1>you know, Senegalia borlandi orry, why don't you pick up
<v Speaker 1>why don't you pick up some blackbrush spiny plant which
<v Speaker 1>smells beautiful when it blooms, really important, tough, sturdy legume
<v Speaker 1>and uh with the zigzag branching when it's young. And
<v Speaker 1>why don't you pick up some leather stems, some jo
<v Speaker 1>Trophi diaheka and Euphorbia anti cyphialitica, the one that's native
<v Speaker 1>down here. Pick up some of those, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>and the plant those around the garden because the paote
<v Speaker 1>will need a little bit of shade, it'll need a
<v Speaker 1>nurse plant, even if they're full grown plants. And this
<v Speaker 1>climate down here in South Texas just gets too hot.
<v Speaker 1>And so in the DA they've I think they've got
<v Speaker 1>the license or they're permitted. The DA knows about this
<v Speaker 1>Payota garden. It's permitted to be there, so it's all good.
<v Speaker 1>And so we just went and planted some things around it,
<v Speaker 1>and it looked, it looks great, it looks really good.
<v Speaker 1>But there was there was a really man Nobody had
<v Speaker 1>been weeding the grass there, which is insane. The two
<v Speaker 1>invasive well there's three invasive grass species. But there was buffalo. No,
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't buffalo, it was guinea grass is everywhere, which
<v Speaker 1>needs to be just weed whacked. And then there was
<v Speaker 1>bermuda grass like popping up through some of the plants,
<v Speaker 1>like sending blades of grass that had punctured the bottom
<v Speaker 1>of the peyote plant and come out the top. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>just crazy. It was like, why is nobody taking care
<v Speaker 1>of this? Like they just not know, Like no one
<v Speaker 1>knew to weed this stuff. Like this is really bad.
<v Speaker 1>You're creating basically a canker in the center of the
<v Speaker 1>cactus that can now be infected by fung guy whenever
<v Speaker 1>it rains and stays you know, wet for for a
<v Speaker 1>few days. You know, you got to get this out
<v Speaker 1>of there, you know, weed that bermuda man, That bermuda
<v Speaker 1>grass is fucking terrible. So anyway, so we planted some
<v Speaker 1>stuff and they got rid of some of the grass
<v Speaker 1>that's gonna come back. They're gonna have to go in
<v Speaker 1>there with either a hoary hory, a little the garden
<v Speaker 1>knife or whatever. But it looks a lot better already,
<v Speaker 1>and there's like stones around this prayer garden. It's maybe
<v Speaker 1>like twelve feet wide by six feet wide, but beautiful
<v Speaker 1>little site. But I was so impressed with the guya
<v Speaker 1>con next to it. I have not seen guyacum and Gustafolium,
<v Speaker 1>which is in the kreosol family Zygopalesi and produces little,
<v Speaker 1>you know, bright red fruits and probably obviously bird dispersed.
<v Speaker 1>I have not seen that in that big like since
<v Speaker 1>Nuevo Leone, like the Sierra Madre has some large individuals,
<v Speaker 1>you know, and a plant that's this big. I mean
<v Speaker 1>it was probably like fifteen feet wide twelve feet tall,
<v Speaker 1>trunk diameter at the base of like sixteen inches. And
<v Speaker 1>then there was there was one of those in Brownsville too,
<v Speaker 1>but I think I got destroyed to build a hideous McMansion,
<v Speaker 1>which is sounds about right for South Texas, for the
<v Speaker 1>developed areas of South Texas. I was so fucking impressed.
<v Speaker 1>And then they had a guahio there too, which is
<v Speaker 1>that multi branched shrub also a legume of the mimosa
<v Speaker 1>subfamily Senegalia berlandi array, which is such a great plant.
<v Speaker 1>It's so cool and you'll know when you see it
<v Speaker 1>because it's got again multiple stems, it's got this mimosa
<v Speaker 1>like leaves. It gets about twelve feet tall, and it
<v Speaker 1>retains the fruits, the fruits which are these woody legumes
<v Speaker 1>that split open, you know, like a v and drop
<v Speaker 1>all the seeds, the woody fruits, the legume part. The
<v Speaker 1>pod tends to stay on the plant after it's dropped seeds.
<v Speaker 1>But it was really fucking cool to be there, and
<v Speaker 1>it was a it's a nice site. They've got a
<v Speaker 1>little shade house to sit under, and uh yeah, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, so hopefully the guinea grass is really bad
<v Speaker 1>in some areas. But I was telling them. I was like, man,
<v Speaker 1>why don't you you guys should get some like fiddle wood,
<v Speaker 1>ice and hardiat text saying, now you get all those
<v Speaker 1>cool plants, this place will be lit up with cool butterflies.
<v Speaker 1>You have hummingbirds coming by, you know, because wildlife sees this,
<v Speaker 1>these spots remembers them and their migratory paths. They'll remember,
<v Speaker 1>you know where, they'll see them from far away as
<v Speaker 1>they're flying high above, and they'll remember. Okay, they use
<v Speaker 1>them like stepping stones, you know, to move across the landscape.
<v Speaker 1>It's really important versus just having a giant cleared agricultural
<v Speaker 1>field or a parking lot or something. So hopefully they'll
<v Speaker 1>do that, and you know, I'll happily volunteer my time
<v Speaker 1>to plant stuff. I'm really good at digging holes, especially
<v Speaker 1>if you've got a sharpshoot, one of those narrow shovels.
<v Speaker 1>But if you're interested in that, I would definitely stop by.
<v Speaker 1>Her house is in Miranda City, Texas, and I would
<v Speaker 1>definitely stop buy it, and I would check out that book.
<v Speaker 1>I guess you can get it on Scamazon. It's only
<v Speaker 1>thirty books paperback. Amada's Blessings from the Payote Gardens of
<v Speaker 1>South Texas a lot of cool Texas history. They're a
<v Speaker 1>lot of cool Native American history and a lot of
<v Speaker 1>ethnobotanically very interesting history about the payote plant, which again,
<v Speaker 1>the fact that's psychoactive is the least interesting thing to me.
<v Speaker 1>The ethnobotany is really cool to me. I like that,
<v Speaker 1>but just being another psychoactive plant whatever, it doesn't matter
<v Speaker 1>to me, which is what I would I was thinking
<v Speaker 1>when I was looking at this massive crested individual of
<v Speaker 1>l'afafro Williamzi, the peyote in West Texas on a private
<v Speaker 1>ranch where I've done many surveys and where there's mountain
<v Speaker 1>lions and it's fucking such a cool area, so rich.
<v Speaker 1>There's Aerocarpus are just about to start blooming. Aerocarpus phisseratus,
<v Speaker 1>the living rock cacked. I will be standing on top
<v Speaker 1>of one and not know it's there, and then they
<v Speaker 1>all flower in October and you'll just see these little
<v Speaker 1>pink flags, these little pink flowers sticking up from that
<v Speaker 1>limestone soil that they grow in. Again, Aerocarpus is the
<v Speaker 1>thickest cuticle, that waxy layer, that lipid layer that all
<v Speaker 1>land plants had to evolve when they evolved out of
<v Speaker 1>green algae four hundred and fifty million years ago. It's
<v Speaker 1>basically which seals them off from the atmosphere. And I
<v Speaker 1>think in most plants it's only like nine nanometers thick.
<v Speaker 1>But in the filmy fernstance, I don't have barely of
<v Speaker 1>any there's nothing there, there's no cuticles. They grow in
<v Speaker 1>very wet areas, like temperate rainforest, but in in Aerocarpus,
<v Speaker 1>it's like I think that cuticle is something like two
<v Speaker 1>hundred and fifteen nanimeters thick or something. Don't know. There
<v Speaker 1>was a paper on it. I might be completely full
<v Speaker 1>of shit, but I remember reading a paper on Aerocarpus
<v Speaker 1>has the thickest cuticle of any plant, which makes sense,
<v Speaker 1>especially when you see them dead and all that's left
<v Speaker 1>the tissue inside has dissolved, and all that's left is
<v Speaker 1>that really thick, waxy, yellow cuticle. There's such an incredible area, man,
<v Speaker 1>And yeah, the leucophile of minus was lit up. Menadora
<v Speaker 1>scabra was there. Remember olive family oliac But this was
<v Speaker 1>not the moth polinated one. This is. It might be
<v Speaker 1>polinated by moths, but probably not as well. No, it's
<v Speaker 1>got an open flower, it doesn't have that narrow tube
<v Speaker 1>opening at the end. Menadora scabra was there. There was
<v Speaker 1>so much good shit in this area. And I was
<v Speaker 1>out there looking for this crest and found Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>Forbia anti cyphialitica was going off too. The green straw Euphorbia,
<v Speaker 1>which you actually do see in a lot of native
<v Speaker 1>plant landscaping. I see it used in fucking Tucson, of
<v Speaker 1>all places. It's more common in landscaping in the places
<v Speaker 1>where it's not even native than it is in West
<v Speaker 1>in Texas. Texas is dropping a ball, man. People gotta
<v Speaker 1>make people got to get into this, start growing everything.
<v Speaker 1>Fuck it, you know. I just picked up some nice
<v Speaker 1>horse cripplers from my friend Zech, some nice Homocephala Texana.
<v Speaker 1>He got a bunch. He was growing stuff and doing
<v Speaker 1>native landscaping for a while and then just kind of
<v Speaker 1>life caught up with him. He got a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>shitt he had to do, and these things were just
<v Speaker 1>slowly not dying because they're cactive, but some of the
<v Speaker 1>other plants were starting to root themselves through the pot
<v Speaker 1>into the ground, and he ended up he just gave
<v Speaker 1>him away. He was like, fucking I'm just I'm you know,
<v Speaker 1>I'm torturing these things. So it was, you know, anyway, Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so I'm gonna do. I think I'm gonna take those
<v Speaker 1>horse cripplers. Man, these butterflies are just going nuts, these
<v Speaker 1>fucking zebra swallowtails. I'm gonna plant these horse cripplers out
<v Speaker 1>in West Texas. You know, normally, I don't care about
<v Speaker 1>the ecotype thing. If a native plant is a native plant,
<v Speaker 1>that's what works for me. But obviously with the West
<v Speaker 1>Texas South Texas, how different they are, how different the
<v Speaker 1>habitats are and how much it dries out. There's a
<v Speaker 1>difference in temperature and there's a difference in humidity. I think,
<v Speaker 1>definitely think it makes more sense to use West Texas ecotypes.
<v Speaker 1>But of course horse cripplers are pretty widespread. God, the
<v Speaker 1>Zinnia anomala is fucking dope too. It's a really cool
<v Speaker 1>plant that's also by the Prairie Dog Town north of Marathon,
<v Speaker 1>little orange flowered zinia that's got vestigial ray floor. It's
<v Speaker 1>vestigial lgules. So it's like a daisy that only produces
<v Speaker 1>like well, it's a tiny orange daisy. Because remember with
<v Speaker 1>as racy, I got disc florets and you got ray floor.
<v Speaker 1>Its ray aka legulate flor It's ray is illegal, A
<v Speaker 1>ray is illegal, and so anyway, this thing, you know,
<v Speaker 1>would be like a daisy that produces rays those petals
<v Speaker 1>but only has they're not really petals, but daisy that
<v Speaker 1>produces rays but only produces like a quarter of the
<v Speaker 1>normal amount of rays and they come out kind of weird.
<v Speaker 1>It's I don't know genetically what codes for that or
<v Speaker 1>why that's happening. I've seen it with a species of Lasthenia,
<v Speaker 1>which is a genus of aster Racy. I saw that
<v Speaker 1>and actually at the I think it was at the
<v Speaker 1>one of the serpentine sites in the Coast Ranges. I
<v Speaker 1>think it was with Ryan O'Dell when I saw that.
<v Speaker 1>But yeah, but it's a cool phenomenon. It's a cool
<v Speaker 1>plant that's only known from a few places northern Mexico
<v Speaker 1>and West Texas. But that's like, all the cool plants
<v Speaker 1>in West Texas are also distributed in Mexico, you know.
<v Speaker 1>In fact, and for many of them, most of the
<v Speaker 1>population is in Mexico. Most of the distributions in Mexico,
<v Speaker 1>I know, you get a handful of sites in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>It just proves to you how silly the geopolitical boundaries
<v Speaker 1>that the humans makeup can be. I'm not saying silly,
<v Speaker 1>but just that they are fucking made up, you know.
<v Speaker 1>Oh God, But immigration works as a political tool when
<v Speaker 1>you're trying to get elected, even if you don't really
<v Speaker 1>care about the issue. It's a great way to work
<v Speaker 1>people up. Anyway. Uh, we disagree on that, that's fine,
<v Speaker 1>we don't need to agree. I don't give a shit.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't matter. Let's just talk about plants. Just keep it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, let's talk more rock or let's talk more
<v Speaker 1>incoherent rambling disjointed rambling about plants. And with that, I
<v Speaker 1>will cut it short here. Thanks for listening. Email me
<v Speaker 1>if you want Crime pays a bound he doesn't at
<v Speaker 1>gmail dot com. Allow me four to six weeks to
<v Speaker 1>respond because I'm busy as fuck, and keep it short.
<v Speaker 1>And I got giving tree stickers to giving the finger
<v Speaker 1>tree stickers, you know, shel Silverstein's famous book, and my
<v Speaker 1>my twist on it, my drawing, and I'm gonna be
<v Speaker 1>presenting give it a presentation on cacti at San Antonio
<v Speaker 1>Botanic Garden on the twenty sixth. And I'll be in
<v Speaker 1>Oklahoma City at the Oklahoma City Fungus Fair in October twelfth,
<v Speaker 1>and then I'll be at be in the Bay Area
<v Speaker 1>in early November for the Antheogen Expo. And then I
<v Speaker 1>can't wait to fucking just be done with everything in
<v Speaker 1>December and then start traveling again. So that's all I got.
<v Speaker 1>Have a grocery day, Go fuck us up by grow
<v Speaker 1>more natives should be collecting seed right now, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>all right, go fuck us up by