Oklahoma City, Limestone endemism, Relict Habitat of West Texas, and more

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