Atlanta, Granitic Knobs, Limestone Glades, Native Habitat Project, Etc.

<v Speaker 1>There you go. That's it. That's nice. That's what he's
<v Speaker 1>playing over there. That's some good stuff. I was listening
<v Speaker 1>to this when they broke into my garage. We were
<v Speaker 1>having a party up front, and they were in a
<v Speaker 1>you know, they'd coming through the alley. Pride opened a
<v Speaker 1>garage door with a hydraulic jack, and then they cleaned
<v Speaker 1>me out. They took the leaf floor, and they took
<v Speaker 1>the lawnmower. They were taking you know, they were taking
<v Speaker 1>Prudence yares that were fifteen years old. They stole my
<v Speaker 1>classic model car collection. They were still anything that wasn't
<v Speaker 1>nailed down. And I was pretty upset about that because,
<v Speaker 1>you know, we had a party going on. Nobody could
<v Speaker 1>hear them, and they knew when we were at our
<v Speaker 1>most vulnerable. They came in right off the alley right there,
<v Speaker 1>right just straight up busy. You've parked the pick up
<v Speaker 1>right there, just like there were a garbage truck leaning
<v Speaker 1>out the trash. Just listen to this. This is a
<v Speaker 1>wonderful song. Thank you, m Yeah, see this is nice.
<v Speaker 1>This is this is Eli Eliganta de Hierro, my GROUPO
<v Speaker 1>showed the door. And if you just put that into
<v Speaker 1>the YouTube music and then it'll set you up. They'll
<v Speaker 1>put you on a nice playlist. You listen to Koobie
<v Speaker 1>as the rest of your day. We'll just jam out
<v Speaker 1>to this for the How you doing? Welcome to the
<v Speaker 1>Crime Pacer Bond. He doesn't podcasts. It's been I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>two or three weeks since I've put out a podcast.
<v Speaker 1>I've been busy as shit, and I just have not.
<v Speaker 1>I've just not had it in me. I've just you know,
<v Speaker 1>I've been I've been engaging in self care. I've been
<v Speaker 1>taking care of myself. Okay, I had a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>shit to do. Actually, I was trying to figure out
<v Speaker 1>in design stuff, put put an in design together for
<v Speaker 1>the second book. They just extended my ded line for
<v Speaker 1>the second book. Because let me turn this down. You
<v Speaker 1>should listen to this song. Koombeas are nice. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there's a time and a place. There's a time and
<v Speaker 1>a place for everything. Yeah. So I was in Atlanta
<v Speaker 1>for a while. That was wonderful. Then we went into
<v Speaker 1>Northwest Georgia, and then we went into Alabama. Hung out
<v Speaker 1>with Kyle Liibarger for a little bit. Who's the only
<v Speaker 1>person I won't give any hell about using common names.
<v Speaker 1>But holy shit. Yeah, he's such a sweet man. You can't.
<v Speaker 1>You can't. You can't, he does, you know, you can't.
<v Speaker 1>I would never teach him about the common name thing,
<v Speaker 1>but holy shit, there are some ridiculous common names in
<v Speaker 1>the Southeast, I mean everywhere, to be honest, but especially
<v Speaker 1>I thought it was bad in Texas, the common names
<v Speaker 1>thing for plants. But in the Southeast there's a plant
<v Speaker 1>called Sonny bells, and I didn't like the way that sound,
<v Speaker 1>so I just started calling it sonnyballs. Showing a leirium
<v Speaker 1>crosy and wonderful relative of agave likes those thin soiled
<v Speaker 1>rock out croppings, especially on granite, or to be more specific,
<v Speaker 1>it was a metamorphoised nice You know, Atlanta has all
<v Speaker 1>these wonderful granitic knobs around, just like you'd see in
<v Speaker 1>South Africa, just like you would see in Brazil, just
<v Speaker 1>like I've seen in Western Australia. You know, where you
<v Speaker 1>get a different plant community then you might see in
<v Speaker 1>a more thick soiled forest. Okay. Also, it was dodging
<v Speaker 1>bullets while I was out there at Arabia Mountain. You know,
<v Speaker 1>there was some kid, you know, you just you know,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's America. So you gotta figure everyone's, you know,
<v Speaker 1>dumb as a brick or mentally ill. Not everyone, but
<v Speaker 1>a large segment of the population. Let's be honest about
<v Speaker 1>what we have going on here. Okay, if you're honest
<v Speaker 1>about it, then it's it doesn't stink so much. You
<v Speaker 1>could kind of joke about it a little bit too,
<v Speaker 1>about what they call KMOSA DCA, the harsh reality. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I was out there, I was standing on top. I
<v Speaker 1>was filming a smile AX I think it was smile
<v Speaker 1>Ax Smolia, and all of a sudden, I, I mean,
<v Speaker 1>I heard the gunshots, which I'm just like whatever, and
<v Speaker 1>then I started hearing you know that sound when an
<v Speaker 1>object is moving by you very fast, and I'll hear
<v Speaker 1>that sound. You know. I've got a sling, like slinging
<v Speaker 1>rocks sometimes it's fun. And if you sling a rock,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like David and Goliath style. Shit. I got
<v Speaker 1>sent to this program for fucked up kids when I
<v Speaker 1>was eleven, and some guy there taught me how to
<v Speaker 1>make a sling, and so I'll sling rock. Sometimes if
<v Speaker 1>you sling it really hard, the rock will spin and
<v Speaker 1>make this sound. I don't really know what causes that
<v Speaker 1>does anybody, any physicists out there can explain it. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I was here hearing that sound with the bullets we're
<v Speaker 1>singing by me, and fuck, I couldn't see anybody and
<v Speaker 1>I was just full on exposed out there on top
<v Speaker 1>of this this granitic knab, and so I'm you know,
<v Speaker 1>getting down shit trying to film O. Fuck, can't see
<v Speaker 1>where it's coming from. Runoff to the you know, down
<v Speaker 1>slope to like the woodland where it was Orcas Georgiana
<v Speaker 1>Corcus georgianis was growing really cool oak that's kind of
<v Speaker 1>endemic to those thin soil there. It grows on the
<v Speaker 1>margins of those knobs. I love this type of shit
<v Speaker 1>because again it's a dry it's a drier plant community,
<v Speaker 1>and there's so many cool endemics that you find. When
<v Speaker 1>you've got this kind of setup, you've got a humid,
<v Speaker 1>relatively high rainfall area. Not always in the case of
<v Speaker 1>South Africa and Western Australia, it's not the case. In
<v Speaker 1>the case of Brazil. It certainly is the case the
<v Speaker 1>Atlantic Forest of Brazil on the east side of Brazil,
<v Speaker 1>and then you go to these thin, soiled, rocky outcroppings
<v Speaker 1>where it's a big granite knob or a limestone glay whatever,
<v Speaker 1>and you get a totally different cast of plant species
<v Speaker 1>that have what it takes, whether it's stem succulents or
<v Speaker 1>geophitic habit or harrier leaves whatever, like Pacera Dubia, really
<v Speaker 1>cool member of astarase with the yellow flowers and shit
<v Speaker 1>that we saw at the Arabia Mountain. When I was
<v Speaker 1>getting shot at everywhere, the kid wasn't shooting at me.
<v Speaker 1>He was trying to impress his girlfriend. Yes, I don't
<v Speaker 1>know what they were doing. We were with a guy
<v Speaker 1>who I think was a ranger there. He was some
<v Speaker 1>sort of authority figure, wonderful man, and he went out
<v Speaker 1>there and talked to him. He's like, guyse, he can't
<v Speaker 1>be shooting guns here. This is like a public hiking
<v Speaker 1>Aerator's people everywhere. And they were just like, oh sorry,
<v Speaker 1>just like that's how you go out, you know in
<v Speaker 1>the United States, that's how you go out. You know.
<v Speaker 1>Some more on with fucking half a brain, no offense.
<v Speaker 1>Don't blame them, blame the education system. And it's only
<v Speaker 1>getting dumber. Okay, it's only getting dumber. We're only getting
<v Speaker 1>dumber here, I guess Trump just defunded PBS. You know,
<v Speaker 1>PBS was too woke, and we don't have money for that.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, you got to give fucking tax cuts
<v Speaker 1>the billionaires or something. Anyway, declining, declining, empliyer here, everyone's
<v Speaker 1>in denial and not that smart. But anyway, you know,
<v Speaker 1>you can't be shooting guns off at a public hiking area.
<v Speaker 1>And so this young man, he was receptive and he
<v Speaker 1>stopped discharging his hand gun at this spot, which was
<v Speaker 1>of course totally I think shooting there maybe it was illegal,
<v Speaker 1>but of course, being that it's the South, it's totally
<v Speaker 1>legal to just discharge guns wherever. Probably is it, I
<v Speaker 1>don't know who knows. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't get shot.
<v Speaker 1>And then I went down the slope and looked at
<v Speaker 1>callt me a latafolia, which, speaking of how stupid common
<v Speaker 1>names are they, that's a plant they call Mountain Laurel,
<v Speaker 1>which again is not related to Laurel whatsoever, which is
<v Speaker 1>in lau race, the avocado family, the Bay Laurel family,
<v Speaker 1>and then of course in Texas our Mount Laurel is
<v Speaker 1>Dermatophylum secunda florum, which is unrelated to Cantia latifolia and
<v Speaker 1>also totally unrelated to laurel. And if you can say
<v Speaker 1>mountain laurel, why can't you just say the word colmia
<v Speaker 1>the genus, you know, get it. Show some respect for
<v Speaker 1>a plant. Learn the genus name, or learn the name dermatophylum,
<v Speaker 1>which isn't that hard to say. Maybe it'll intimidate, you know,
<v Speaker 1>some of the half wits out there, no offense to
<v Speaker 1>them either, but dermatto phylum. You know, you could figure
<v Speaker 1>out how to spell this stuff. Everybody did hooked on phonics, right,
<v Speaker 1>dermtto phylum, mountain laurel, which you know, if you're gonna
<v Speaker 1>go to the trouble as saying that many syllables, why
<v Speaker 1>not just learn the genus name of the plant. That's
<v Speaker 1>pretty cool. You might end up using it again anyway.
<v Speaker 1>So that was a fun That was a fun time.
<v Speaker 1>I'm glad I didn't get shot. I'm glad I got
<v Speaker 1>some cultural insight. You know. The last day I was
<v Speaker 1>in Atlanta as well, I was able I borrow a
<v Speaker 1>bike from my hippie friend Josh. We went biking around
<v Speaker 1>and god, it was so nice. Man. They're like bike
<v Speaker 1>in an old style city where you can actually you know,
<v Speaker 1>bike down the street without getting mote over by like
<v Speaker 1>some four hundred pound no offense, four hundred pound man
<v Speaker 1>in a Yukon, which is the state. In most of
<v Speaker 1>the Sun Belt, that's like the status. And especially in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>you can't. It's unsafe to bike many places in Texas
<v Speaker 1>because people are just horrible drivers, either dumb or aggressive,
<v Speaker 1>and they're just driving these giant trucks. They can't even
<v Speaker 1>see you half the time. They probably wouldn't even feel
<v Speaker 1>you if they ran over you. You know, it's it's
<v Speaker 1>just but it was nice to ride a bike. They
<v Speaker 1>gotta they get. They turned a beltline railroad in Atlanta
<v Speaker 1>into a bike path so you can bike all round.
<v Speaker 1>Everybody was out, hundreds of people on the bike path.
<v Speaker 1>It was nice, but everybody, you know, it wasn't crowded,
<v Speaker 1>it wasn't packed like ass to neck. It's just a
<v Speaker 1>beautiful sunny sunday. We were biking around. Uh. It was
<v Speaker 1>such a nice experience that I haven't had in a
<v Speaker 1>while because I haven't lived in a real city and uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, four or five years. So that was a
<v Speaker 1>nice time. I ended up taking my shirt off and
<v Speaker 1>just biking on because it felt so nice the breeze.
<v Speaker 1>It was hot. I was sweating like a pig, and
<v Speaker 1>then the breeze just felt and I was like, fuck it,
<v Speaker 1>I don't care if I'm gonna look like an asshole.
<v Speaker 1>I'm gonna take my shirt off and just you know, oh,
<v Speaker 1>it's so so lovely, you know. And they shut down
<v Speaker 1>one of the streets. I don't know why they shut
<v Speaker 1>the street down. The cops shut the street down for
<v Speaker 1>some sort of street fair. Maybe it was a marathon.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know what it was. Maybe they had maybe
<v Speaker 1>they had the Shriners out, you know, in their little
<v Speaker 1>lawnmower cars. I don't know what was going on. Where
<v Speaker 1>was it? I saw the most American scene the other day.
<v Speaker 1>Where was it? I forget where I think it was in.
<v Speaker 1>It was somewhere in the South. It was in Georgia,
<v Speaker 1>and it was like it was a couple, a married couple.
<v Speaker 1>Presumably maybe they're just housing together. I don't know, who knows,
<v Speaker 1>who knows what's going on. They fucking rent the so
<v Speaker 1>expensive property value so expensive, and maybe people maybe they're
<v Speaker 1>not married. Who am I to presume? Maybe they're just
<v Speaker 1>both cohabitating to save money because everything they're getting reading
<v Speaker 1>by the land. I don't know, but it was a
<v Speaker 1>It was a man and a woman and they were
<v Speaker 1>on either side of the driveway this massive yard, and
<v Speaker 1>each one was riding. They had his and hers riding lawnmowers.
<v Speaker 1>The only thing that could have made it made it
<v Speaker 1>more American was if they had like a styrofoam mount
<v Speaker 1>up light up cross on the back of it, and
<v Speaker 1>maybe they had like one hundred and fifty extra pounds
<v Speaker 1>each to him. It was a beautiful sight. It was
<v Speaker 1>like someone should paint this. And they were just you know,
<v Speaker 1>they were just each It was a group effort, a
<v Speaker 1>couple's effort, his and hers riding lawnmowers. Which we get
<v Speaker 1>the similar thing here in Texas to where you get
<v Speaker 1>a guy doing donuts. But because it doesn't rain here,
<v Speaker 1>we're further west and it starts to and it's so hot,
<v Speaker 1>you know, we're thirty minutes from the Payote gardens, and
<v Speaker 1>so it stops. It's the rain kind of tapers off,
<v Speaker 1>especially if you move west that oftentimes you'll see a
<v Speaker 1>man riding a lawnmower and there's no long to be mowed.
<v Speaker 1>It's just a bunch of weeds. Mostly native weeds, rutero
<v Speaker 1>plants pretty cool, and maybe some bermuda grass, but it's
<v Speaker 1>it's sparse, and so when he's mowing it, it just
<v Speaker 1>kicking up clouds of dust, you know. And probably a
<v Speaker 1>lot of catshit too, because we got bad feral cat
<v Speaker 1>problems here. So he's probably breathing in toxoplasmosis spores or
<v Speaker 1>so usis usiss oh oh osiss toxoplasmosis sports or some
<v Speaker 1>other you know. I don't think we get coccidio. My
<v Speaker 1>coosa is out here valley fever like you get out west.
<v Speaker 1>But it's a nice site, you know, and you have
<v Speaker 1>to take that when you live in America in the
<v Speaker 1>twenty first century. There's a man who's just so filled
<v Speaker 1>with the call of duty that he's mowing a dirt
<v Speaker 1>lot and there's clouds of dust going everywhere. It's the
<v Speaker 1>same thing where they got the irrigation canal near my house.
<v Speaker 1>And I guess there used to be a grove of
<v Speaker 1>native sable palms here and they had to cut him down.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know why they know why, the city hall,
<v Speaker 1>the city the civic leaders know why because they hate plants,
<v Speaker 1>probably because it's you know, it's they hate nature. It's messy,
<v Speaker 1>it's dirty. Nature's messy. But either way, they completely scrape
<v Speaker 1>the sides that irrigation canal clean. So and they've got
<v Speaker 1>all this land subsidence and it just looks like shit
<v Speaker 1>and it's just like barren. Oh God, I love it.
<v Speaker 1>I love it. It's so fucking ridiculous. You can't make
<v Speaker 1>this ship. Well you could. I could probably make some
<v Speaker 1>ship up. You know. They hate plants here, so it's it's, uh,
<v Speaker 1>they just want bermuda grass and parking lots, just the
<v Speaker 1>whole concept of the urban heat island. It's too much.
<v Speaker 1>It's gonna break the brains. It's gonna it's gonna fray
<v Speaker 1>the wiring. You're gonna have a short circuit. Don't even
<v Speaker 1>try to explain it. It's just too much. You're gonna
<v Speaker 1>come on, you're gonna break the algorithm. But anyway, so, uh,
<v Speaker 1>I want to go through these plants that we saw.
<v Speaker 1>It's some of this, these granitic knobs, and it's actually
<v Speaker 1>the geology of this area school So this is there
<v Speaker 1>is there's granite there which is was formed from in
<v Speaker 1>Atlanta and the Atlanta area. These granitic knobs stone mountain.
<v Speaker 1>That's where they got the KKK rally, where they got
<v Speaker 1>the Confederate statues, you know, the fucking Colonel Sanders looking
<v Speaker 1>guy with a white hood on. You know, please a
<v Speaker 1>plant plant? I guess I didn't get to see that.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to see if I puked, would the puke
<v Speaker 1>run down and drip on? Like? How far is the
<v Speaker 1>carving in the mountain beneath the cliff that you can
<v Speaker 1>stand on its stone mountain? Like if how much vomit
<v Speaker 1>would you have to vomit in order to have it
<v Speaker 1>run down? And finally hit one of the Confederate the figures,
<v Speaker 1>And I think, I don't know, I don't know, but
<v Speaker 1>it was a nice thing to wander about and postulate on.
<v Speaker 1>That was a great spot too, though. Again you go
<v Speaker 1>up on top of these rocky knobs and you find
<v Speaker 1>really cool plants up there. There was Vaccinium arboreum up
<v Speaker 1>there as well. Sparkleberry. It's a silly common name, but
<v Speaker 1>I kind of like it, you know, sparkly balls, sparkly berries,
<v Speaker 1>sparkle berry. Up there there was smilax growing in the
<v Speaker 1>cracks of some of these these fissures. So this is
<v Speaker 1>a high rainfall area. I mean, I think it's sometimes
<v Speaker 1>fifty to seventy inches of rain a year in the Atlanta,
<v Speaker 1>Georgia area. But because it's a rocky knob and there's
<v Speaker 1>not much soil there, again, you get all these more
<v Speaker 1>drought tolerant plants like Opunthia. There was opunthia, say spotosa there.
<v Speaker 1>It might have been Saxe potosa. I don't know what
<v Speaker 1>it's probably says potosa. Same thing you see on Floyd
<v Speaker 1>Bennett Airfield, the abandoned airfield in Brooklyn, with a host
<v Speaker 1>of invasive plants slowly recolonizing the pavement. But Pakrodubia was
<v Speaker 1>up there, like I said, And you know, the adaptations
<v Speaker 1>you see in a lot of these plants that you
<v Speaker 1>see growing on these granitic knobs are of course hairs, right,
<v Speaker 1>reduced leaf size hairs. The same thing you see in
<v Speaker 1>the deserts a much more extreme degree. Right, it's not
<v Speaker 1>I can see like funeral stage like you get in
<v Speaker 1>the Mojave Desert, which is so hairy it's almost white,
<v Speaker 1>and the flowers are so reduced in size because of
<v Speaker 1>the fact that they grow in these barren limestone cliffs
<v Speaker 1>in the Mojave Desert. But you're gonna see similar adaptations
<v Speaker 1>hair stem succulents. Of course, there was diamorphous smallly eye,
<v Speaker 1>which is now just see the smallly I crass. The lacey,
<v Speaker 1>little four pedaled flowers always flush the leaves. The succulent
<v Speaker 1>leaves always flush in red with stressed pigments. I bet
<v Speaker 1>it what they do grow green. They're grow in shade,
<v Speaker 1>like the shade of a big rock or something. The
<v Speaker 1>dimorphous small eye will have greener leaves, but that's an
<v Speaker 1>annual so it just produces seeds and then the plant
<v Speaker 1>dies and the seeds laying weight to germinate the next year.
<v Speaker 1>There was so much cool stuff on these glad areas.
<v Speaker 1>Again that Corcus georgiana as well, really narrow ranged oak
<v Speaker 1>god I was having a blast. Tritiscontia was everywhere right.
<v Speaker 1>We saw both Ohiensis and try to Scontia Hersseudoculus, another
<v Speaker 1>succulent plant. One of the Coomalainace members, which is a
<v Speaker 1>really cool family, and they've always got those weird ass anthers.
<v Speaker 1>Some of the members of Comala and Ace have corkscrew anthers.
<v Speaker 1>One of my most favorite members of Coma in Ac
<v Speaker 1>was cocleiostema, cocleostema. Wonder what that means in Latin. I
<v Speaker 1>gotta get that. I have one of those like Latin
<v Speaker 1>translation for plants books. I lost that. I who, I'm surprised.
<v Speaker 1>You know what? Is there? An easy one is there?
<v Speaker 1>It's odd the one I had. The book I had
<v Speaker 1>was like thirty years old. It's out of print maybe longer.
<v Speaker 1>It was a Sterns you know who stern was right,
<v Speaker 1>it was fifty years old. It's an old ass book,
<v Speaker 1>but it explains what all these Latin words mean, you know,
<v Speaker 1>and it was very helpful. But coclio stema odoritissimum. That
<v Speaker 1>was a plant. Martin Grantham gave me weirdest fucking It's
<v Speaker 1>it's like a it's like a comolinid that behaves like
<v Speaker 1>a uh bromeliad. I don't even where's the native to.
<v Speaker 1>I don't even know where it's native I put. If
<v Speaker 1>you want to see photos of what I'm talking about,
<v Speaker 1>go to my I Naturalists. Go to I naturalist dot org,
<v Speaker 1>hit explore uh type in for the for filter over
<v Speaker 1>on the right head side to go to film their
<v Speaker 1>Joey Santaur and type in cochleos or hit Joey santaur
<v Speaker 1>and then type in in the tax on field Cochleostema
<v Speaker 1>c O C H L I O S T E
<v Speaker 1>M A odoritsimum and you'll see what I'm talking about.
<v Speaker 1>I put a bunch of money shots up there. I
<v Speaker 1>think twenty. But this is such a weird plan. All
<v Speaker 1>the members of comal and AC have weird anthers. Some
<v Speaker 1>have dimorphic anthers, like two different sets of anthers and
<v Speaker 1>uh and hairs on them like little filaments, and some
<v Speaker 1>of the sometimes the the uh anths look like fly
<v Speaker 1>fishing lures. So really cool pollination biology. This thing, Cochliosma
<v Speaker 1>odoritsimum grows as an epiphyte in the neotropics and almost
<v Speaker 1>resembles a bromeliad. And Martin Grantham gave me one. It
<v Speaker 1>was growing in my kitchen and a sunny window in
<v Speaker 1>Oakland and it did so well. Yeah, I gave it
<v Speaker 1>back to him and then, uh, you know what, he
<v Speaker 1>said he was going to send me one. I don't
<v Speaker 1>think he ever did, and he's gonna send me another one.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think he did, but it would probably hate
<v Speaker 1>where I live now. It's probably too hot. Oh you
<v Speaker 1>know what. Actually it grows in Costa Rica. But this
<v Speaker 1>is a lowland plant, so we're not gonna see it done.
<v Speaker 1>Our little foray that we planned in July for the
<v Speaker 1>high elevation oak forests and Paramo of Costa Rica me
<v Speaker 1>Allen Rockefeller Mandicr. It should already sold out. It's sold that.
<v Speaker 1>We sold twenty twenty tickets already to this thing. It
<v Speaker 1>should be great, it should be really cool. It's nine
<v Speaker 1>thousand feet. We'll probably do another one at some point,
<v Speaker 1>and I guess we're doing Ecuador in November. Yeah, but
<v Speaker 1>we're gonna be you know, July is supposed to be
<v Speaker 1>peak fungus season there, so we're gonna be looking at
<v Speaker 1>mushrooms and all kinds of cool plants. I've got a
<v Speaker 1>somewhat decent primer already on the plant life there, crazy
<v Speaker 1>lineages of plants Perumnopotes, Stanley Ie which is now Pectanapoti's
<v Speaker 1>Stanley Eye. Listened to the Costa Rica podcast if you
<v Speaker 1>want to hear about some of these things. Two thousand
<v Speaker 1>year old Potocarpus trees right, really cool, predominantly Southern Hemisphere
<v Speaker 1>conifer lineage. I had no idea that grew way up
<v Speaker 1>at nine thousand feet in a Costa Rican cloud forest
<v Speaker 1>with a bunch of cool endemic raspberry species and crazy
<v Speaker 1>birds and three or four different species of oaks which
<v Speaker 1>should be host to some wonderful electo micro rhizol mushrooms,
<v Speaker 1>as well as Camaro stapfless arbutoids, which is in the
<v Speaker 1>genus Camarostaphlos, which is closely related to madrones. Yes, the
<v Speaker 1>madrones you get in Texas, Arizona, and California and all
<v Speaker 1>over Mexico, but higher elevations in Mexico, but is not
<v Speaker 1>in that genus Camara Staphlus. Their fruit is a what
<v Speaker 1>is It's a drup instead of a berry, but it's
<v Speaker 1>called arbutoides because it looks like in arbutis it looks
<v Speaker 1>like a madrone and those, of course are host to
<v Speaker 1>ectomycorrhizol fungi as well. So this should be a nice
<v Speaker 1>trip anyway. Uh yeah, but it's sold out already, so sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. It's sold on like three days. I
<v Speaker 1>could do that, shit, Oh yeah I should. I could
<v Speaker 1>do like three or four of those. If I could
<v Speaker 1>find a way to bring my kid down with me,
<v Speaker 1>you know, she could help out, get her, get her
<v Speaker 1>a passport, bring her down her, have her help out.
<v Speaker 1>That would be so nice, you know, South Texas is
<v Speaker 1>nice once in a while. I just think about that
<v Speaker 1>the other day. I don't have to worry about crackhead's
<v Speaker 1>breaking into my shit anymore. I live in a severely
<v Speaker 1>culturally repressed area, but people are generally pretty polite and kind,
<v Speaker 1>you know. But it's it's a trade off. Because people
<v Speaker 1>ask me, how do you like living in Texas? I
<v Speaker 1>always say it's culture is kind of fucked up, but
<v Speaker 1>people are really nice. I hate the fact that it's
<v Speaker 1>a car slum like this this state, like so much
<v Speaker 1>of the infrastructure here in the cities is just dedicated
<v Speaker 1>to cars. Like you have to spend your whole life
<v Speaker 1>trapped in a car. It's like the most one of
<v Speaker 1>the most pedestrian, anti anti friendly, anti pedestrian places I've
<v Speaker 1>ever lived. To be miserable to grow up here, you know,
<v Speaker 1>I guess, I guess it's to each their own. It's
<v Speaker 1>different for everybody. For me, I like being able to
<v Speaker 1>walk around, like being able to take public transit, especially
<v Speaker 1>as a kid. I like being able to interact with people,
<v Speaker 1>you know. Yeah, you've heard me random about this before.
<v Speaker 1>I hate I hate the parking. I hate the way
<v Speaker 1>everything looks when everything's you know, dedicated to parking and driving.
<v Speaker 1>But uh whatever, But you know, I don't have to
<v Speaker 1>worry about crack. It's still in my shiver. That used
<v Speaker 1>to be a thing all the time, Like you leave
<v Speaker 1>your your car, everything would get jacked, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>everything would get fucking jacked. And then you'd have like
<v Speaker 1>some some kid who grew up rich being like, Wow,
<v Speaker 1>the person who's still your stuff must have really needed it.
<v Speaker 1>And it's kind of fucked up actually for you to
<v Speaker 1>be upset by it, because they obviously really needed it,
<v Speaker 1>because you know whatever, it's like, yeah, I'm sure they're
<v Speaker 1>like I'm sure, I'm sure whoever stole it's donating it
<v Speaker 1>to like a food co op to feed under privileged
<v Speaker 1>children with the fuck like what the fuck? Anyway, Sorry,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but it's a trade off. There no public
<v Speaker 1>land anyway. Let's not get distracted on this. I'm sorry,
<v Speaker 1>I'm really on with today. You know, it's been bottled
<v Speaker 1>up inside me. I didn't do a podcast for three weeks,
<v Speaker 1>been bottled up. I got you know, you'd let the
<v Speaker 1>cap off, and I just said, wow, he just starts
<v Speaker 1>going off. You know, he was drinking those na's. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>he'd been sober nine years, but he was drinking those
<v Speaker 1>na's as if they actually contained you know, some ethanol. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>uh but uh, okay, where what the fuck were we?
<v Speaker 1>So we were talking about kamalin ac. I M just
<v Speaker 1>pull up a little plant list here. Okay, make sure
<v Speaker 1>when you type in if you're going to I natracy,
<v Speaker 1>typeing in Georgia for the location field, you're hitting Georgia, USA,
<v Speaker 1>not Georgia the country. Okay, no shade the eastern Europe.
<v Speaker 1>But you know, we were focusing on a different thing.
<v Speaker 1>So god damn it. Now everything's just a mess. I
<v Speaker 1>can't even see it. Everybody. Oh yeah, Riby's cravadum. We're
<v Speaker 1>talking about granitick knob endemics, okay, or near endemics, plants
<v Speaker 1>that like growing on the thin soiled areas of these
<v Speaker 1>granitic knobs. And the geology in this case in the
<v Speaker 1>Atlanta area is really cool because this was it was metamorphised, okay,
<v Speaker 1>and it's a remnant of a time. Did you know
<v Speaker 1>that North America and Africa once slammed into each other
<v Speaker 1>and then later came apart and split up again. So
<v Speaker 1>this is geologically a very old area. I think it's
<v Speaker 1>three or four hundred million year old rocks that formed
<v Speaker 1>some of these granitic knobs. So anyway, the rock it
<v Speaker 1>Arabia Mountain, for instance, which is where we were getting
<v Speaker 1>shot at, not intentionally, is part of the Lithonian nice.
<v Speaker 1>It's a granitic rock that was later exposed by erosion
<v Speaker 1>in the mountain itself. Arabia Mountain itself is called a
<v Speaker 1>monodnock and isolated rock outcrop left standing after surrounding softer
<v Speaker 1>rocks eroded away. So lots of erosion here, just like
<v Speaker 1>throughout much of Appalasia. Okay, these mountains were originally much
<v Speaker 1>larger and then if you know, over time been weathered
<v Speaker 1>weathered down, and they're actually for the for Appalachies, you know,
<v Speaker 1>for the Appalachian Mountains. There were there were I think
<v Speaker 1>three three or four major orogenes that is mountain building
<v Speaker 1>events orogenes, not erogenies like your erogenous zones, not e
<v Speaker 1>R O O R O you had. Uh, the Grenville
<v Speaker 1>orogeny was it like a billion years ago? There was
<v Speaker 1>the Taconic orogeny, which was shortly after the Cambrian explosion,
<v Speaker 1>a formation of life, okay, of the the more complex
<v Speaker 1>life and an The most important orogeny was the Alleghanian
<v Speaker 1>which is roughly three hundred million years ago. And this
<v Speaker 1>is this is the big one. This is when Laurentia
<v Speaker 1>and Gondwana UH smashed into each other. Gondwana. Africa was
<v Speaker 1>part of Gondwana forming and they together they formed the
<v Speaker 1>super Conon and Pangaea Laurentia which was North America and Gondwana.
<v Speaker 1>This is not, of course not doesn't look anything like
<v Speaker 1>like modern day North America. And this is why you'll
<v Speaker 1>find the same rocks both in like Scotland UH and
<v Speaker 1>Newfoundland right like eastern northeast coast of North North America
<v Speaker 1>and then Scotland, you know, the same exact same rock
<v Speaker 1>formed at the same time, same age, same kind, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>And also i'll find you know east like where you
<v Speaker 1>get those well witchi of fossils on the east coast
<v Speaker 1>of Brazil and also in Africa. So you know they
<v Speaker 1>were together at one point because the Atlantic Ocean wasn't
<v Speaker 1>always there before that seafloor spreading center opened up, pushed
<v Speaker 1>North America to the west and Africa or the East,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. But that was that was the big one
<v Speaker 1>that built the Appalachians, the Alleghanian Orogyeny just like Alleghany
<v Speaker 1>Pennsylvania is that's a spot right where Alleghany. What's good
<v Speaker 1>Allegheny count What is it? I don't know. I haven't
<v Speaker 1>spent much time in Pennsylvania, but you want you know
<v Speaker 1>what I'm talking about. So, just like India islamming into
<v Speaker 1>Asia today, so was going on between what is today
<v Speaker 1>Africa and what is today in North America three hundred
<v Speaker 1>million years ago and that's what formed the Appoachian Mountains
<v Speaker 1>and of course ever since then. So that was the
<v Speaker 1>cause of the uplift continental collision and then now they've
<v Speaker 1>been weathered down and from what I can understand, correct
<v Speaker 1>me if I'm wrong. I mean, this is a one
<v Speaker 1>way conversation. But you know, take what I'm saying with
<v Speaker 1>the Grand Salt. This these rocks were you know, originally
<v Speaker 1>they've got a large grain size the granite that forms
<v Speaker 1>Arabia Mountain, which was later cooked and metamorphoused, but they
<v Speaker 1>were much deeper back in the day three hundred million
<v Speaker 1>years ago when they formed, and so as the mountains
<v Speaker 1>above them have been eroded and weathered down, these have
<v Speaker 1>risen up. You know, they've had the lithospheric rebound. When
<v Speaker 1>you take some off, you relief some pressure off the top,
<v Speaker 1>and it kind of floats back up. All right. So
<v Speaker 1>that's that's where the just came from. But either way,
<v Speaker 1>they're immensely important. And you've got geologic events that happened
<v Speaker 1>three hundred million years ago dictating what grows there today. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>a lot of the stuff that grows in these woodlands
<v Speaker 1>down below could not grow on top of these granitic
<v Speaker 1>knobs throughout the Atlanta area. There's not enough soil there.
<v Speaker 1>It's too dry. I mean shit, that's why you get
<v Speaker 1>the prickly pit. You got cactus there. You got shown
<v Speaker 1>a llyrium there, which has a geophitic habit. It's a
<v Speaker 1>relative of a gave sunny balls. I love that plant.
<v Speaker 1>Wonderful plant. It's got like a little bulb. Is it
<v Speaker 1>a bulber of corm? I don't know one of the
<v Speaker 1>two bulbs are leaves, corms or stems, But either way,
<v Speaker 1>it's got a storage mechanism. It's got a storage tuber
<v Speaker 1>and what does sunny balls look like in August? You know,
<v Speaker 1>if it has a rained in a while, like, can
<v Speaker 1>they die? I presumably they can just dive back to
<v Speaker 1>that bulb, right they fly now they flower in April.
<v Speaker 1>I was so nice to be there in the humidity too,
<v Speaker 1>so fucking humid poison ivy everywhere in the Atlanta area.
<v Speaker 1>But uh yeah, man, I don't know it was the
<v Speaker 1>humidity is so nice. It's so weird for me to
<v Speaker 1>be in a place where it rains so much. It
<v Speaker 1>rained a shit ton fifty to seventy inches a year.
<v Speaker 1>That's insane. Where I live. I live in one of
<v Speaker 1>I live in the most humid desert in North America.
<v Speaker 1>It's technically not. It's where desert turns to thorn scrub.
<v Speaker 1>You go west towards like Del Rio, Texas, that's more
<v Speaker 1>you're hit in desert. Then you hit West Texas, Brewster County, Percity,
<v Speaker 1>a kind of that's more true desert. Right where I live,
<v Speaker 1>it's humid. The peote here grows on top of the ground.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't grow recessed into the ground like it does
<v Speaker 1>in that little small population in West Texas where it
<v Speaker 1>just kind of sinks it's at the top of the
<v Speaker 1>plant is flat with the limestone that it grows in,
<v Speaker 1>so it's it's humid here. I mean, we get like,
<v Speaker 1>what is it, twenty two inches of rain A little,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. We're two hours from Brownsville more humid,
<v Speaker 1>but over there, you know. And that was what was
<v Speaker 1>cool too, is parts of parts of the Atlanta area
<v Speaker 1>really felt like a milder version of the tropics, all right,
<v Speaker 1>like the same kind of plant communities, not the lowland tropics,
<v Speaker 1>the six thousand foot tropics, right, except you get a freeze.
<v Speaker 1>It freezesn't there in the winter. So there's a lot
<v Speaker 1>of shit that you're not going to get tropical species,
<v Speaker 1>but you've got congeners maybe species that grow in the
<v Speaker 1>same genus related plants. You're gonna have similar, similar enough,
<v Speaker 1>at least taxonomically evolutionarily related, some of those same so
<v Speaker 1>some of those same plants. And then of course you
<v Speaker 1>can have you know, tropical stuff that doesn't families that
<v Speaker 1>are tropical that don't grow. Can't cut it in Atlanta
<v Speaker 1>at all. But it was cool to see because to
<v Speaker 1>me it felt like parts of like Highland Wahaka or
<v Speaker 1>some of the forests and Coast Rica, you know, which
<v Speaker 1>also you get a lot of rain in those places
<v Speaker 1>like Veric like highland, not highland, but you know montane
<v Speaker 1>areas of Vera Cruz, Mexico, or Wahaca Wahaca, Mexico or
<v Speaker 1>even uh Morelos Mexico. You know, the mount like directly
<v Speaker 1>east of Mexico City and the mountains there seven thousand
<v Speaker 1>foot elevation, that's kind of what it felt like at
<v Speaker 1>like a thousand feet in the Atlanta area and a
<v Speaker 1>similar rain, similar duff on the ground, somewhat related species oaks,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. You know, I remember seeing if there was
<v Speaker 1>a fucking viburnum I saw at nine thousand feet in
<v Speaker 1>Costa Rica, and you got viburnums all over the East
<v Speaker 1>coast native ones, so that was really cool for me
<v Speaker 1>to see. I bet the mushrooms are fucking nuts there too,
<v Speaker 1>depending on what time you're out. But again, I was
<v Speaker 1>obsessed with these these these you know, glades I generally
<v Speaker 1>think of as limestone, so these were just what is
<v Speaker 1>the term for these then just granted out croppings. I
<v Speaker 1>don't know, knobs, I'd like to say in the word knob,
<v Speaker 1>but anyway, yeah, so this this is these these thin
<v Speaker 1>soiled plant communities. All right, so cool, so cool to see.
<v Speaker 1>And I was surprised at how much facilia there was here.
<v Speaker 1>All right, there was a lot of facilia facilia. The
<v Speaker 1>genus boragineci to borige family are predominantly western. Most of
<v Speaker 1>the diversity is out west. They're certainly more adapted to
<v Speaker 1>the drier to drier areas. All right, Facilia is a
<v Speaker 1>is a more xeric genus, a more drought adapted genus.
<v Speaker 1>But of course on these thin soiled granites. You know,
<v Speaker 1>I must have seen three or four different facilia species.
<v Speaker 1>So Facilia dubia, uh, Facilia perchei. Where was that? I
<v Speaker 1>think that was in Alabama. That was on a limestone glade.
<v Speaker 1>Facilia bipanitifiah, Facilia macilatta. I think that's it. Facila congesta.
<v Speaker 1>It's a Texas one. But yeah, so Facilia percii, macilotta,
<v Speaker 1>and by panitifida. So you know that was what was
<v Speaker 1>cool for me is you see what's mostly a western genus,
<v Speaker 1>but you're gonna see it on thin soiled areas, on
<v Speaker 1>these uh, these granitic knobs. Also got to see a
<v Speaker 1>runding area gigantia and flower. There was a colony flowering
<v Speaker 1>member there are a bamboo technically, so they're all gonna
<v Speaker 1>they're gonna flower. They've got that gregarious monocarpy, so they
<v Speaker 1>all flower at the same time. What the fuck else
<v Speaker 1>did we see? Oh? You know what? Shout out to
<v Speaker 1>Alicia and Dave who invited us out to their land
<v Speaker 1>in northeastern Alabama where I got to stand on a
<v Speaker 1>cliff watching drunken turkey vultures soar over a beautiful valley
<v Speaker 1>and uh with there was Pinus virginiana everywhere, which is
<v Speaker 1>I'm pretty sure it's a two need old pine again
<v Speaker 1>it was again it was a rocky area, thin soiled,
<v Speaker 1>rocky area. There was a puntia. Uh everywhere there was liatris.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't going off yet, but there was I think
<v Speaker 1>two different Liatris species growing all over this cliff. Got
<v Speaker 1>it was such a cool, such a cool sight, and
<v Speaker 1>saw a bunch of box turtles too, box tortoises. God damn.
<v Speaker 1>I just went to use the can. The fucking toilet's
<v Speaker 1>broken again. You know these plastic pieces you got to
<v Speaker 1>take the lid off and then flip the little handle
<v Speaker 1>it's pain in the ass. Anyway. So again with this
<v Speaker 1>theme of dry sites in western genera of plants that
<v Speaker 1>have more Western species. Ribies is another example. We had
<v Speaker 1>Ribies curvadum, but wonderful, white flowered, really cool where curved petals.
<v Speaker 1>The gooseberry genus, the genus of gooseberries. Ribies is the
<v Speaker 1>genus of gooseberries, of currants berries. That's not like a
<v Speaker 1>British currants. Gooseberries got like, I don't know, fifty something
<v Speaker 1>species out west, all right, like west of Illinois, and
<v Speaker 1>then on the east coast you got like twenty four.
<v Speaker 1>So most of the diversity is out west. There's a
<v Speaker 1>species of Ribies that grows in Baja. What species was that,
<v Speaker 1>by the way to I forget? Oh yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>Riby's torchi woes. That's a sick one. Got the flowers
<v Speaker 1>and it looked dope. Oh god, I remember that one. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I saw that growing with Asculus perii, the dwarf buckeye,
<v Speaker 1>a buckeye that grows with giant cacti. But but anyway,
<v Speaker 1>you know, again, it wasn't surprising that primarily a genus
<v Speaker 1>that has most of its diversity in the arid west
<v Speaker 1>of North America, I would find growing in Georgia, in
<v Speaker 1>Atlanta on a thin soiled granite knob that was its
<v Speaker 1>stone mountain, you know, the place where they got the KKK.
<v Speaker 1>It's well, I guess it's the Confederate, the same thing
<v Speaker 1>they got the Confederate, the you know stiffs carved into
<v Speaker 1>the mountain side, you know where it's trying to see
<v Speaker 1>how far would I have to puke to have it
<v Speaker 1>dripped down anyway? So just for me from you know
<v Speaker 1>what I know. The other species I know in many
<v Speaker 1>of the genera that I was encountering here, another plant, uh,
<v Speaker 1>Pilea rutasi, Tilea trifoliata. The species that I was encountering
<v Speaker 1>here was really cool to see, you know that, you
<v Speaker 1>know from what I know of them where they grow
<v Speaker 1>out west, the more arid areas they're growing here on
<v Speaker 1>this these thin soiled spots. Femoranthus was there too. The
<v Speaker 1>what do they call fame flower? What is a common
<v Speaker 1>name for this fame flower? You shouldn't should just stay
<v Speaker 1>away from all these common names. Just learn the learn femoranthus.
<v Speaker 1>Because Femoranthus is a genus. You're going to see it
<v Speaker 1>glades throughout the Midwest and East coast, I still saw
<v Speaker 1>cool femoranthus in Joplin, Missouri. I love these glade habitats,
<v Speaker 1>these these whether it's limestone, which I generally think of
<v Speaker 1>as being a glade, or you know, a granitic knob. Right.
<v Speaker 1>There was Yucca filamentosa there as well. That was at
<v Speaker 1>Arabia Mountain. Philadelphus Inodorus, Quirkish, Montana. That'sa oh, the Philadelphis.
<v Speaker 1>Where did I see that again? Yeah? The you know
<v Speaker 1>what was really cool was Trediscontia herseudocullus. It was a
<v Speaker 1>hairy again hares confer adaptation to drought, a very hairy,
<v Speaker 1>almost obscenely so uh, Tretiscontia. So not only that I
<v Speaker 1>have the stem succulents that had the hairs as well,
<v Speaker 1>and then just to be able to stand up on
<v Speaker 1>top of one of these these knobs and look out
<v Speaker 1>the fucking view is beautiful. You can get up there.
<v Speaker 1>So cool. But the highlight for me was seeing isoeedes
<v Speaker 1>melanospora or melanospora if you want to call it that,
<v Speaker 1>which is a relative of the great lepidodendron, which of
<v Speaker 1>course are the you know, one of the scale trees
<v Speaker 1>that built the like a direct descendant of lepidodendron, one
<v Speaker 1>of the scale trees that built the whole force of
<v Speaker 1>the carboniferous Right, they just used to grow fast as
<v Speaker 1>hell and then would just when they die and they
<v Speaker 1>would just pile up and there. You know, this is
<v Speaker 1>when you know, large plant life was still relatively new.
<v Speaker 1>This is like three hundred fifty million years ago, so
<v Speaker 1>there wasn't enough Fungi and other microbes hadn't evolved yet.
<v Speaker 1>I mean there was fungy, but not ones that could
<v Speaker 1>decompose quickly decompose all this uh lignan and cellulose that
<v Speaker 1>was being created in these coal forces. So that's why
<v Speaker 1>we have coal. We're bringing back coal. Man, Jesus Christ.
<v Speaker 1>He's the reminders of today's idiocracy. So uh so, yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>that was I mean, you know, isoheedes grows up on
<v Speaker 1>this granite. You've got these little divots where water collects
<v Speaker 1>and will form these ephemeral ponds. There was another cool
<v Speaker 1>aquatic plant there, Gradiola amfiantha, which I was not familiar with,
<v Speaker 1>and it was yes, it's critically in dangered. I was
<v Speaker 1>not the normally it's submerged, it's in the it's in Plantagenec,
<v Speaker 1>the family plantagen Ac. But much of the water was
<v Speaker 1>already dried up. I mean it was still semi wet
<v Speaker 1>like parts of the isoetes were still green, but they
<v Speaker 1>were not submerged anymore. But Isoetes grows with this gradiole
<v Speaker 1>and they grow in these little ephemeral ponds. They are
<v Speaker 1>only a few inches deep, and then like on the
<v Speaker 1>edge of the pond will be an opunthia, like a
<v Speaker 1>prickly pair because it's it just is so dry, and
<v Speaker 1>a lot of cacti, even peoti can be you know,
<v Speaker 1>once they're adult size and it's hot enough, they can
<v Speaker 1>be submerged in water for a day or two, uh
<v Speaker 1>you know, and just without without rotting, you know, and
<v Speaker 1>they just suck up all the water and then it's
<v Speaker 1>an ephemeral pond so it drives out. Not a big deal.
<v Speaker 1>But I think, I you know, this will be in
<v Speaker 1>the video and that's coming out. I don't know when
<v Speaker 1>you're listening to this thing. I don't know when I'll
<v Speaker 1>release this fucking podcast, but the video should be out
<v Speaker 1>this weekend. Isohetes is cool. It's literally an inch or
<v Speaker 1>too tall. Doesn't look totally you know, inconspicuous plant, not
<v Speaker 1>something you would stop to look at, doesn't look showy,
<v Speaker 1>doesn't look that cool until you get up close to it.
<v Speaker 1>If you have no context for it'd be really easy
<v Speaker 1>to not give a shit about. But knowing it's a
<v Speaker 1>relative of these ancient these ancient plants that reproduces by spores.
<v Speaker 1>The spores are contained in like a little almost swollen
<v Speaker 1>black sack at the base of these leaves, and that's
<v Speaker 1>normally under a little matt of pebbles or soil. I
<v Speaker 1>was stoked to see it, and we get an Isoetes
<v Speaker 1>species here on the granitic knob that we have in
<v Speaker 1>Texas near Fredericksburg called enchanted rock. Again, these names enchanted?
<v Speaker 1>Why is it enchanted? Enchanted? Gloryhole? Right? Enchanted? Why is
<v Speaker 1>it enchanted? It's just a granitic knob. Do you have
<v Speaker 1>to bring in like these weird fairy tale references, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like we're fucking children for Christ's ex well grown man.
<v Speaker 1>I don't need it to be a check that. Just
<v Speaker 1>call it a granitik knob, nab. It's a granitic knob anyway,
<v Speaker 1>another very old piece of interesting, ignious rock that's got
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of cool plants that it forms a thinner
<v Speaker 1>soil area, you know, in Texas, though it's already by
<v Speaker 1>that point when you move west through North America, it's
<v Speaker 1>already drying out enough, because as you move west, it
<v Speaker 1>continues to dry out. You know. You got that, You
<v Speaker 1>got that one hundredth meridian right in the center of Texas,
<v Speaker 1>where everything east of there is generally more music, everything
<v Speaker 1>west is more dry. It's the dividing line we you know,
<v Speaker 1>as biogeography enthusiasts, consider the dividing line between the arid
<v Speaker 1>west and the more music humid east. But and I've
<v Speaker 1>never been to enchanted Gloryhole, Enchanted Rock. I'm sorry, I've
<v Speaker 1>never been there. You know, but if you do, go
<v Speaker 1>to the adult bookstore near Joplin, Missouri. They give you
<v Speaker 1>your materials in a black plastic bag. Now, so you
<v Speaker 1>don't have to be you don't have to walk out,
<v Speaker 1>you know, look of shame when you're walking your truck.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just kidding. I was teasing a friend about that.
<v Speaker 1>And you go through Missouri, it's always the most repressed
<v Speaker 1>areas where you get the dirty Where was the there
<v Speaker 1>was a dildo shop? I saw it was painted pink
<v Speaker 1>and what's Merle Haggard's hometown in Oklahoma? Shit, I forget.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. It's too early for this. I forget. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>let's not go down that road. I always got to
<v Speaker 1>find a way to filter out the squares somehow. I
<v Speaker 1>don't want I'm listening to this podcast right that said,
<v Speaker 1>this podcast is not sponsored by Native American Seed. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to come there and do a video and
<v Speaker 1>I was, you know, I love what they do. They
<v Speaker 1>have a wonderful seed catalog, but they did not want
<v Speaker 1>any affiliation with me, and I understand. I totally understand
<v Speaker 1>I would not want any affiliation with myself either. So
<v Speaker 1>I have to go on the record expressly stating that,
<v Speaker 1>despite my encouraging you to buy seed from Native American Seed,
<v Speaker 1>they are not sponsoring this podcast. They do not approve
<v Speaker 1>of Crime Pays, but Botany doesn't. So I don't want
<v Speaker 1>any you know, any of the stiffs or prudes who
<v Speaker 1>don't like what I do, to think that because I
<v Speaker 1>endorse Native American Seed that they're on board with me.
<v Speaker 1>They're not endorsing me. They are not okay with me.
<v Speaker 1>All right? And thank God, because someone's got to stand
<v Speaker 1>for decency here for the genteeles. Right it is, after all,
<v Speaker 1>it's Texas. It's a little you gotta be prudent here,
<v Speaker 1>you know, a little repressed, a little prudent. We don't
<v Speaker 1>like to use cuss words and call everybody sir, and
<v Speaker 1>we don't approve of his filthy mouth nor his delivery. No,
<v Speaker 1>they're doing great work, and they don't I don't think
<v Speaker 1>they don't like me. They just don't want any affiliation
<v Speaker 1>with me, which I understand because they have to do
<v Speaker 1>the hard work of working with the stiffs and getting
<v Speaker 1>their support, and you can't do that if you're any
<v Speaker 1>of if you're having any affiliation with a guy that
<v Speaker 1>you know, talks about duffel bags full of DilOS, or
<v Speaker 1>how he's you know, a dirty bookstore in Merle Haggard's
<v Speaker 1>hometown or something anything you know, which I think is funny.
<v Speaker 1>I do employ toilet humor a lot, but I don't
<v Speaker 1>want anyone to look down on Native American seed. They
<v Speaker 1>do not approve of my endorsement of them. Okay, they
<v Speaker 1>want nothing to do with me, all right. Some of
<v Speaker 1>the people who work there really cool, by the way,
<v Speaker 1>and they've got a great seed catalog. But I don't
<v Speaker 1>want anyone to get the wrong impression that because I'm
<v Speaker 1>endorsing them, that they, you know, somehow, you know, approve
<v Speaker 1>of what I do. Okay, they don't. So don't you know,
<v Speaker 1>if you're one of these these the pasty Texas stiffs,
<v Speaker 1>don't don't get the wrong idea. I want you to
<v Speaker 1>still support them too. They don't have anything to do
<v Speaker 1>with me. But they've got a wonderful seed catalog too.
<v Speaker 1>You should check it out. Okay. So anyway, so isoetes
<v Speaker 1>milanos melanospora milanospoil was up and the ones at the
<v Speaker 1>margin of this pond were dying out. You know, these
<v Speaker 1>ponds probably pond probably filled up like a day after
<v Speaker 1>I left because it rained too. It rains so much there,
<v Speaker 1>Like what's the longest that the Atlanta area goes without rain?
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. I mean, apparently long enough for these
<v Speaker 1>ponds to dry out. But still, it was really cool
<v Speaker 1>to see where their sporangia are, where the spores are produced.
<v Speaker 1>It's again, it's at the base of those leaves, like
<v Speaker 1>in a little sheath god. Isohetes is so cool to
<v Speaker 1>have fallen from great heights you go to the Field Museum,
<v Speaker 1>you look at the fossils of the scale trees, and
<v Speaker 1>you think, you know, you've fallen from glory, my friend,
<v Speaker 1>but you're still glorious to me. That's what you say
<v Speaker 1>to the isoetes, is what I was thinking to isohetes
<v Speaker 1>when I was looking at it. Excuse me, that was
<v Speaker 1>I'm sorry, that was really, that was really you didn't
<v Speaker 1>need to hear that. What else was up top? So
<v Speaker 1>we had smilax smolly I too, growing in the cracks.
<v Speaker 1>I already mentioned that we had Rubus pennsylvanikis, which is
<v Speaker 1>a native of raspberry, with white flowers forming these kind
<v Speaker 1>of arching branches. I was almost worried that it was
<v Speaker 1>not native at first, but then I looked into it
<v Speaker 1>and it's, sure enough it is. I didn't, you know.
<v Speaker 1>I just I saw this raspberry species and it was
<v Speaker 1>thriving in some areas so well that I thought, maybe
<v Speaker 1>it's not native. It's behaving like it's got no natural
<v Speaker 1>checks and bounces, But indeed it does. Rubus pennsylvani goes
<v Speaker 1>again all this stuff, and these were growing out of cracks,
<v Speaker 1>so no soil here, but they've got these cracks that
<v Speaker 1>they can send their roots down into Who knows how
<v Speaker 1>deep there was vaccinium or borium there too. Galcemium semperverance.
<v Speaker 1>Does anybody who's not in the South, No, not know
<v Speaker 1>what gelcemium is. It's a really cool I first became
<v Speaker 1>familiar with it when we were filming Kill Your Lawn
<v Speaker 1>in New Orleans because Swampfly was planting it. You know,
<v Speaker 1>the ladies at swamp Fly were planting it in some
<v Speaker 1>of the yards that we were doing. But apparently it
<v Speaker 1>can take it just finds a crack to grow on,
<v Speaker 1>and it can take these kind of laid nob habitats
<v Speaker 1>in Atlanta really well. Supposedly it's mildly psychoactive. I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>Galcemiace is the family how what is a taxonomy? How
<v Speaker 1>many yeah, Galcemiace I think how many genera Galcemium must Mustuia,
<v Speaker 1>moss Tuia, and Tileo karpa and the order gentian Aleies.
<v Speaker 1>So three genera, I don't know how many species, and
<v Speaker 1>it's in the order Gentianalies. But yellow flowers, yellow five
<v Speaker 1>pedal flowers. When it's going off, it's a fine line between, uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, between psychoactive and toxic. So do with that
<v Speaker 1>what you may. If you decide to put some in
<v Speaker 1>your ass or smoke some. I don't advise it, but
<v Speaker 1>you know people are going to experiment to escape the
<v Speaker 1>bleakness of modern day. There was a Helianthus portery there.
<v Speaker 1>They were just getting started, little seedlings. That's an it's
<v Speaker 1>a sunflower. They are like many members of Asteraci. They're
<v Speaker 1>late summer bloomers, late summer early all bloomers. Kyan Anthos
<v Speaker 1>virginicus fringe tree was there. Olyac, the olive family relative
<v Speaker 1>of ash trees. Plants are generally dioecious that the will
<v Speaker 1>either produce male flowers or female flowers. The male flowers
<v Speaker 1>are supposedly the most showy, right. The male flowers are
<v Speaker 1>the one sas Shane you know around a parking lot,
<v Speaker 1>you know, calling everyone you know derogatory names. Oh, and
<v Speaker 1>Moninuria uniflora another one of these arid microsite endemics. These
<v Speaker 1>plant these are the plants that you see and it's
<v Speaker 1>an indicator of like, oh, the soil is not too
<v Speaker 1>deep here. And we saw the same thing when we
<v Speaker 1>went out with Kyle from Native Habitat Project to Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>The next day growing in the Limestone Glades. And that
<v Speaker 1>was really cool to see because I mean, he took
<v Speaker 1>us out to this spot that that was kind of
<v Speaker 1>how he got in to plants. He had been going
<v Speaker 1>there since he was a kid, and he talked about
<v Speaker 1>like the first time he went out there, he's tried
<v Speaker 1>to spray it with round up. I think what he
<v Speaker 1>was trying to do. I think he was trying to
<v Speaker 1>like clear it out or increase the potential for wildlife
<v Speaker 1>to inhabit it, for turkeys or something. You know, he's
<v Speaker 1>a hunter. I still don't understand how people can be
<v Speaker 1>against hunting. You, I mean, I do, you have to
<v Speaker 1>be ecologically illiterate. So I don't want to shit on anybody,
<v Speaker 1>but it's just you know, it's checks and balances, if
<v Speaker 1>you know, if there's no hunting of deer, the deer
<v Speaker 1>populations get too big, they start impacting the plants and
<v Speaker 1>then everything else that lives. You know, it's like any ecosystem,
<v Speaker 1>too little or too much of something and the whole
<v Speaker 1>tower stuff, whole Jenga tower starts coming down. Anyway. So
<v Speaker 1>uh well, maybe that was a Puntia music canta. I
<v Speaker 1>don't fucking know. I'm so over trying to figure out
<v Speaker 1>what Puntia uh, you know, especially in the East coast,
<v Speaker 1>if there's when you're in Mexico, it's different because there's
<v Speaker 1>more variation between the prickly pair of species. But you
<v Speaker 1>know hume ethusus that s Potosa music canta, that could
<v Speaker 1>the differences between these Upunthia species can be very very
<v Speaker 1>nil or or very subtle. Linaria canadensis purple flowers with
<v Speaker 1>a nectar spur. It was another cool plant to see.
<v Speaker 1>I forget what is it. They call it toad flex.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. It's not related to bastard toad flex,
<v Speaker 1>which is a semi parasitic plant that we also saw
<v Speaker 1>at one of the prairies in northwestern Georgia. Linaria canadensists
<v Speaker 1>purple flowers, uh, nectar nectar spur which implies, you know,
<v Speaker 1>butterflies hit this things. We can stick the proboscos and
<v Speaker 1>the nectar spur whatever. That was common on the glade
<v Speaker 1>habitats as well. But anyway, we went to uh, the
<v Speaker 1>the granite habitats as well, but have Yeah, so Kyle
<v Speaker 1>showed us this the spot where it all started for him,
<v Speaker 1>you know, his journey, his journey into uh into botany
<v Speaker 1>and just you know, native plants and restoring habitats. That
<v Speaker 1>guys doing so much good work, and that brings up
<v Speaker 1>something for me that was just smacking me in the face.
<v Speaker 1>Every time that I was there was you're okay, you
<v Speaker 1>get fifty to seventy inches of rain a year. I
<v Speaker 1>think it literally rained every day I was there. I
<v Speaker 1>was there for a week, maybe one or two days
<v Speaker 1>it didn't rain. When you get that much rain, everything
<v Speaker 1>grows so vigorously, and so you need something to check
<v Speaker 1>if it's not megafauna, which are all basically extinct on
<v Speaker 1>the East coast, especially the bison. If it's not megafauna
<v Speaker 1>keeping these plants in check, this plant life is just
<v Speaker 1>going to grow and grow, just like the the cold
<v Speaker 1>force of the carboniferous, right, the fun guy in the
<v Speaker 1>bacteria that break them down can only do so much
<v Speaker 1>and move so fast, and so you know you need
<v Speaker 1>something in these habitats or else it just gets choked out.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, Kyle took this to another glade in Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>It was a thin soiled limestone glade. It was kars,
<v Speaker 1>so there were like the beginnings of caves. There were
<v Speaker 1>huge divits that were sometimes three feet deep in this limestone,
<v Speaker 1>and it gets so much rain that the like these
<v Speaker 1>this glade. Well, first off, the only reason where we
<v Speaker 1>were where the glade was open there it was because
<v Speaker 1>it was a power line going over, so they had
<v Speaker 1>to keep it clear. They would come through, spray, moll whatever.
<v Speaker 1>But on the sides of the where that power line was,
<v Speaker 1>it was like thick juniper I think junipers Virginiana, probably
<v Speaker 1>oaks and stuff. And so there's so much rain that
<v Speaker 1>even these thin soiled glade, this thin soil glade, which
<v Speaker 1>there's not much elevational change between this and the surrounding
<v Speaker 1>landscape like there was on the granite knobs or the
<v Speaker 1>nice knobs, the g N e I s s metamorphous
<v Speaker 1>granite knobs like we saw in the Atlanta region. This
<v Speaker 1>is in northeast Alabama. That even these glades would would
<v Speaker 1>slowly eventually not actually not even that slowly, they would
<v Speaker 1>they would just get smothered. We'd just get too dense.
<v Speaker 1>The plant life will get too dense, and all these
<v Speaker 1>cool glade endemics, these things that don't get that tall,
<v Speaker 1>that can thrive in thin soiled areas, would eventually get
<v Speaker 1>choked out. And shaded out by juniper and oaks, and
<v Speaker 1>so thus the importance of fire. You know what I
<v Speaker 1>was getting at. Fire is so important in these East
<v Speaker 1>Coast habitats, and it was likely practiced for thousands of years.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, we know it was. It was It likely
<v Speaker 1>was one of the main ways that tick populations and
<v Speaker 1>sugar populations were kept down because not only are you
<v Speaker 1>incinerating the ticks and the chiggers, you're burning up the
<v Speaker 1>duff that they need to help retain the humidity when
<v Speaker 1>they're you know, overwintering or going into the nym stage
<v Speaker 1>and the soil, so you burn away all that duff,
<v Speaker 1>you burn a ray, all that schmutz. You know, the
<v Speaker 1>fire was so important. I think it was like some
<v Speaker 1>of these habitats is like one to three year intervals.
<v Speaker 1>Like Lily, my friend that Florida Native Plant Society talks
<v Speaker 1>about how well you know, the the fire down there,
<v Speaker 1>it was like a one to three year interval. And
<v Speaker 1>again fire suppression, which is basically what you've had since
<v Speaker 1>the you know, the euro settlers came in since the
<v Speaker 1>I don't want to say honky menace, but you know
<v Speaker 1>what I mean, came in because it's a cultural thing.
<v Speaker 1>It's not about race. It's a cultural thing. It's you know,
<v Speaker 1>it is the part of the death cult or not.
<v Speaker 1>But ever since they came in and you know, wiped
<v Speaker 1>out many of the natives or pushed them out and
<v Speaker 1>then started taking over the land and not knowing how
<v Speaker 1>to manage it, and so they of course suppressed fire
<v Speaker 1>because fire is bad generally. It's what they think or
<v Speaker 1>what the what the you know, what the the accepted
<v Speaker 1>thinking was of the day. And so you have two
<v Speaker 1>hundred years of fire suppression and you've got you know,
<v Speaker 1>these habitats are just totally altered for the worse for wildlife,
<v Speaker 1>for people, uh not for tics or chiggers. It's much
<v Speaker 1>It's great for tics and jiggers because it helps, you know,
<v Speaker 1>now they can retur and all this humidity they've got,
<v Speaker 1>all this extra veg dead veg, et cetera. That's great
<v Speaker 1>for creating a little humid microclimate. You burn that away.
<v Speaker 1>Not only do you make it easier for new plants
<v Speaker 1>to come up and you enrich the soil, you also
<v Speaker 1>remove the stuff that the takes and sigers need to thrive.
<v Speaker 1>As well as incinerating takes and sugars, and you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's it's kind of what resets the scoreboard, what resets
<v Speaker 1>the canvas for everything else to you know, creates a
<v Speaker 1>blank canvas for everything else to go to grow. And
<v Speaker 1>so that's what Kyle's been doing. He showed me this,
<v Speaker 1>this land they purchased for the leafy prairie clover, which
<v Speaker 1>is Dlia foliosa. Delia is a big genus, plenty of
<v Speaker 1>species in the genus Dahlia. We get a shif ton
<v Speaker 1>in Texas. Great genus, really cool. It's in the pea
<v Speaker 1>family Fabasi, in the subfamily the p subfamily, known for
<v Speaker 1>their p flower morphology faboidy. And so he showed me
<v Speaker 1>this habitat where they were burning, and he, you know,
<v Speaker 1>he said, when we first got this habitat, it was
<v Speaker 1>choked out. And now we've been burning and this endangered
<v Speaker 1>plant is now popping up everywhere, like the seeds that
<v Speaker 1>were probably in the soil forever are now able to germinate.
<v Speaker 1>You know. That's and that's what he kept telling us about,
<v Speaker 1>was that the seed bank is able to now come up.
<v Speaker 1>So burning has been so good for this landscape. And
<v Speaker 1>it's not like out west where you get these Santa
<v Speaker 1>Ana winds and it's so dry it doesn't rain for
<v Speaker 1>six months, like southern California. Of course, Mediterranean climate dry summers,
<v Speaker 1>fire is inevitable, but it can also be much more
<v Speaker 1>disastrous because it doesn't rain for six months, especially if
<v Speaker 1>you've had a century of fire suppression and the fuel
<v Speaker 1>load is built up east coast, it's more humid, it
<v Speaker 1>rains more often. It can be hard to keep a
<v Speaker 1>fire going, all right. And this is the same thing
<v Speaker 1>that you know. I remember growing up hearing about the prairies.
<v Speaker 1>My mom would tell me how the natives would burn
<v Speaker 1>the prairies. I couldn't understand, but once you've been to
<v Speaker 1>a prairie you could see why. Again they've you know,
<v Speaker 1>all that veg starts to pile up after a year.
<v Speaker 1>You burn it, you reinvigorate the soil, burn away the
<v Speaker 1>ticks and the chiggers, get it going again. So that
<v Speaker 1>was something that I kept thinking about everywhere we went,
<v Speaker 1>and we would drive by forests that were just choked
<v Speaker 1>out and smothered, and not just with invasives, but with
<v Speaker 1>natives too, I mean just really dense forests, Like the
<v Speaker 1>burning is so important there. I want to have a
<v Speaker 1>burn day in Chicago. You know, we need some we
<v Speaker 1>need some goth teen arsonists to set fire to the
<v Speaker 1>forest preserves in Chicago, you know, like a late summer,
<v Speaker 1>late fall day or something. Kill all the buckthorn we
<v Speaker 1>might have. You know, where was it Chiller Woods on
<v Speaker 1>the Northwest Side. I always talking about, maybe have like
<v Speaker 1>a buckthorn clearing party, you know, get a cooler full
<v Speaker 1>of na beers, a couple of stogies, you know, maybe
<v Speaker 1>accidentally light the woods on fire. I don't know. You know,
<v Speaker 1>Chicago's not ready for that yet. They're not ready for
<v Speaker 1>prescribed burns right now, like good old Jerry Wilhelm does
<v Speaker 1>in his yard, author of the floor of the Chicago area,
<v Speaker 1>burns his suburban yard in Glen View or glenn Allen,
<v Speaker 1>wherever the hell he lives. I don't know. God, that
<v Speaker 1>guy's yard is amazing too. Oh what an o G.
<v Speaker 1>I saw him at the uh what was the thing
<v Speaker 1>I went to in February, the Wild Things conference? That
<v Speaker 1>was fun. That was a nice time. I saw him there.
<v Speaker 1>It was cool to shoot the shit and say hi
<v Speaker 1>to him. But that guy lives in a fucking man.
<v Speaker 1>That guy lives in like the suburbs and he still burns.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, I don't know how he worked it
<v Speaker 1>out with the fire department, but they just I guess
<v Speaker 1>they're cool with it now. He probably had some explaining
<v Speaker 1>to do for the first three or four years, you know,
<v Speaker 1>but just again, just by being polite and informative and kind,
<v Speaker 1>he was able to get it going. But burning in
<v Speaker 1>these eastern habitats is so important, man, so important. The
<v Speaker 1>ticks alone would be reason for me to just want
<v Speaker 1>to light everything up. Anyways, Also want to give a
<v Speaker 1>shout out to grimmy alevi gotta, which is a little
<v Speaker 1>it's like a bearded moss. It saw another it's in
<v Speaker 1>the family grimy Ac. I saw other species of Grimea
<v Speaker 1>actually in West Texas, and a grown with peoti and Aerocarpus,
<v Speaker 1>the living rock cactus. But this was a that was
<v Speaker 1>a much hairer, more whitish, more drought adapted form of Grimea,
<v Speaker 1>a little tiny fucking moss. But this was grime olevia gotta.
<v Speaker 1>And this is what's growing on many of these, uh
<v Speaker 1>these granite knobs in the Atlanta area. So anyway, after that,
<v Speaker 1>we went, uh we went west through northwest Georgia, for
<v Speaker 1>towards the Cusa Prairie, and it was started. It was
<v Speaker 1>about the damn thunderstorm on us, black clouds on the horizon,
<v Speaker 1>but we still decided to do it. And that started
<v Speaker 1>getting really cool. Because I love prairies. I didn't expect
<v Speaker 1>to see Stilpiu and terrabinthinaceum there. The prairie doc, the
<v Speaker 1>same prairie doc you get in the Chicago area, which
<v Speaker 1>I love so much, can live a century. It's in
<v Speaker 1>the sunflower family, gets you know, twelve foot tall inflorescences,
<v Speaker 1>flower spikes, and then has leaves that can be upwards
<v Speaker 1>of three feet long in some cases. It looks like
<v Speaker 1>a dam tropical plant forms a massive route that can
<v Speaker 1>shoot down thirty forty feet in some cases, emblematic of
<v Speaker 1>the prairies of the Midwest, and here it was growing
<v Speaker 1>in northwest Georgia. So that was fucking wonderful to see
<v Speaker 1>Critagis pruinosa get into the genus Critagus there, which I get.
<v Speaker 1>You know, we get that in Texas too, but I don't.
<v Speaker 1>I can't remember if I'm that familiar with any out west,
<v Speaker 1>like in California. I'm sure they're there, but I just
<v Speaker 1>never really paid attention to them. Low nisra some perverance
<v Speaker 1>right native red flowered honeysuckle obviously hummingbird pollinated. Got kind
<v Speaker 1>of a white colored ab axial that is underside to
<v Speaker 1>the leaf ilex lounge apes. Saw some baptizia there. You know,
<v Speaker 1>you're going through like pine plantation to get to this
<v Speaker 1>prairie remnant. This that's well managed, that's burned and that
<v Speaker 1>it's you know, well taken care of. But but god,
<v Speaker 1>it's just it's pine plantation everywhere. It's the native pine.
<v Speaker 1>Was it was it the loblollie or I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I don't have much interest in the pine plantations. But
<v Speaker 1>but you eventually make this little prairie outcropping. And I
<v Speaker 1>was really excited to see Marshallia. There's a species of Marshallia.
<v Speaker 1>It's Marshallia MOREI. I think it should be blooming now.
<v Speaker 1>It wasn't blooming when I was out there, but we
<v Speaker 1>saw Marshallia abbovada. These are members of the sunflower family
<v Speaker 1>of ast Raci that have flowers in floresce a flower
<v Speaker 1>head that looks like it's like it's an onion flower.
<v Speaker 1>Really cool. We think we get one or two in Texas,
<v Speaker 1>but it's a cool genus. Most of the diversity is
<v Speaker 1>in the east. Something I saw before we got to
<v Speaker 1>the prairie that I was stoked to see was the
<v Speaker 1>asarum the which is the genus of wild ginger. It's
<v Speaker 1>in the Aristolochiac family to pipe vine family, which I'm
<v Speaker 1>sure from me rant them out before toxic leaves on
<v Speaker 1>Aristolochia aristolochic acid host plant for many cool butterflies, including
<v Speaker 1>the black swallow tail. Crazy ass flowers that trap insects,
<v Speaker 1>that trapped flies pollinated by flies and temporarily trap them,
<v Speaker 1>and they've got a Gyno. The flowers of pipe vines
<v Speaker 1>have have what's called a gynostamium, which is a column
<v Speaker 1>that contains both It's a column on the inside of
<v Speaker 1>the flower that contains both the anthers and the stigma,
<v Speaker 1>all right, kind of similar to what an orchid does.
<v Speaker 1>He's got a column that's got the you know, anther
<v Speaker 1>on it, and the case of orchids, most orchids only
<v Speaker 1>have one anther and the stigma. So it's got this
<v Speaker 1>this this structure. But in Aristolochia, it's uh, they're protogenists,
<v Speaker 1>so the flower is female first, and then after that
<v Speaker 1>goes into the male face, and that's to avoid fucking itself,
<v Speaker 1>to avoid self pollinating, to ensure better genetic outcrossing. And
<v Speaker 1>the female part the stigma is up top of this column,
<v Speaker 1>and then the anthers are on the sides. And that's
<v Speaker 1>the same thing that was going on with the genus Asarum.
<v Speaker 1>The wild gingers again no relation to ginger at all.
<v Speaker 1>Ginger is a monocot, Aristolochia is not. Aristolochia is one
<v Speaker 1>of the more early branching angiosperm lineages. It's technically not
<v Speaker 1>a udikot either. But what was the genus that they
<v Speaker 1>were calling. They were calling this something else. I think.
<v Speaker 1>I think Weekly's Flora treats it something I don't know. Offense,
<v Speaker 1>he makes up all, he makes up a bunch of stuff.
<v Speaker 1>He'd like. They got their own taxonomy. It doesn't make
<v Speaker 1>it up, but they make their They make their own taxonomy.
<v Speaker 1>It doesn't always jibe well with angiosperm alogeny group. And
<v Speaker 1>it begins with the H hexas stylist. That's it. Yeah, okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>I guess I don't know man, so I naturalists and
<v Speaker 1>APG don't recognize hexas style hexas Stylus is being different,
<v Speaker 1>but weekly does hexas stylus is different anyway, If they're
<v Speaker 1>basically they're in the same family, they're closely related Asarum,
<v Speaker 1>as a ar Um and hexas stylists. And why are
<v Speaker 1>these cool? Why is this worth memorizing the name, remembering
<v Speaker 1>this genus name this this you know, wopping six letter
<v Speaker 1>genus name asorum or in the case of hexas stylists,
<v Speaker 1>nine letters. Because they've got this cool pollination biology also
<v Speaker 1>utilizing flies to pollinate them, and they create these tiny
<v Speaker 1>little flowers that are at the base, they're under the leaves,
<v Speaker 1>all right, really easy to miss. You see this thing
<v Speaker 1>as the leaves kind of look like an aeroid in
<v Speaker 1>some cases. And then these tiny flowers are blooming on
<v Speaker 1>the forest floor, all right, three pedaled flowers, which is
<v Speaker 1>another trait protogeny being female first, having a flower a
<v Speaker 1>perfect flower that's female first. And also you know, a
<v Speaker 1>flower in numerals of three, which you would normally think
<v Speaker 1>would be a monocop But again, this is the the
<v Speaker 1>early branching lineage that is in the family Aristolochiace aristolochiac
<v Speaker 1>is in the order piper Ales. It's one of the Magnoliads.
<v Speaker 1>All right, that's the kind of the the I guess
<v Speaker 1>said informal clade, the Magnolias. Not really, it's not an angiosperm.
<v Speaker 1>Phylogeny poster four orders Canilelees, piper alesh Loreles, and magnoli Alies.
<v Speaker 1>Aristolochiace is in piper Ales along with piper the genus piper, Pepperomia,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera. So anyway, yeah, so it's it's got three petals,
<v Speaker 1>which again is weird. You normally see three petals a
<v Speaker 1>three maras flower and think it would think that's a
<v Speaker 1>you know, it's a trait you normally see monocots. But again,
<v Speaker 1>the magnolias, it's a little different. They're an earlier branching.
<v Speaker 1>They branched this lineage branched off the Anglo spring family tree,
<v Speaker 1>prior to the monocots where it's thought to have. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so this is a this is a really cool genus.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's how many species we got in it. They're
<v Speaker 1>all fly pollinated. They're uh, let's look this up, how
<v Speaker 1>many they're all fly pollinated. So far as I know,
<v Speaker 1>they've got these kind of maroonish colors to the flowers
<v Speaker 1>growing shady woodlands like this was growing in the understory
<v Speaker 1>of tulip poplars, which are not a poplar leriodendron. There
<v Speaker 1>are another magnolia. They're in the They're related to magnolias.
<v Speaker 1>Some oaks and what else was there? I think sassafras.
<v Speaker 1>That's a sassafras can be damn weedy in this sassafras,
<v Speaker 1>liquid ambar, et cetera. Did you know that liquid ambar?
<v Speaker 1>The sweet coms grow in chiappus and icars man. There's
<v Speaker 1>a saarum in Ah. It's all over the world in
<v Speaker 1>the northern hemisphere, leaves lots of diversity in Asia West coast,
<v Speaker 1>not much in the Central United States like the Rocky Mountains.
<v Speaker 1>I think there's any there, and then a bunch of
<v Speaker 1>the East coast. Supposedly some in Europe too. Goddamn Asarum's everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>Not much in the southern hemisphere. But anyway, Yeah, so
<v Speaker 1>that was that was really cool to see that asarum
<v Speaker 1>arifolium because it looks like a like an aerid arifolium califolium,
<v Speaker 1>which I guess some people call hexas stylus, And in
<v Speaker 1>this same habitat Ozma riiza lunges stylus was going off.
<v Speaker 1>I saw on Ozma riiza species in Chile, you know,
<v Speaker 1>apac Cara family, so leaves looking like a parsley, tiny
<v Speaker 1>white flowers and a compound humble. What's the common name?
<v Speaker 1>What is this? Sweet? Cisely? The fuck does that? Why
<v Speaker 1>is it? What is cisely? Long style sweet root? But uh,
<v Speaker 1>but yeah, this was this was that was abundant, that
<v Speaker 1>was everywhere again, this this shady understory, this woodland. Josh
<v Speaker 1>was going there to get you know, he's a hippie,
<v Speaker 1>so he's got to get it spring water. He only
<v Speaker 1>drinks the spring water. So he went there and did
<v Speaker 1>that and then tolerated me while I ran off into
<v Speaker 1>the bushes looking at plants. God, I got some nice
<v Speaker 1>macro shots that at the asarum wild ginger now relation
<v Speaker 1>to ginger. And then after that we headed out to
<v Speaker 1>Thecusa prairie where we saw you for bea corolatta, which
<v Speaker 1>that is a plant too that you also get. It's
<v Speaker 1>another prairie plant, cool prairie plant. Uh. There was Zizia
<v Speaker 1>aptera out there, another member of apac To Carrott family,
<v Speaker 1>Lithospermum kniscence hori pecoon, which is another great indicator of
<v Speaker 1>thin soil areas in this prairie too. I believe the
<v Speaker 1>limestone was still pretty close to the surface. I saw
<v Speaker 1>Nostok there that looks like green snot that cyanobacterial film.
<v Speaker 1>Anytime you see nostak, you know you got either hardpan
<v Speaker 1>or thin soiled areas. And Comandra umballada was there too,
<v Speaker 1>that weird ass bastard toadflex is. The common name is
<v Speaker 1>it's another hemi parasitic plant, five white petals, a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of flowers are like size of a marble if that.
<v Speaker 1>And it's in Yeah, it's in Santa Leasi, which right there,
<v Speaker 1>and it tells you it's parasitic, full parasite, like obligate parasite,
<v Speaker 1>or partially parasitic, because the whole order Santalales, so far
<v Speaker 1>as I know, and all the families contained therein are
<v Speaker 1>partial or full parasites. And so anyway, speaking of parasites,
<v Speaker 1>Pendicularis canadensis was going off with those those yellow hoods
<v Speaker 1>paintbrush family ooral Bancs, which is not in Santa Leeles,
<v Speaker 1>not in the order Santa Lallies. There was some white
<v Speaker 1>flowered siserankiums. The Siicerenkium diversity can be nuts in North America,
<v Speaker 1>and it's one of another one of those genera where
<v Speaker 1>the differences are so minute that I just I just
<v Speaker 1>don't care, and it drives me nuts because some of
<v Speaker 1>these keys that you look at for these plants, they're
<v Speaker 1>written by somebody in an arbarium who may or may
<v Speaker 1>not know the ecology and the ecological behavior or the
<v Speaker 1>habitat preference of these plants, and so can't you know,
<v Speaker 1>the differences might be more than you would initially assume,
<v Speaker 1>but because they're looking at them in an arbarium, they're
<v Speaker 1>relying on things like, you know, how the seed, what
<v Speaker 1>the placentation of the seed is, and the fruit or
<v Speaker 1>what the you know, these subtle characteristics that are not
<v Speaker 1>really easy to use for identification if you're keying them
<v Speaker 1>out using a flora, and so I kind of lose interest.
<v Speaker 1>They either have to go see the plant and habitat
<v Speaker 1>or see it in an urbarium to get an idea
<v Speaker 1>of the differences between it, the difference between the species
<v Speaker 1>and the same genus that look look very similar. And
<v Speaker 1>then of course you can for some of these you
<v Speaker 1>can assume that they're hybridizing or there might be more
<v Speaker 1>plastic or whatever. So I just in order for me
<v Speaker 1>to care what, you know, how great the species, the
<v Speaker 1>differences between two closely related or closely look alike species
<v Speaker 1>in the same genuses, I have to see. I have
<v Speaker 1>to you know, be able to know the difference between them,
<v Speaker 1>whereas if they just look alike, I'm just like, it's
<v Speaker 1>a cisernkium and that's good enough for me. I just
<v Speaker 1>I'm not one of these people who fixates on these
<v Speaker 1>subtle differences and has to know everything. That's some weird shit,
<v Speaker 1>to be honest with you, right, Like, morphologically, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>And it's just it's so frustrating too, because again, some
<v Speaker 1>of these keys are written by someone who maybe doesn't
<v Speaker 1>get onto the field that much, you know, and it's
<v Speaker 1>just again looking at shitting in an arbarium versus I
<v Speaker 1>would love to write my own flora one day, where
<v Speaker 1>it's like, not flora, but you know, a summation of species,
<v Speaker 1>where it's like the shit you would hear in a
<v Speaker 1>conversation with someone. Well, this is different because it likes
<v Speaker 1>to grow in a wetter habitat and it's like the
<v Speaker 1>more thin, soiled rocky habitat, or you know, they this
<v Speaker 1>thing kind of grows on the west side of this
<v Speaker 1>mountain range. This thing looks grows on the east side.
<v Speaker 1>They look a lot alike, but you could tell the
<v Speaker 1>differences in bomb bomb bomb these different ways, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just to kind of like normal, shoot the shit, casual
<v Speaker 1>summation of species differences. You don't have to rely on,
<v Speaker 1>you know, these subtle ass traits that someone in an
<v Speaker 1>Arberia herbarium who's writing a flora might depend on that
<v Speaker 1>in an ideal world. Okay, that's what I would be doing. Okay,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the time for a break. I want to
<v Speaker 1>tell you about this thing I saw. This is a
<v Speaker 1>sick This is a sick ass thing to do. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>like literally disgusting, but I thought it was pretty funny.
<v Speaker 1>I had to send it to like nine different people
<v Speaker 1>that I'm friends with. I follow this page called regret Maxing,
<v Speaker 1>and he just posts, uh, all this different shit that
<v Speaker 1>he finds on the internet, you know, in the in
<v Speaker 1>the gutter of the Internet. And it was a picture
<v Speaker 1>of some dude urinating into one of those dicing that's
<v Speaker 1>so terrible. Of course, someone like me would laugh at this.
<v Speaker 1>It was in a public bathroom and someone had one
<v Speaker 1>of those dice in you know, those like super amped
<v Speaker 1>up hand dryers that just like blows like if someone's sick,
<v Speaker 1>it just blows shit ever, you know, it blows like
<v Speaker 1>viral particles everywhere. It's like a you know, and fuck Dyson. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I had one of the vacuum cleaners once and a
<v Speaker 1>broke after like a year and a half. But uh,
<v Speaker 1>those dice in hand DRIs and this dude's just pissing
<v Speaker 1>into it. Just aerosol, aerosolizing all the urine, just totally disgusting,
<v Speaker 1>in heinous, but at this but at the same time
<v Speaker 1>kind of funny. It's like, what kind of sick fucking bastard.
<v Speaker 1>Only in the United States, you know, only in the
<v Speaker 1>United States, Only in this in this special country, this
<v Speaker 1>special place in time which someone come up with I
<v Speaker 1>don't know. Oh god, it was so gross, man. So
<v Speaker 1>oh just aerosolizing. Okay, So you got to take time
<v Speaker 1>to laugh in the dystopia in the decline. Okay, So
<v Speaker 1>moving right along, let's talk about the limestone glade we
<v Speaker 1>saw in Alabama. Alabama is so cool, man, It's cutty.
<v Speaker 1>It's like in northeastern Alabama. It's cutty. It's remote. It's
<v Speaker 1>not like, you know, it's not a hotshot area. It's
<v Speaker 1>pretty mellow. We went to a Mennonite bakery there that
<v Speaker 1>felt like, you know, you were living in a pre
<v Speaker 1>inflation United States. Like the prices and all this stuff
<v Speaker 1>was nice, really nice, like really you know, like ten
<v Speaker 1>years ago, you know, and they sold like I bought
<v Speaker 1>like a wooden from my daughter that I found there,
<v Speaker 1>you know, like they had like all it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like the it's like a Mennonite store, like not just
<v Speaker 1>the deli, it's like a Mennonite store. Right. They need
<v Speaker 1>to start selling T shirts. You know, what would a
<v Speaker 1>T shirt that you sell in a Mennonite spot, you'd
<v Speaker 1>be you know, like I like my I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I like my funny hat. No offense to them. I'm
<v Speaker 1>just saying, you know, something you could do like a
<v Speaker 1>I don't know, Mennonite tourism shirts something like that. It
<v Speaker 1>was a great place to be though. It was really nice,
<v Speaker 1>and then of course the the thunderstorms. It was like
<v Speaker 1>overcast and I don't know, it was cool. I was
<v Speaker 1>pretty into pretty into Alabama. But Kyle took us to
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of different glades. Finally got to see the
<v Speaker 1>genus Levinworthia, which is a mustard. It's in the Brassic case.
<v Speaker 1>That was great, so four pedaled sinnapomorphies of the mustard family,
<v Speaker 1>four petals, four sepals, six stamens. Levenworthia is you know,
<v Speaker 1>you get them on glades in Tennessee. They're like a
<v Speaker 1>it's a glade genus. It likes the thin, soiled, rocky areas.
<v Speaker 1>I think we saw what we saw was levinworthy acrassa.
<v Speaker 1>Earlier that day, I had seen one of my favorite
<v Speaker 1>plants in North America, the American smoke tree Cotinus abbervedus.
<v Speaker 1>Of course you'll see smoke trees the genus Catinas planted
<v Speaker 1>in human landscaping often, but it's always the asiatic species
<v Speaker 1>because it's got the red leaves or whatever the shit.
<v Speaker 1>It's not a native. This was really wonderful to see,
<v Speaker 1>and I think it's called the smoke tree because when
<v Speaker 1>it flowers, the flowers are so small, so tiny, that
<v Speaker 1>they kind of look like smoke, and they're on these
<v Speaker 1>panicles like the family anacardiac, the mango sumac and poison
<v Speaker 1>oak family normally gets tiny white flowers on panicles, but
<v Speaker 1>in the American smoke tree, the flowers are so small
<v Speaker 1>and they're so greatly spread out that it kind of
<v Speaker 1>looks like smoke. And this is a plant that comes,
<v Speaker 1>it grows around the Austin area, but it's exceptionally endangered
<v Speaker 1>and rare, and it would I would love to see
<v Speaker 1>it being grown more. If someone could master the art
<v Speaker 1>of growing Cotinus abbervedus the American smoke tree, you'd be
<v Speaker 1>doing us all a favor. And if you're in Texas
<v Speaker 1>and trying to do it, try to find the Texas
<v Speaker 1>populations and collect seed. I think Michael Easton at San
<v Speaker 1>Antonio Botanic Garden was growing. I know he's got one
<v Speaker 1>in his yard in Alpine, but god, it's such a
<v Speaker 1>cool one. I've seen it. I saw a small population
<v Speaker 1>on top of a limestone outcrop that I think Eric
<v Speaker 1>Knight gave me to point for and it was on
<v Speaker 1>some cutty road near Wimberley or something. And probably you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's like most Texas plants, it's a rare plant that
<v Speaker 1>there's like one or two places you could see it
<v Speaker 1>on like a public right of way, and then maybe
<v Speaker 1>there's a huge population and someone's land somewhere, but they're
<v Speaker 1>nuts and they'll shoot it you if you come and
<v Speaker 1>try to see it. Who knows, But in any case,
<v Speaker 1>it's a really cool plant. And where we saw it,
<v Speaker 1>it was growing on a limestone outcropping with a whole
<v Speaker 1>bunch of other cool shit roosts aromatica, which god damn,
<v Speaker 1>the roos Aromatica I'm used to is like a small shrub.
<v Speaker 1>This was a big leaved shrub that grows. I guess
<v Speaker 1>I've just never seen the east the Southeast ecotype before,
<v Speaker 1>but it was really cool to see. And then there
<v Speaker 1>was Poleia what is it, Poleia andromeda the coffee fern,
<v Speaker 1>what's that? What's the common name birds foot fern, which
<v Speaker 1>is in Terra dacey no is Polea atro papurea, which
<v Speaker 1>of course the sporangia, the black spores are on the
<v Speaker 1>underside of these like plastic feeling leaves growing along the margins.
<v Speaker 1>But and it was growing in the shade at this
<v Speaker 1>really cool fucking limestone outcrop you could tell had been
<v Speaker 1>a quarry at one point. And there's fucking poison ivy
<v Speaker 1>where we have to look where you step. There was
<v Speaker 1>a really odds I don't know if it was an
<v Speaker 1>ecotype or what of Delphinium, which it was. Ainett was saying,
<v Speaker 1>it's Delphinium caroliniaum. I looked at every other Delphinium, both
<v Speaker 1>on the Consortium of Herbaria and on I naturalists that
<v Speaker 1>grew in the area, and I couldn't find anything that matched.
<v Speaker 1>It had really thinly. It was really unique. Like first off,
<v Speaker 1>Delfinium caroline ain'tum the lark spurs for the common name.
<v Speaker 1>They got a nectar spur. They got a fucking cool
<v Speaker 1>flower morphology. It's a it's a really cool genus. You
<v Speaker 1>get some out well, you know, they could look like columbine.
<v Speaker 1>Sometimes they're in the same family Ranunculacy. What is that
<v Speaker 1>the buttercup family? Guy said, a stupid common name buttercup?
<v Speaker 1>What is a buttercup? Somebody tell me what the fuck
<v Speaker 1>a buttercup? What is a buttercup? It sounds like some
<v Speaker 1>deranged sexual act. I don't know what a buttercup is anyways,
<v Speaker 1>stupid common name ranunculacy. Okay, many many toxic members, many
<v Speaker 1>medicinal members too, but it's always a fun How cool
<v Speaker 1>is it. What is a yellow finch outside? Fucking cool?
<v Speaker 1>I went outside the other day there was a warbler
<v Speaker 1>in my truck and it took a shit in there.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how I leave my windows open so
<v Speaker 1>it's not hot as balls, because where I live it's
<v Speaker 1>so hot. I went in and there was some kind
<v Speaker 1>of warbler in there, and I said, you got to
<v Speaker 1>get out. He couldn't get out. He didn't know how
<v Speaker 1>to get out. The window was open. He was kept
<v Speaker 1>trying to fly into the fly, you know, into the
<v Speaker 1>windshield on the dash, and then he took a shit
<v Speaker 1>on my dash. I said, you gotta get out. So
<v Speaker 1>I realized the only way I'm gonna let him out
<v Speaker 1>is if I opened the door and just walk away,
<v Speaker 1>which is what I did. And then he finally got
<v Speaker 1>out of there, and then I had to go clean
<v Speaker 1>up as shit. You know, I gotta worry about bird
<v Speaker 1>flu these days when you're hanging out with some of
<v Speaker 1>these passer reins. But this delfinium that was growing, where
<v Speaker 1>where the fuck was this? If you live in Alabama,
<v Speaker 1>you gotta go check this spot out. I don't mind
<v Speaker 1>blowing up a spot because it's in Alabama. And I know,
<v Speaker 1>everybody who lives in Alabama needs shit to do. Anyways,
<v Speaker 1>how good is the acid in Alabama? That's what I
<v Speaker 1>wonder about. Somebody came out to me. God damn it,
<v Speaker 1>I forget his name. He was so nice. Fuck, I'm
<v Speaker 1>so bad at names. If we meet and I forget
<v Speaker 1>your name, you gotta forgive me. Man. I'm got like
<v Speaker 1>nine things in my head at any given time. It anyway,
<v Speaker 1>but he had some acid. He was telling me. He
<v Speaker 1>was like, do you want someone? I'm like, no, I
<v Speaker 1>actually haven't done acid in two years. I'm just always
<v Speaker 1>encouraging able to do it. That's not true. I did
<v Speaker 1>acid last year. Fucking Leo Leo, fucking Chicano hippie. You
<v Speaker 1>got me to microdose at the Boyce Thompson. I was
<v Speaker 1>out there. You give me some ass, I said, fine,
<v Speaker 1>I fucking do it. Micro dos had a wonderful time,
<v Speaker 1>and I was looking at their collection of South American
<v Speaker 1>creosote bushes South American larrea, which I have to say,
<v Speaker 1>there's some wonderful species in the genus Larrea. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>if you live in North America, you just know the
<v Speaker 1>one we got here. Larrea tried and tight. I say, wow,
<v Speaker 1>there's some different, some other interesting species. Anyway. Uh, if
<v Speaker 1>it's off of Union Hill Road east of Woodland Mills, Alabama,
<v Speaker 1>and you got to go check out this spot. It's
<v Speaker 1>a little it's a little quarry carved into the north
<v Speaker 1>side of the road. Go collect some seed of Cotinas
<v Speaker 1>abba vedas. It was flowering two weeks ago. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know how long it takes for the fruits to mature,
<v Speaker 1>probably by fall. But and then you could see this
<v Speaker 1>Delphinium there too, which is supposedly Carolinia aum But how
<v Speaker 1>many different species of Delphinium Carolinia ainum are there? Not
<v Speaker 1>species subspecies? Right? This was a weird one in the
<v Speaker 1>Delphinium caroline aanum. I mean we get the same what
<v Speaker 1>is supposedly the same species in Texas, but it's got
<v Speaker 1>white flowers. You always see them with white flowers. I
<v Speaker 1>refuse to believe that it's Delphinium carolina anum. Somebody's got
<v Speaker 1>to do work on this. Why is somebody not doing
<v Speaker 1>work on this? Split this up for God's sakes. Ha
<v Speaker 1>I saw a bunch of different Delphinium species there. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>look at this, the white the ones in Texas have
<v Speaker 1>white flowers. They're telling me that's not significant. Jesus Christ,
<v Speaker 1>you know Dallas white flower Delphi looks totally different and
<v Speaker 1>a leaf morphology. This is driving me nuts. I hate that.
<v Speaker 1>I hate calling this Delfinium caroliniaanum when there's like, what
<v Speaker 1>is there's probably three different species and it's cluster five
<v Speaker 1>talk of a of a tax on. No one's no
<v Speaker 1>one's doing the work and splitting it up. Same thing
<v Speaker 1>with like Rebecci Aherta. There's a sand species or a
<v Speaker 1>sand endemic eco type that Ken King was at my
<v Speaker 1>house the other day, brought over the floor of North America.
<v Speaker 1>We're trying to look at it and it's one of
<v Speaker 1>those things where it's got these maroon spots on the
<v Speaker 1>on the rays quote normal, Rebecky, I heard it doesn't
<v Speaker 1>have that, and it was just, oh, it's just a different,
<v Speaker 1>different type of Rebeccy, you heard it. It's a different
<v Speaker 1>type because it's a different species. Who wrote the flora? Ha?
<v Speaker 1>I want to find out who and and give them
<v Speaker 1>a stern talking to it. Maybe a spank on there, Fanny. Anyway,
<v Speaker 1>But this spot, I was in love with this spot.
<v Speaker 1>This was really cool. I love these goddamn rocky sites.
<v Speaker 1>And if you see kotainaso vedas there, you know you
<v Speaker 1>got to say wow, because that is a that's a
<v Speaker 1>rare one. I guess it's rare. Kyle had never even
<v Speaker 1>seen the American smoke tree in that county before, So
<v Speaker 1>someone please go there and collect seed. And if you
<v Speaker 1>live in Texas, please collect seed and try to grow
<v Speaker 1>Cotinas alba vedas or send it to us. Me and
<v Speaker 1>James peace right. He's my nursery guy. He's my go
<v Speaker 1>to a nursery guy, all right. He used to work
<v Speaker 1>for another nursery that wanted to grow boogain vias and
<v Speaker 1>other shit, and they fired him because he didn't want
<v Speaker 1>to grow this horticultural atrocity garbage. So anyway, we're gonna
<v Speaker 1>be at This is probably way too late to to
<v Speaker 1>notify you of this, but we're going to be at.
<v Speaker 1>We're going to be at the Cactus Mart tomorrow in Austin,
<v Speaker 1>Texas till one pm, which is at what is that
<v Speaker 1>Live Oat Brewery, And then we're going to the Carnivoro
<v Speaker 1>thing for my friend Drew's carnivorous Plant Nursery at the
<v Speaker 1>Jester King Brewery. You know, for someone who doesn't drink,
<v Speaker 1>I got nine years sober. Now this is a lot
<v Speaker 1>of breweries gonna be it right. I don't know what's
<v Speaker 1>up with this. Hopefully they got Na's. I might smoke
<v Speaker 1>a stoga or something nice. I didn't smoke a fucking cigar.
<v Speaker 1>That's bad. That's bad form. I'll just drink a lot
<v Speaker 1>of green team be run in my mouth. Trying to
<v Speaker 1>loosen people up. You know, it's Texas. Everyone's a little stiff,
<v Speaker 1>and it's you know, the bleak dystopia we're living in now.
<v Speaker 1>Two people are a little bummed too, So a little repressed,
<v Speaker 1>A little depressed not a good concoction. You gotta make
<v Speaker 1>people laugh lit, but you gotta loosen them up, you know,
<v Speaker 1>even if it's just by like letting one rip when
<v Speaker 1>everything's quiet, you know. But uh, anyway, so we'll be
<v Speaker 1>there tomorrow, uh, selling a bunch of plants, including we
<v Speaker 1>will have uh, We're gonna have ari agonam harass a folium,
<v Speaker 1>which is a cool buckwheat from West Texas, nobody grows.
<v Speaker 1>We will have Liatrius carizana, which no one grows. That's
<v Speaker 1>an incredible liatriss fucking wild like wild. Look it up
<v Speaker 1>on an asurist Liatris carries on it c A R
<v Speaker 1>I Z A N A couple cuttings of Mandeville and
<v Speaker 1>New Genosa moth blooming shrub from South Texas. We're gonna
<v Speaker 1>have a bunch of stuff. Salvia darcii right, wonderful smelling,
<v Speaker 1>red flowered sage from the mountains of Nuevo Leone. It's
<v Speaker 1>one of those plants that's only known from one or
<v Speaker 1>two locations, but is becoming more common in cultivations. Jatropha
<v Speaker 1>dioheca variety Graminia, which was seed I collected from. It
<v Speaker 1>was growing sympatric with peyote, with the West Texas population
<v Speaker 1>of peyote. Jatropha dioheka. It's a fucking great plant, really cool,
<v Speaker 1>forms these colonies. Likes full sun, likes getting blasted with
<v Speaker 1>full sun. Can tolerate frost. It's a succulent. They call it.
<v Speaker 1>Leather stem is the common name. I think you can
<v Speaker 1>tolerate temperatures down to like ten or twenty degrees fahrenheit.
<v Speaker 1>But it forms these massive underground colonies. Ormes rather Simzia calva,
<v Speaker 1>another cool member of astraci from the limestone Vernonia Baldwinnie.
<v Speaker 1>I will have a couple ooh, Vernonia Larcinie from Sanderson
<v Speaker 1>with love. Limestone vernonia that doesn't look like any of
<v Speaker 1>the vernonias that you'd see in the East Coast or Midwest.
<v Speaker 1>It's still got those cool magenta, bright ass magenta flowers,
<v Speaker 1>but it's got hairy, white thin leaves because it grows
<v Speaker 1>in limestone deserts Eryngium Levenworth. The i it at sebanger
<v Speaker 1>Hibiscus marchianis Payoti gardens hibiscus. I just like putting payote
<v Speaker 1>gardens on stuff because it gets people interested in it.
<v Speaker 1>This is my this is what I'm trying to do.
<v Speaker 1>This is my inn because a lot of people don't
<v Speaker 1>see how cool these natives are unless you mention a
<v Speaker 1>plant that grow with like payoti that they're already. Everybody
<v Speaker 1>loves peyote, right, My four year old, my five year
<v Speaker 1>old daughter loves peyote. She knows what it is. She's
<v Speaker 1>never had some. But you know, except one of my
<v Speaker 1>friends who is in nac You know, you go to
<v Speaker 1>like there, you go to like a peote meeting. There's
<v Speaker 1>little kids eating medicine, you know, left and right if
<v Speaker 1>they want to, they could stomach the bitter taste, right.
<v Speaker 1>It's just it's it's part of the native culture. It's
<v Speaker 1>a wonderful thing to see. Anyway. I don't want to
<v Speaker 1>get distracted here, but uh, Salvia Gregy, I will have
<v Speaker 1>some of those salvia bleff of fire. James really butchered
<v Speaker 1>the ship out of some of these names. I don't
<v Speaker 1>know how he did it. No offense, James, but you
<v Speaker 1>know you're doing great work, but you got to get
<v Speaker 1>some of the spell some fucking spelling of these names down.
<v Speaker 1>Salvia Pence, the minoities, that's a rare one. Tried to
<v Speaker 1>grow it down here in South Texas. It fucking hated it.
<v Speaker 1>Og Nadia Speciosa. See in South Texas where like a
<v Speaker 1>hundred feet elevation. I think Austin is like a thousand
<v Speaker 1>feet elevation, So it's you know, where's five hour drive south.
<v Speaker 1>But still the differences between some of there's just a
<v Speaker 1>lot of shit. You can grow up there, we can't
<v Speaker 1>grow down here. But anyway, Yeah, so we're gonna have
<v Speaker 1>a bunch of good stuff come out, will be We'll
<v Speaker 1>probably stick around on cact the smart uh, which is
<v Speaker 1>at live O Prairi, which is kind of near the
<v Speaker 1>airport in Austin, will be there until one or two
<v Speaker 1>pm and then uh, we'll be at Carnivoros thing from
<v Speaker 1>like one one or one one or two pm to
<v Speaker 1>five pm. Is this gonna where I gotta call make
<v Speaker 1>sure one is? When is what's what's shutting down? Like
<v Speaker 1>hopefully Carnivoroes opened later, but I'll be selling shirts, books, uh,
<v Speaker 1>maybe some prints, some kill your lawn yard signs all
<v Speaker 1>that shit and uh and plants too, so come check
<v Speaker 1>it out. Okay, So anyway back to Alabama. You know
<v Speaker 1>what was this is another cool thing. There were these
<v Speaker 1>fucking millipedes everywhere everywhere, these really cool millipedes. The subfamily
<v Speaker 1>I think was riiso desmony r H Y s O
<v Speaker 1>d E s M I n a E. They look
<v Speaker 1>like a millipede that I one of these armored fucking
<v Speaker 1>millipedes that I saw in Ecuador. Probably close related, well
<v Speaker 1>maybe not, I don't know, but either ways, they they
<v Speaker 1>fluoresce under UV light, so you get like a black
<v Speaker 1>light flashlight, and these things just glow hot, almost as
<v Speaker 1>hot as scorpions, which we also saw it, and even
<v Speaker 1>though there was an East Coast scorpion, you know, living
<v Speaker 1>on this glade habitat, at the spot where Kyle's got
<v Speaker 1>Delia foliosa, the leafy prairie clover spot, we lifted up
<v Speaker 1>a rock and there was a cool scorpion under their
<v Speaker 1>beautiful fat little bastard too, not like the little beige
<v Speaker 1>ones that we get, you know where I live, and
<v Speaker 1>you know, the New World scorpions are all pretty harmless
<v Speaker 1>so far as I know, not like the ones that
<v Speaker 1>can kill you from you know, the Arabian Peninsula or
<v Speaker 1>from northeastern Africa, et cetera, or South Africa. Remember when
<v Speaker 1>I was in South Africa, we saw some scorpions and
<v Speaker 1>size of hamburgers down there. But this is ve Jovis Carolinianus. God,
<v Speaker 1>it's a beautiful I want at Fluoresce's too. Ah. The
<v Speaker 1>southern unstriped scorpion uns. What does it mean to be unstriped?
<v Speaker 1>Wouldn't it be non striped? Who? Who? Where's the common
<v Speaker 1>name it is? Where does it come from? Why is
<v Speaker 1>it not? Why is it unstriped versus non striped? Is
<v Speaker 1>there a non striped it? Never? Never mind? Never mind.
<v Speaker 1>This was in Moulton County, Alabama. Goddamn Alabama's cool man.
<v Speaker 1>You know the only time I've been through Alabama before
<v Speaker 1>was riding a freight train to Birmingham from New Orleans
<v Speaker 1>circa two thousand and four or five. Then I got
<v Speaker 1>off and had pie in a little diner, the type
<v Speaker 1>of little diner you can't find anymore in these these
<v Speaker 1>these trying times. They've all been shuttered or turned into
<v Speaker 1>like a fucking bootique coffee roostery. But it was a
<v Speaker 1>little diner on the outskirts of Birmingham, and I had
<v Speaker 1>pie there in a black neighborhood, a cool area, a
<v Speaker 1>little cool area, a little cool rost belt area of
<v Speaker 1>a lot of you know, a lot of wonderful electric
<v Speaker 1>blues musicians that I listened to, you know from back
<v Speaker 1>in like sixties seventies electric blues, sixties electric blues actually
<v Speaker 1>uh from uh from Alabama anyway, but uh. But yeah,
<v Speaker 1>so that was that was fucking wonderful to see a
<v Speaker 1>little scorpion there. But on this glade habitat, what was cool?
<v Speaker 1>This this habitat that Kyle has, there's like giant boulders
<v Speaker 1>of carstick limestone everywhere, like it's on a slope. It's
<v Speaker 1>on a hill, and so we were like, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like four foot off the ground, these like flattened boulders.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, really, it's just sedimentary rock where the Betting plane,
<v Speaker 1>you know, the is still there and the rock has
<v Speaker 1>eroded and weathered. But goddamn, it was cool. I mean
<v Speaker 1>you're like you have to jump over these large crags,
<v Speaker 1>these cracks in the ground, and there's you know, timber
<v Speaker 1>rattlesnakes that live there. They weren't out that day. I
<v Speaker 1>would have loved to see one, but yeah, it was
<v Speaker 1>a really cool, uh, really cool spot. I would love
<v Speaker 1>to spend more time there someday again, if I can
<v Speaker 1>take my kid. I just hate being away from her.
<v Speaker 1>Once I can take her, gotta take her out of school.
<v Speaker 1>You know what to teach these kids in school? Anyway?
<v Speaker 1>You know what are they teaching these kids? I don't
<v Speaker 1>She'll learn more with me anyway. I could say she's sick.
<v Speaker 1>I'll say she's got mono or something, you know, drag
<v Speaker 1>out with me before she hates me when she's twelve
<v Speaker 1>or fourteen or fifth however old. Also at the spot
<v Speaker 1>was Sylphium pinnat of Tiffitum pinatiffitum. We also saw Sylphiu morii,
<v Speaker 1>which is Sylphium is the genus coloaqually known as rosen weed.
<v Speaker 1>Sylphium Terrabentanaceum, which I've ranted about is in uh is
<v Speaker 1>known as prairie doct These are members of the sunflower family,
<v Speaker 1>big genus in the midwest and southeast of North America.
<v Speaker 1>Some of them can live for a long time, very
<v Speaker 1>cool leaves, very cool flower late flowers like so many
<v Speaker 1>members of Astra I see late summer flowers Selfiu and
<v Speaker 1>Pa pintifidum, you know, pinnate leaves or pinatifid leaves, Selphia
<v Speaker 1>and moriy I. I was blown away at how woolly
<v Speaker 1>Sylphia and Mori. I was. I've seen I've seen it
<v Speaker 1>in Kyle's videos before at you know, the Native Habitat
<v Speaker 1>Project page, but uh, you know, to see it up close,
<v Speaker 1>I mean, goddamn, the hair. I mean this this thing
<v Speaker 1>where I saw it was growing kind of in the
<v Speaker 1>shade of the margin of a woodland. But but I
<v Speaker 1>guess it's more of a glade species. And you would
<v Speaker 1>think that seeing all the hairs again, because hairs confer drought. Uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, drought evolution with drought drought adaptation. Unless you're
<v Speaker 1>in the Parama of Costa Rica, hairs can confer adaptation
<v Speaker 1>to UV exposure and freezing night temperatures. But anyway, so
<v Speaker 1>Kyle was really just taking us around, showing us some
<v Speaker 1>of the habitats he's been working on, these different spots.
<v Speaker 1>He took us to like four or five different spots,
<v Speaker 1>showed us areas where stuff is burned. It was uh,
<v Speaker 1>he gave us like our own guided field trip. It
<v Speaker 1>was awesome. It was so cool to see. But again,
<v Speaker 1>I think, you know, Kyle loves grasslands and glades. I
<v Speaker 1>love grasslands and glades, and that's primarily what we were
<v Speaker 1>focusing on, not so much on woodlands. Pygnathomum tenuifolium mountain
<v Speaker 1>mint Pynathemum, the genus of mountain mint, lamey ac Oregano family,
<v Speaker 1>sage family Picnathomum's got a lot of diversity in the
<v Speaker 1>east and southeast. Probably a lot of cool ones in
<v Speaker 1>Florida too. In fact, I remember I think Lily telling
<v Speaker 1>me about that. Yeah, damn it, Sophia and Moria. It
<v Speaker 1>looks like the almost looks like a plant someone would
<v Speaker 1>call lambsier, which again I don't common name, but it
<v Speaker 1>just tells you how whooly it is. Sylphia and Morie
<v Speaker 1>and the basil rosetta leaves was just getting started, but
<v Speaker 1>I guess I can get it up, you know, eight
<v Speaker 1>or nine feet tall. So if you live in Alabama,
<v Speaker 1>that's definitely one to be growing. Sylphia and MOREI Sylphium pentitifitum.
<v Speaker 1>All the sylphiums, they're all dope. They're all cool, Silphium
<v Speaker 1>terrabin the nacium especially they. I asked Kyle too, It's like,
<v Speaker 1>who is growing? Do you guys have like a native
<v Speaker 1>nursery here, like a native wholesale nursery that you can get,
<v Speaker 1>you know, plants from. He had a bunch of cool
<v Speaker 1>stuff growing in his yard too, Croton, Alabama, and says,
<v Speaker 1>fuck man, that thing's incredible. Disjunk population in Texas, I
<v Speaker 1>guess too. Really cool leaves like silvery leaves with like uh,
<v Speaker 1>I think there was a rusty color as well. That
<v Speaker 1>is a fucking stunner of a plant. But I just
<v Speaker 1>wish that there was. If you've thought about starting a
<v Speaker 1>nurse free do it if you've got a bank roll
<v Speaker 1>up by selling drugs, or I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding,
<v Speaker 1>you got a bank roll up by knocking over a brinkstruck.
<v Speaker 1>I'm just kidding. If you gotta whatever you gotta do
<v Speaker 1>to bankroll a native plant nursery, do it, or just
<v Speaker 1>backyard growers, like so many native plant nursery start with
<v Speaker 1>just backyard growers. But just grow the shit out of
<v Speaker 1>all this stuff. Figure out what it takes to crack
<v Speaker 1>the coat to make you know, the soil mix that
<v Speaker 1>the species in your area need, whatever the sun exposure,
<v Speaker 1>et cetera, what it takes to get some of them
<v Speaker 1>to germinate. You know, where I am in South Texas,
<v Speaker 1>it just takes cooler temperatures. A lot of stuff just
<v Speaker 1>pops when it temperatures drop into like sixties, you know,
<v Speaker 1>like the sixty degree, fifty degree even fifty degree mark,
<v Speaker 1>like Prunus texana, Thymaphola tefro luca. Those are all rare
<v Speaker 1>plants that people need to be growing. They germinate. You
<v Speaker 1>sow the seeds in April, they won't come up till November.
<v Speaker 1>But just figure out what it takes. Figure out the
<v Speaker 1>rare plants in the area, figure out what's cool and
<v Speaker 1>grow ton of them and then just politely push them off.
<v Speaker 1>And people that need to kill the fucking loss. It's
<v Speaker 1>not that hard. Do it. It's worth it, or just planting,
<v Speaker 1>you know, get involved with your city, find places where
<v Speaker 1>they want to schools want to plant native plant gardens.
<v Speaker 1>Sometimes they're open to it. But get this stuff out
<v Speaker 1>there because it needs to be being grown and we
<v Speaker 1>need way less bogain villas and boxwoods and all this
<v Speaker 1>other shit, you know, berberous, Thunbergie. It's a big East
<v Speaker 1>Coast horticultural atrocity. But I ask kind of I'm like,
<v Speaker 1>who's growing this stuff? Anybody's like, no, man, right, there's not.
<v Speaker 1>Not every place has a Pizzo wholesale nursery. Pizzo Illinois's
<v Speaker 1>lucky because he got Jack Pizzo there. That's a fucking operation. Man.
<v Speaker 1>What was the video I did on Pizzo owner? I forget,
<v Speaker 1>but if you got a chance to watch it, there's
<v Speaker 1>a video on YouTube from shit what was it? Twenty
<v Speaker 1>twenty three? I think though, God, man, what a fucking
<v Speaker 1>dope nursery. Every if every state had a Pizzole wholesale
<v Speaker 1>nursery or equivalent. They grow the healthiest plants, and they
<v Speaker 1>grow them in these plugs. I don't think they I
<v Speaker 1>think their wholesale only. But I'm sure if you showed
<v Speaker 1>up and begged with like a wa of cash, maybe
<v Speaker 1>they'd throw you a flat of like Ilamna iliamna ramota
<v Speaker 1>or something. But god, man, you know, or like big bluestem.
<v Speaker 1>But their plugs look so good, and if you could,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but we need one of those in Texas.
<v Speaker 1>You need one in Alabama. You need one in Florida,
<v Speaker 1>where there's so many endangered and rare plants that need
<v Speaker 1>to be grown, and where fire suppression has been practiced
<v Speaker 1>for so long and the cult of the lawn is
<v Speaker 1>still strong, right, you need someone growing this stuff. And uh,
<v Speaker 1>you know, but I think that's the thing any native
<v Speaker 1>plant nursery struggles with is that people aren't ready for
<v Speaker 1>it yet. You know, the mashes aren't. They still want
<v Speaker 1>the horticultural shit, the garbage whatever. But then if you
<v Speaker 1>could convince like home depot, I hate going to home depot.
<v Speaker 1>My friend Charlie though, is always he's like, man, if
<v Speaker 1>you could get the thing to do is get the
<v Speaker 1>box stores selling native plants. Right. I don't like Home Depot.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not going to go there. When I go there,
<v Speaker 1>I fucking hate going there. I don't like what they
<v Speaker 1>stand for. I don't you know whatever. But but if
<v Speaker 1>you have them growing this stuff, it's just a strategy.
<v Speaker 1>Think like a criminal, right, an ethical criminal. It's just
<v Speaker 1>a strategy. You don't need to endorse the store. You
<v Speaker 1>just want them to sell native plants. You end up
<v Speaker 1>seeing less shit, right, less of the horticultural garbage that
<v Speaker 1>then ends up invading the what few little crumbs of
<v Speaker 1>native habitat remain. Right. I would love it if like
<v Speaker 1>Low's and Home Depots sell sold native plants. To do that,
<v Speaker 1>they need, you need, you got to create the culture
<v Speaker 1>for you. You need to get more people stoked on it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, which is like what Kyle's doing and a
<v Speaker 1>bunch of other people are doing, so, you know, like
<v Speaker 1>why could that stuff not be? I mean in California
<v Speaker 1>and other places you get you know, they still have
<v Speaker 1>the depressing strip malls and you know, parking lots that
<v Speaker 1>Americans love so much, and fast food, but the lands,
<v Speaker 1>the landscaping's native. I went through a fucking Starbucks in
<v Speaker 1>a Oh my god, you went to the Starbucks. Jesus,
<v Speaker 1>I went to a Starbucks in Tucson and they had
<v Speaker 1>like euphobia anti syphilitica, a cool West Texas native plant,
<v Speaker 1>and some of the what is the leafless milk weed
<v Speaker 1>out there, the stem milk weed a scleepiest there's like
<v Speaker 1>two species in the Mohave Desert. Anyway, they had that
<v Speaker 1>growing in the strip mall landscaping. I was blown away.
<v Speaker 1>It was like, this is so fucking cool. These are
<v Speaker 1>rare plants that not rare, but cool and unique plants
<v Speaker 1>that I'm always excited to see when I see them
<v Speaker 1>in habitat and they're growing here in a bleak strip mall.
<v Speaker 1>If every bleak strip mall in the United States, and
<v Speaker 1>it's a lot of bleak strip malls, had cool native
<v Speaker 1>plants in it, maybe the suckage would decline a tiny bit.
<v Speaker 1>You know, you'd have more cool insects, more cool birds.
<v Speaker 1>You're creating, you know, life for life, the life that
<v Speaker 1>other life needs to thrive instead of shipped like crape
<v Speaker 1>myrtles that evolved, you know, six thousand miles away and
<v Speaker 1>have no ecological relevance whatsoever in North America anyway. Nothing
<v Speaker 1>like that exists in Alabama. So it's up to you,
<v Speaker 1>the backyard grower, right to grow this stuff. Right. Not
<v Speaker 1>every place can have a pizzol wholesale native plant nursery anyway,
<v Speaker 1>Moving right along, what other plants did we see from
<v Speaker 1>this area? Oh? Yeah, the glade area we saw so
<v Speaker 1>that there's that Levinworthia. This was on some ladies land.
<v Speaker 1>Kyle just approached the landowner. She was really cool and
<v Speaker 1>he told her what she's got and kind of how
<v Speaker 1>to protect it and how to manage it whatever. So
<v Speaker 1>that was where the Levinworthia was, the Levenworthia crassa. There
<v Speaker 1>was a euphobia spat the a lot of there which
<v Speaker 1>is not rare. But there was Mono nuria. Was that
<v Speaker 1>what that was? Where the fuck? Where am I now? Yeah?
<v Speaker 1>Mono Nuria, Pachula triodanis portfolio. That's companiolac purple flowers, seed them, pulchellum,
<v Speaker 1>A bunch of good stuff there, A lot of really
<v Speaker 1>cool stuff, and I guess there was. He showed us
<v Speaker 1>a spot where he found Solidago portery, which is a
<v Speaker 1>rare golden rad that also needs to be grown a lot.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's known from like only a handful of sites.
<v Speaker 1>It's it's pretty rare, but he had he had found
<v Speaker 1>where it was a spot where it was growing on
<v Speaker 1>the margin of a woodland. All this stuff again suffering
<v Speaker 1>due to fire suppression. I don't know if the solid
<v Speaker 1>dogo was necessarily but anything to get out competed, you
<v Speaker 1>know it. It does a plant in Ramnassy, the buckdorn
<v Speaker 1>family that I had never seen before, Berucimia scand ins.
<v Speaker 1>It looks the leaves look like Karwinskia, which is a
<v Speaker 1>buckthorn from the Payota gardens down here in South Texas.
<v Speaker 1>Grows on down into all the way to Wahaca, Mexico.
<v Speaker 1>Very toxic leaves, but cool flowers. Apparently it produces extra
<v Speaker 1>floral nectaries of some kind, because I saw a bunch
<v Speaker 1>of bees just mobbing it once in Pueblo in Tewakan
<v Speaker 1>Valley bioos fere reserved even though it wasn't flowering. They
<v Speaker 1>we're getting something off of it. It's got some glands
<v Speaker 1>on it or something. I don't know, but the leaves
<v Speaker 1>look like that like karwinski It was Bercimia scandons, and
<v Speaker 1>it grows kind of like a vine. It's one of
<v Speaker 1>those plants you can tell what family it is just
<v Speaker 1>by the way the leaves look. That was a really
<v Speaker 1>interesting thing. That was a new species for me. But
<v Speaker 1>uh but yeah, so this this little glade area was
<v Speaker 1>pretty unique. Man afraid of Virginica, which is you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's like a succulent perennial a gave. It's somebody was
<v Speaker 1>trying to lump it in with the genus of Gave
<v Speaker 1>at one point, but man afraid of Virginica a false
<v Speaker 1>aloe they call it because it kind of looks like
<v Speaker 1>gallo But it's just again, just the succulent monocut Camasia ciloides,
<v Speaker 1>which no botanically, you know, it's an edible plant. Surely
<v Speaker 1>indigenous people were were farming this wild farming it, you know,
<v Speaker 1>just spreading seeds around. It's another relative of a gave,
<v Speaker 1>purple flowers when it blooms. What is the common name,
<v Speaker 1>Oh yeah, wild camas, wild hyacinth, or atlantic camus. But
<v Speaker 1>there was a spot where we saw that coming up
<v Speaker 1>that had just been flooded. All the leaves were kind
<v Speaker 1>of knocked over again. The rainfall here just wild lots
<v Speaker 1>of rain. Corcus niagra Carrick's gray i Snicola odorata, Amsnia
<v Speaker 1>taberne montana. It's another moth pollinated like so many of
<v Speaker 1>them are Fasbium chapmani. I what was this? I forget
<v Speaker 1>what this is. That's a carrot of some kind, obviously
<v Speaker 1>apac Where the fuck was it? Where do I see
<v Speaker 1>this thing? I can't remember where I was? But but yeah,
<v Speaker 1>out there's lots of good stuff, lots of good stuff.
<v Speaker 1>This this wasn't on the glade now, but this is
<v Speaker 1>so oh. Dlia gettingeri gattinger gatten geri, so same genus
<v Speaker 1>as the leafy prairie clover. But this thing had an
<v Speaker 1>ecology where it had been it was taken to you know,
<v Speaker 1>you can basically walk on it. It's got really cool flowers.
<v Speaker 1>It's a dahlia again, really species rich genus in the
<v Speaker 1>pea family. But and this has like hot, hot, pinkish
<v Speaker 1>magenta inflorescences. All the dahlias are so cool, right, closely
<v Speaker 1>related to a Morpha, which is the genus of lead plant.
<v Speaker 1>But Dlia gatten geri has taken It's got an ecology
<v Speaker 1>where it probably grew in bison wallows. You know where
<v Speaker 1>bison would you know, take a little dirt bath, and
<v Speaker 1>because it takes so well to being walked on or
<v Speaker 1>treaded on and probably you know, wallowed on by bison.
<v Speaker 1>And then of course they'd create this barren area and
<v Speaker 1>then the seeds would grow there too. So, uh, that
<v Speaker 1>was pretty cool to be reminded of the important ecology
<v Speaker 1>created by the American bison, which again were reduced to
<v Speaker 1>like less than one hundred individuals by market hunting and
<v Speaker 1>the general death cult mentality of euro settlers, et cetera. Right,
<v Speaker 1>so now moving on to the glade. The glade we
<v Speaker 1>were at the end of the day. We're in the
<v Speaker 1>video that I filmed. You know, we almost got struck
<v Speaker 1>by lightning. That was a fucking wonderful spot. This is
<v Speaker 1>the Limestone Power Easement glade where we saw pence them
<v Speaker 1>in Tenu of Floris. Again, pence them in another genus
<v Speaker 1>that's so species rich and has had so much ecological
<v Speaker 1>and evolutionary success out west on er drier habitats. Where
<v Speaker 1>do you get it. The few species that you get
<v Speaker 1>on the East coast, you get them in drier habitats. Right,
<v Speaker 1>the arid western genus you're gonna get on drier habitats
<v Speaker 1>in the Music East, and so that's where this grew.
<v Speaker 1>And I think this has a relatively restricted range. It's
<v Speaker 1>got kind of an odd flower shape too for a pencilme,
<v Speaker 1>and kind of looks like it's been flattened like a
<v Speaker 1>little frog mouth. White flowers flattened like a frog mouth,
<v Speaker 1>many flowers to a raceme. And it was growing on
<v Speaker 1>a carstic limestone glade where there's just like giant two
<v Speaker 1>foot deep holes in the ground, probably tons of caves
<v Speaker 1>beneath as well. You get seventy inches of rain a year,
<v Speaker 1>fifty to seventy inches of rain a year, and you
<v Speaker 1>have limestone, you're gonna start creating some caves pretty quick,
<v Speaker 1>my friend. And it was on this where we saw
<v Speaker 1>some of the coolest plants, including my favorite of the day.
<v Speaker 1>Pedomelium Pedomealium suball call Pedomealium is the genus known as breadroot.
<v Speaker 1>We get him in Texas. There's some really cool ones
<v Speaker 1>I saw in Wyoming. They almost kind of look like
<v Speaker 1>a loop in flowers are a little different. Then, of
<v Speaker 1>course they build this giant under around the tuberous root
<v Speaker 1>that they can die back to. And I guess if
<v Speaker 1>you you know, after thorough leeching and probably cooking, you
<v Speaker 1>can eat them. And this was certainly a plant that
<v Speaker 1>was being spread by indigenous people. It was very important
<v Speaker 1>to them. It's massive, you know, ethnic botanical history here.
<v Speaker 1>And it just looks fucking dope. It's just got a
<v Speaker 1>beautiful blue spike of flowers, faboidy flowers. Oh, I guess
<v Speaker 1>it's in danger too. I didn't know that. How many
<v Speaker 1>observations on a naturalists God, I love pediomealing. Man, it's
<v Speaker 1>such a cool genus. Right, some of them get big,
<v Speaker 1>but they can look a lot like loopin. They've got
<v Speaker 1>palmate leaves. And let's see what is the range it is.
<v Speaker 1>I think it's just the northeast Alabama, northeast Alaba. Oh shit, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>you got it in Tennessee too. If you live in Tennessee,
<v Speaker 1>goes out up into Nashville, Chattanooga. There's a population supposed
<v Speaker 1>northwest Georgia, Chattanooga Nashville area, and then northern Alabama. And
<v Speaker 1>it was man, someone's got to be growing this thing.
<v Speaker 1>Please please find seeds of this and grow the shit
<v Speaker 1>out of it. Grow the ever loving shit out of it,
<v Speaker 1>and you get some seeds going. You could put them
<v Speaker 1>in the ground. You have like a sunny area in
<v Speaker 1>your yard or something you can mimic a glade. Right,
<v Speaker 1>keep the competition away, Grow a couple of stock plants.
<v Speaker 1>You put everything in the ground. It does way better
<v Speaker 1>than it does in a pot. It wants to go home,
<v Speaker 1>It wants to go to the ground. Grow this. There
<v Speaker 1>was also Primula media which I was against that name change.
<v Speaker 1>It used to be Doda kathe on. The flowers of
<v Speaker 1>Doda Kathion look totally different from every other species in
<v Speaker 1>the genus Primula, and they have a different pollination biology too.
<v Speaker 1>They're poorus cytal, they're buzz pollinated. This is a Doda
<v Speaker 1>katheon species. Who was it who lumped it? Was it Reveal?
<v Speaker 1>I think Reveal lumped Doda kathon into Primula. I don't
<v Speaker 1>think that was a wise idea. It's just forming the
<v Speaker 1>the It's just it's just due to the rules of
<v Speaker 1>taxonomic nomenclature. They would have had to split other stuff
<v Speaker 1>out when they looked at the DNA, and it was
<v Speaker 1>really revealed that Doda kathon was nested within Primula. So
<v Speaker 1>you split other stuff out like the same thing they
<v Speaker 1>did with manfreda and agave. They created a kindo agave
<v Speaker 1>and paleo agave. Whatever you know this is because this
<v Speaker 1>is such a big the flowers are so different, the
<v Speaker 1>pollination biology is so different, you're obscuring that when you
<v Speaker 1>lump anyway, Doda Kate the on media shooting star. What
<v Speaker 1>is the common name for this one? White flowers, nodding
<v Speaker 1>flowers that turn upright after the flower has been pollinated. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was a cool and like fleshy leaf rosettes. And
<v Speaker 1>then of course another cool one was uh, Frassera, frasezera,
<v Speaker 1>what do I call it? American Colombo? I don't know
<v Speaker 1>where that came from. Wasn't Colombo. It was a detective
<v Speaker 1>the seventies Detective series Frasera caroliniana, which is monocarpic, so
<v Speaker 1>it's like a gave. It'll just sit there collecting sunlight
<v Speaker 1>for thirty years, creating sugars, storing it in the heart
<v Speaker 1>of the plant, and then when it gets enough and
<v Speaker 1>it's triggered by whatever else it needs the trigger flowering,
<v Speaker 1>it sends up a big five or six foot tall
<v Speaker 1>inflorescence with some really cool looking flowers on it. Four
<v Speaker 1>petaled flowers with hairy nectaries, hairy nectar glands, cool speckles,
<v Speaker 1>cool patterning. The flowers look absolutely fucking fantastic. They look
<v Speaker 1>fucking dope. And then the whole plant produces a shit
<v Speaker 1>tennesseeed and dice. And that's what that's what this Frasera
<v Speaker 1>was doing. And they were just starting to open when
<v Speaker 1>we got there. And I know the genus is another
<v Speaker 1>genus that I know from. I'm assuming this Phrasera is
<v Speaker 1>more of a dryland plant too, because I know it
<v Speaker 1>from like alpine areas or subalpine areas in Wyoming and
<v Speaker 1>then rocky areas in Nevada. What's the range on Frazerah, carolinianstis?
<v Speaker 1>Where does it grow? Let's see, we got Alabama, Northern Georgia,
<v Speaker 1>basically the southern Appalachians. Oh, it's in Kentucky. Two it's
<v Speaker 1>in eastern Missouri. No shit. Oh wow, you could probably
<v Speaker 1>grow it in Chicago. Wow it does. Supposedly it does
<v Speaker 1>grow in Chicago. No shit, where is that? Where does
<v Speaker 1>it grow in the Chicago area? Crazy? I had no
<v Speaker 1>idea Western Michigan. There's some in Ohio and Pennsylvania too,
<v Speaker 1>and even then up by Toronto. That's fucking cool. I
<v Speaker 1>didn't know Hamilton, Ontario. But oh, they're all obscured because
<v Speaker 1>it's rare. I suppose, I suppose it's kind of rare.
<v Speaker 1>It's cool. I did not know that. I did not know.
<v Speaker 1>It's such a far ranging I think it's so much
<v Speaker 1>habitat's been destroyed in the East coast compared to the
<v Speaker 1>West coast that it's easy to, you know, lose track of,
<v Speaker 1>or it's easier to go your whole life without knowing
<v Speaker 1>that a certain plant exists because all the habitats been destroyed.
<v Speaker 1>There's just so much more development. Yeah, Frasera albiculis speciosa
<v Speaker 1>albo marginata. Those are the other phraser I've seen. God,
<v Speaker 1>the flowers and all of them look so cool though,
<v Speaker 1>such cool flowers in another small and dainty plant. But what,
<v Speaker 1>of course, which deserves mentioned because of how evolutionarily cool
<v Speaker 1>it is, and also for the fact that it's compared
<v Speaker 1>to other plants, it's got extensive numbers of chromosomes. Right
<v Speaker 1>in the case of like ophioglossom reticulate them up to
<v Speaker 1>twelve hundred and sixty chromosomes. It's six undred than thirty pairs, right,
<v Speaker 1>so extensive polyploidy in the genetic history of this genus
<v Speaker 1>of Ophioglossom, and just because it looks weird. It's a
<v Speaker 1>firm but it looks like a tongue. That's the name Ophioglossum.
<v Speaker 1>But Ophioglossum Engelmannia, which is the common name, is adder's tongue.
<v Speaker 1>And it was coming up on again on the karst,
<v Speaker 1>so that was I mean, I don't think I've even
<v Speaker 1>seen I've seen Botrichium, which is in that family, which
<v Speaker 1>is another weird fern, the grape ferns. But you know,
<v Speaker 1>it's got these little tongue like leaves and then it
<v Speaker 1>sends up are maybe four or five inches tall, and
<v Speaker 1>then it sends up a spike of spores of Sporangia
<v Speaker 1>that almost it looks like a rattlesnake tail almost, that
<v Speaker 1>gets upwards of like nine inches tall ten inches tall.
<v Speaker 1>I don't know how many species are in the genus Ophioglossom,
<v Speaker 1>but they're unique, and it's it's one of those genera
<v Speaker 1>that you learn about in botany textbooks because of the
<v Speaker 1>high chromosome count, and also just it's it's in its
<v Speaker 1>own weird lineage it's it's uh, let's see what is it.
<v Speaker 1>I've just taught this h O fio gloss sales is
<v Speaker 1>the order I know that. Let me let me look
<v Speaker 1>up the text on I mean is because the risk
<v Speaker 1>ferns are somewhat closely related to them. They're ferns that
<v Speaker 1>don't really look like ferns. Yeah, they're in their own
<v Speaker 1>They're in their own subclass O fio glossity order ohio glasses,
<v Speaker 1>which has the family O fio glass ace and uh
<v Speaker 1>votrichi oid E HELMINTHO stachioid E subfamily subfamily man choid E,
<v Speaker 1>subfamily O field glass O field glossy oh field glass
<v Speaker 1>soid e. So uh wait where the hell? Oh yeah,
<v Speaker 1>and siloed them. The wriisk ferns is order silo tiles,
<v Speaker 1>and those are the only two orders in the subclass
<v Speaker 1>oh fio Glossity. I don't normally pay attention to class,
<v Speaker 1>class or subclass in terms of taxonomic order, but with
<v Speaker 1>some of these old ass lineages of bizarre fern relatives,
<v Speaker 1>you have to so subclass opioglossity, order ophioglossles, and then
<v Speaker 1>order stylotles only to orders in this clade. So and
<v Speaker 1>the whisk ferns, of course, are another plant you learn
<v Speaker 1>about in botany textbooks because just they're so damn weird.
<v Speaker 1>And I think both these the gametophyte stage is a chlorophilis,
<v Speaker 1>and you know, it's an obligate micor rhyzyl plant. It's
<v Speaker 1>or micoheterotrophic, maybe parasitizes micro hyzyl fungi of both adders
<v Speaker 1>tongue and the whisk ferns. Maybe not all of them,
<v Speaker 1>but certainly so that's another thing underground micro hyzyl gametophyte
<v Speaker 1>micaoheterotrophic gametophyte. So so notable for a number of reasons,
<v Speaker 1>both in looking fucking weird, both just by simply looking
<v Speaker 1>fucking bizarre and also and you know, genetically and in
<v Speaker 1>terms of what's going on with it. So but goddamn,
<v Speaker 1>that was a yeah, man, it was a really great
<v Speaker 1>experience seeing this glade area, you know, the pedium meal
<v Speaker 1>and then of course there was a punthia there too,
<v Speaker 1>like the cactus. So just wonderful diversity that you don't
<v Speaker 1>see in these areas. And again it would have been
<v Speaker 1>overgrown had it not been a power line. He's mint,
<v Speaker 1>So what they need to do on the stuff that's
<v Speaker 1>not under the power line. Theasement is burnick, get rid
<v Speaker 1>of some of the junipers, the quote cedars not true seedars,
<v Speaker 1>but whatever, and and just open it up, you know,
<v Speaker 1>reinvite all those glade species. The seeds are probably still
<v Speaker 1>in that soil waiting for their chance to grow. But
<v Speaker 1>that was a really cool spot to see. Part of
<v Speaker 1>One of my favorite spots from this trip was that
<v Speaker 1>power line. Of course, Kyle knew how cool it was,
<v Speaker 1>saved it for last and then that's when it started
<v Speaker 1>pissing on us. It was pouring and there was just man,
<v Speaker 1>it was like at one of those points I thought
<v Speaker 1>it the cloud started swirling. I was like, oh shit,
<v Speaker 1>is this a tornado. Goddamn, I'm not used to this,
<v Speaker 1>but you know, he assured us it wasn't, but it
<v Speaker 1>wasn't moving fast enough. But geez man, crazy weather. I'm
<v Speaker 1>not used to that. It's at East Coast weather piss break.
<v Speaker 1>I just got word that they're cutting as part of
<v Speaker 1>our nation's dessent into idiocracy. I guess they're cutting. The
<v Speaker 1>government is cutting under Trump's plan, the usgs B LAB.
<v Speaker 1>The usgs B LAB is currently defunded under the President's
<v Speaker 1>budget for twenty twenty six. Of course, of course, because
<v Speaker 1>this is you know, this is a culture that worships
<v Speaker 1>rich fools and has no respect at all for anything
<v Speaker 1>that requires intellect or science. So anyway, not directly, but
<v Speaker 1>the Group Ecosystems Mission area that funds the b LAB
<v Speaker 1>is not being funded in the proposal. Labs and programs
<v Speaker 1>throughout the Department of the Interior are facing similar cuts
<v Speaker 1>and pressure to quit their positions. Fucking idiots. This, God, this,
<v Speaker 1>what is this country gonna look like when he's through,
<v Speaker 1>when he's through with it, you know, God, ah, just
<v Speaker 1>what a shame. Man, Just just so much dumber where
<v Speaker 1>this whole culture is going to get so much dumber.
<v Speaker 1>That's a drag. Sam Drogi, of course I did a
<v Speaker 1>we did a podcast together back in twenty twenty three.
<v Speaker 1>Wonderful dude, smart as a whip entomologist studies bees. Really
<v Speaker 1>cool guy, and uh, you know the native bees, not
<v Speaker 1>the European honeybees. Fuck the honey bees, no offense, not
<v Speaker 1>honeybees just don't care. And but the native bees, man,
<v Speaker 1>the you know, the native living world that evolved here
<v Speaker 1>in North America is Uh yeah, this this lab studies
<v Speaker 1>I mean, it's really cool. I've actually been to this lab.
<v Speaker 1>It's amazing. It's a really cool sight. And they test
<v Speaker 1>out what plants attract the most pollinators. They're basically studying
<v Speaker 1>the ecology between the pollinators, some of the most significant
<v Speaker 1>pollinators in North America and the plants they pollinate. This
<v Speaker 1>is stuff that needs to be studied. This is the
<v Speaker 1>living machine that keeps our world alive. And here's the
<v Speaker 1>Trump administration defunding it. So's I wouldn't expect anything less.
<v Speaker 1>What a drag anyway, Okay, so moving on from talk
<v Speaker 1>about our dystopia, let's move on the last day, or
<v Speaker 1>one of the last days we were there. We hit
<v Speaker 1>up I got to see some really cool plants, including
<v Speaker 1>nevi Usa where let me find this thing, the plant
<v Speaker 1>colloquially known as snow wreath, which is in the rose
<v Speaker 1>fans Rose si. And I know there's a West coast species.
<v Speaker 1>This is a weird genus because there's a West Coast
<v Speaker 1>species that yeah, nevi Usa alabamenses. And this was a
<v Speaker 1>growing in the same spot with a whole bunch of
<v Speaker 1>cool stuff. Jeffersonia difila. Again on these like limestone bowlders,
<v Speaker 1>these carstick limestone bowlers, and I know nevi Usa from
<v Speaker 1>uh the only other species in the genus. Is it
<v Speaker 1>the only other species? Or let me let me check. Actually, yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it's there's only two species in the genus and they're
<v Speaker 1>they're really far apart ones in Shasta County, California. My
<v Speaker 1>friend Julie discovered it like ten or twenty years ago, No,
<v Speaker 1>nineteen ninety two, thirty years ago. Excuse me, uh, nevi
<v Speaker 1>Usa Cliftonia. It's limestone endemic, really really restricted rain from
<v Speaker 1>Shasta County. Limestone, which again limestone for that area, for
<v Speaker 1>northern California is rare because it's mostly volcanic or it's
<v Speaker 1>serpentine in that area. It's probably limestone under the volcanics.
<v Speaker 1>But anyway, so it's a rare. It's a rare. Plant
<v Speaker 1>grows north of Redding, California, never Usa CLIFTONI and then
<v Speaker 1>never Usa Alabama. Nsis is known only from h northeastern Alabama.
<v Speaker 1>Where is it? Man? Is that a goddamn Yeah? Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>northeastern Alabama, northwest Georgia. And supposedly there's some in Tennessee.
<v Speaker 1>Is there some in that's not right. Is there some
<v Speaker 1>in Arkansas? No, shit, there's a disjunc population of never
<v Speaker 1>Usia Alabama NSA's Alabama snow wreath in Arkansas. Well. Primarily
<v Speaker 1>found in the southern Appalachians. Never Uca alabamicus also occurs
<v Speaker 1>in Arkansas, specifically in the Boston Mountains in Arkansas Valley,
<v Speaker 1>with a few south central ozark Highlands occurrences. It is
<v Speaker 1>considered a threatened specie. That that's fucking cool. Wow, I
<v Speaker 1>had no idea. And then you don't see it for
<v Speaker 1>fifteen hundred miles two thousand miles until you get to
<v Speaker 1>Shasta County, California, don't see the genus. So that tells
<v Speaker 1>you this is a You know that that's a cool
<v Speaker 1>That is a cool disjunct. But I've still never seen
<v Speaker 1>the Shasta County species, which grows in an infantasmally smaller area,
<v Speaker 1>has a small much smaller range than Alabamensis. But anyway,
<v Speaker 1>so yeah, rose family rose c. And it was growing
<v Speaker 1>in this area with jeffersoniadifila, which is berber A decei.
<v Speaker 1>And I think this is a pre They call it.
<v Speaker 1>Twin leaf is the common name, which I think is
<v Speaker 1>this is kind of a No, it's not a rare.
<v Speaker 1>Is it rare? I don't know. Now, there's six thousand
<v Speaker 1>observations on iat. But it's an odd one. It's got
<v Speaker 1>a little it's got a kind of a weird kind
<v Speaker 1>of a weird fruit looks like a little knob, a
<v Speaker 1>little swollen ass. But it was growing with another rare plant,
<v Speaker 1>which was nowhere. It was by no means uncommon at
<v Speaker 1>this site. It was everywhere. Again, it was like understory
<v Speaker 1>of a forest with Cornophilus what is it, Conophalis americana
<v Speaker 1>bear corn, the plant the parasitic plant they call barcrn
<v Speaker 1>or bank case. It does look like corn in the
<v Speaker 1>cup and it forms these massive colonies parasitizing the roots
<v Speaker 1>of trees. That was everywhere. So it's growing in the
<v Speaker 1>shady understory. But there was like these carstic limestone boulders everywhere.
<v Speaker 1>Polymnia levi gatta as through acy, which kind of looks
<v Speaker 1>almost maybe like a small lanthis or something, but has
<v Speaker 1>kind of like pinatifid leaves. And that's in the tribe Polimny.
<v Speaker 1>I'm not even familiar with that. What else is in
<v Speaker 1>tribe Polimny? Oh, just that weird that's a yeah, man,
<v Speaker 1>that's it's a weird one. I really wanted to see that.
<v Speaker 1>It's a rare, a pretty rare plant. But again it
<v Speaker 1>was common here and very hairy, very hairy leaves. So
<v Speaker 1>I'm wondering if this is like another limestone and you know,
<v Speaker 1>another limestone plant or a rocky microsite plant, so that
<v Speaker 1>so many hairs, it kind of looks like wooly webbing
<v Speaker 1>on the stem. And then one that was growing at
<v Speaker 1>a spring it looked like a dirty water spring, like
<v Speaker 1>it was cloudy water. I don't know what happened there,
<v Speaker 1>but it was a little cool spring in the middle
<v Speaker 1>of this woodland. You could actually like you could get
<v Speaker 1>inside and go swimming. There was the plant known as
<v Speaker 1>bladder nut staff Stephilia Staphilia which is in staff is
<v Speaker 1>staphil ace which the order is Chrososamatales, which I've only
<v Speaker 1>seen a plant in a couple members of that from
<v Speaker 1>desert areas. But Staphilia like staff, like you got a
<v Speaker 1>staff infection uh y leah y l e a uh
<v Speaker 1>staphily a C. Three genera in that family darien dary
<v Speaker 1>dal rim dal Rimpelia. Where the fuck is that? Native
<v Speaker 1>to Interpenia and Stephelia, So three genera in a family
<v Speaker 1>staphily Ace, order Krososamatales, which is an order I don't
<v Speaker 1>think I had much experience with that. I would have
<v Speaker 1>to help me check ain at at some point and
<v Speaker 1>see how many plants I've seen in the order Crosisamatales.
<v Speaker 1>That's a weird one, man. But h but that was
<v Speaker 1>growing too, and it's got these like little bladder bad
<v Speaker 1>you know, it looks like little bag fruits again. You
<v Speaker 1>know this, you guys with this East coast, you know,
<v Speaker 1>flora are blowing my mind. We went to earlier in
<v Speaker 1>the day, we'd gone to see Ciprepedium, a call the
<v Speaker 1>lady slipper orchid, another stupid name for it, but there's
<v Speaker 1>no taking epic. They're known everywhere. They're known throughout the
<v Speaker 1>world as lady slipper orchids. And why because they've got
<v Speaker 1>that inflated bag labellum that that you know, that pedal
<v Speaker 1>that's been modified into a little inflated bag trademark of
<v Speaker 1>the orchid subfamily cip Repedioid, which is notable for having
<v Speaker 1>two stamens, not just one like so many like all
<v Speaker 1>the epidendrums basically, et cetera. So it's it's got two anthers,
<v Speaker 1>not just one anther like so many orchids do. And
<v Speaker 1>then it's got this bagflower. Be's got to crawl in there,
<v Speaker 1>dupes of female being the crawling in there, the bes
<v Speaker 1>to crawl out, pick up a pollennium on her back,
<v Speaker 1>and then and fly off to pollinate another flower. But
<v Speaker 1>I guess supposedly from pollination studies on this genus and
<v Speaker 1>syprepedium a call which curs. You know, it's pretty wide spread, uncommon,
<v Speaker 1>but wide spread, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan, the southeast, et cetera.
<v Speaker 1>Apparently the bees learn pretty quick, and so you know,
<v Speaker 1>there's a lot of dud fruits. There's a lot of
<v Speaker 1>fruits that don't produce produce seeds. But again, orchid seeds
<v Speaker 1>are so tiny. One fruit can produce you know, half
<v Speaker 1>a million maybe more tiny seeds, and you know, so
<v Speaker 1>one fruit, I mean, the thing gets around. This was cool.
<v Speaker 1>There was like a pretty large population here growing in
<v Speaker 1>the understory of this woodland at like two thousand feet
<v Speaker 1>in the mountains of northwest Georgia. And also here, you know,
<v Speaker 1>there was a lot of there was sassafras. Everywhere there
<v Speaker 1>was leaf stuff on the ground. I guess they've been
<v Speaker 1>burning again, which is cool. We saw a lot of
<v Speaker 1>areas where they had been burning in been reintroduced. But
<v Speaker 1>there was castania and tada. There was American chestnut seat
<v Speaker 1>not seedlings. These are probably old plants, but they get
<v Speaker 1>so big and then they get infected with the chestnut blight.
<v Speaker 1>The whole tree dies and then the American chestnut the
<v Speaker 1>roots stay alive. It'll just send up new growth. The
<v Speaker 1>compartmentalizes that dead shoot, the shoot falls over rots, and
<v Speaker 1>then it just sends up a new shoot and that
<v Speaker 1>can only get so big before it gets infected with
<v Speaker 1>the chestnut blight again, which again involved in Asia, and
<v Speaker 1>it was introduced in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.
<v Speaker 1>And you know, I remember seeing those before only once
<v Speaker 1>somewhere in Pennsylvania. But you'll still see them, you know,
<v Speaker 1>re sprouting again. It's pretty sad, but it was great.
<v Speaker 1>It was still cool to see, like, oh they're still here.
<v Speaker 1>You know, the species has almost been wiped out for
<v Speaker 1>a century, all the large trees have, but there's still
<v Speaker 1>re sprouters, you know, found intermittently throughout the range. But
<v Speaker 1>the cyprepedium was a fucking that was great to see.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, orchids are you gotta give it to them, man,
<v Speaker 1>deceptive pollination they've always got like the flowers on orchids,
<v Speaker 1>they're they're not just attractive, but there's always a puzzle there.
<v Speaker 1>There's always something cool they're doing. I just saw a
<v Speaker 1>siper pedioid when I was in Ecuador. Yeah, that was
<v Speaker 1>a fragment Pedium perci, which had a really unique looking
<v Speaker 1>column and staminode. That's the other thing. They've got two
<v Speaker 1>stamens and then a staminode. The cyprepedioids subfamily cipropedioid E,
<v Speaker 1>which what either four or five orchids subfamilies orchidoid E,
<v Speaker 1>epidendroid E, siprepedia in five, vanilloid E, and then the
<v Speaker 1>base almost subfamily Apostassoidy. Those are weird. Apostasia. I've still
<v Speaker 1>never seen one in flower. I think they're all Asian.
<v Speaker 1>Maybe maybe Asia they're Asian, but uh but yeah, god,
<v Speaker 1>that was a nice one. That was a nice one
<v Speaker 1>to see. Got some nice wide angle money shots, you know,
<v Speaker 1>out here looking like a nineteen nineties alternative rock music
<v Speaker 1>cover with the fucking Scyprepedium acall in the background. And
<v Speaker 1>then lastly, I saw a micoheterotroph so a plant that
<v Speaker 1>partially parasitizes fungi, called the obel Aia virginica. I mean,
<v Speaker 1>does it really could you call it's partially it's thought
<v Speaker 1>to partially parasitize fungi. It's producing big flowers, and the
<v Speaker 1>leaves on this thing are do not look big enough
<v Speaker 1>to feed it, you know, to produce the sugars via
<v Speaker 1>photosynthesis necessarily to feed it. Obelaria virginica from the family
<v Speaker 1>gentianac which is a family which has quite a few
<v Speaker 1>micoheterotrophic members also, some of which I saw in Ecuador,
<v Speaker 1>like a species of Voiriea that someone, some specialist in
<v Speaker 1>the genus wrote me and told me might potentially be
<v Speaker 1>an undescribed species. What other there's quite a few members
<v Speaker 1>of the Gentian family that let me see this thing. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>it was Voiriea that I said. On there. Of the
<v Speaker 1>Gentian family that are micoheterotrophic, so or at least partially micaheterrotrophic,
<v Speaker 1>I saw the genus Helenia and the Parrimo that to me,
<v Speaker 1>it's there's like a there's like a way to look
<v Speaker 1>at the color tones sometimes of the leaves and the
<v Speaker 1>flowers that to me, and this is completely just gestalt.
<v Speaker 1>There's not that I have no science to back this up,
<v Speaker 1>but that just to me, they kind of look like
<v Speaker 1>they they're partially there's something we're going to have with
<v Speaker 1>a funky They are maybe micahedrotrophic, like there's chlorophyll there,
<v Speaker 1>so they're not fully micoheterotrophic like the genus voiriead I
<v Speaker 1>saw an Ecuador, which is just fully white, no green
<v Speaker 1>and whatsoever. But the Obilaria Helenia, which again is neotropical
<v Speaker 1>genus of gentineac that just look they hint I can't
<v Speaker 1>describe it. They hint that they're partially micoheterotrophic. They're stealing
<v Speaker 1>or parasitizing from fungi, maybe taking more than they give,
<v Speaker 1>or maybe just taking and not giving anything. But Oberaleria
<v Speaker 1>I think is actually has it been confirmed. It's not
<v Speaker 1>just my conjecture. Helenia is just my conjecture. I think
<v Speaker 1>Hellnia is probably my go headotropic Oblaria I think has
<v Speaker 1>been confirmed either way. It's a cool little plant grown
<v Speaker 1>on the understory of these these East coast, you know,
<v Speaker 1>temperate forest woodlands, these East coast temperate forests growing on
<v Speaker 1>the understory that is producing four white petaled flowers and
<v Speaker 1>little ovate leaves that are sessile and a stem doesn't
<v Speaker 1>get that big. But a cool plant, really cool plant.
<v Speaker 1>And I think, is it rare too? I don't know,
<v Speaker 1>I would assume how many observations you get, I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I was I was fucking you know, I was a
<v Speaker 1>little tickled to see it. I was excited because some
<v Speaker 1>of these weird you know, the ecology of some of
<v Speaker 1>these things, especially the Michael Head. Oh yeah, God, look
<v Speaker 1>at this thing purple flowers. The ecology and some of
<v Speaker 1>these things, it's just it hints it a lot more
<v Speaker 1>going on. There's a little there's a little bit more context.
<v Speaker 1>They're a little mysterious, all right. It's not rare at all.
<v Speaker 1>It was like five thousand observations on inept. But what
<v Speaker 1>is the range? What is the range on oval Aria?
<v Speaker 1>Oh gets into southern Illinois, central Indiana, southern Ohio, central Pennsylvania.
<v Speaker 1>I don't think it gets into New York at all,
<v Speaker 1>and then south to northern Alabama, northern Georgia. So anyway,
<v Speaker 1>I was tickled to see that. And then there's a
<v Speaker 1>new Critaga species, not new, but it was thought to
<v Speaker 1>be extinct that Josh found and at the same year
<v Speaker 1>some other guy found it as well. And I was
<v Speaker 1>there with my friend Adam Black, who is collecting arbarium
<v Speaker 1>specimens Critagus austro montana and uh, I think there were
<v Speaker 1>a few individuals. Anyway, pretty exciting thought to be extinct,
<v Speaker 1>lost for a while, you know, in this clusterfuck of
<v Speaker 1>mountains called the Southern Appalachians and clusterfuck of northwest southwest
<v Speaker 1>to northeast trending mountain ranges called the Southern Appalachians. And it,
<v Speaker 1>you know, it was rediscovered in twenty twenty four, Critagus
<v Speaker 1>montana austro montana critagas from the Southern Mountains. So how
<v Speaker 1>many observations only three observations that a naturalist, that's cool.
<v Speaker 1>That's weird, man. What has been going on in these mountains?
<v Speaker 1>How many plants have been lost, like wiped out that
<v Speaker 1>were you once grew here? And how many I mean
<v Speaker 1>there's a couple of documents, how many of how many
<v Speaker 1>plants have gone extinct that were never documented? I don't know.
<v Speaker 1>I wonder about that though. I mean, you know, with
<v Speaker 1>the ecological disturbance that has been caused since colonization, since
<v Speaker 1>the death cult arrived, you know how much was wiped
<v Speaker 1>out before it could be documented. I don't know anyway,
<v Speaker 1>that's it. That's a two hour and fifteen minute podcast.
<v Speaker 1>If you're in Austin, Texas, come see us tomorrow. What
<v Speaker 1>else You'll have a book out next to April Concrete
<v Speaker 1>Botany be looking for it. I think it'll be pretty good.
<v Speaker 1>I'm pretty satisfied with it as always, selling shirts, stickers,
<v Speaker 1>that kind of shit. If you're interested, email me crime
<v Speaker 1>Pace at Botany doesn't at gmail dot com. Costa Rica
<v Speaker 1>Foray is in July from July what is it, ninth
<v Speaker 1>to seventeenth, and then at the end of the month,
<v Speaker 1>Alan Rockefeller and I will be at the New Mexico
<v Speaker 1>Mycological Societies. It'll get together. I think it's the last
<v Speaker 1>weekend in July in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Beautiful Cloudcroft. How
<v Speaker 1>many thrifts stores they got good thrift stores there, probably,
<v Speaker 1>I don't know. We'll go check them out. We'll go,
<v Speaker 1>we'll go give them a gander. I haven't been in
<v Speaker 1>New Mexico for any significant amount of time in a while,
<v Speaker 1>except when I was there last year and tore off
<v Speaker 1>the bumper of my truck in a cook's peak range.
<v Speaker 1>So anyway, that's all I got. Have you got your day,
<v Speaker 1>go fuck it up by it. Thanks for listening.