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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
There you go. That's it. That's nice. That's what he's
playing over there. That's some good stuff. I was listening
to this when they broke into my garage. We were
having a party up front, and they were in a
you know, they'd coming through the alley. Pride opened a
garage door with a hydraulic jack, and then they cleaned
me out. They took the leaf floor, and they took

(00:41):
the lawnmower. They were taking you know, they were taking
Prudence yares that were fifteen years old. They stole my
classic model car collection. They were still anything that wasn't
nailed down. And I was pretty upset about that because,
you know, we had a party going on. Nobody could
hear them, and they knew when we were at our
most vulnerable. They came in right off the alley right there,
right just straight up busy. You've parked the pick up

(01:03):
right there, just like there were a garbage truck leaning
out the trash. Just listen to this. This is a
wonderful song. Thank you, m Yeah, see this is nice.
This is this is Eli Eliganta de Hierro, my GROUPO
showed the door. And if you just put that into

(01:24):
the YouTube music and then it'll set you up. They'll
put you on a nice playlist. You listen to Koobie
as the rest of your day. We'll just jam out
to this for the How you doing? Welcome to the
Crime Pacer Bond. He doesn't podcasts. It's been I don't know,
two or three weeks since I've put out a podcast.
I've been busy as shit, and I just have not.
I've just not had it in me. I've just you know,

(01:46):
I've been I've been engaging in self care. I've been
taking care of myself. Okay, I had a bunch of
shit to do. Actually, I was trying to figure out
in design stuff, put put an in design together for
the second book. They just extended my ded line for
the second book. Because let me turn this down. You
should listen to this song. Koombeas are nice. You know,

(02:07):
there's a time and a place. There's a time and
a place for everything. Yeah. So I was in Atlanta
for a while. That was wonderful. Then we went into
Northwest Georgia, and then we went into Alabama. Hung out
with Kyle Liibarger for a little bit. Who's the only
person I won't give any hell about using common names.
But holy shit. Yeah, he's such a sweet man. You can't.

(02:29):
You can't. You can't, he does, you know, you can't.
I would never teach him about the common name thing,
but holy shit, there are some ridiculous common names in
the Southeast, I mean everywhere, to be honest, but especially
I thought it was bad in Texas, the common names
thing for plants. But in the Southeast there's a plant
called Sonny bells, and I didn't like the way that sound,

(02:50):
so I just started calling it sonnyballs. Showing a leirium
crosy and wonderful relative of agave likes those thin soiled
rock out croppings, especially on granite, or to be more specific,
it was a metamorphoised nice You know, Atlanta has all
these wonderful granitic knobs around, just like you'd see in
South Africa, just like you would see in Brazil, just

(03:13):
like I've seen in Western Australia. You know, where you
get a different plant community then you might see in
a more thick soiled forest. Okay. Also, it was dodging
bullets while I was out there at Arabia Mountain. You know,
there was some kid, you know, you just you know,
I mean, it's America. So you gotta figure everyone's, you know,

(03:33):
dumb as a brick or mentally ill. Not everyone, but
a large segment of the population. Let's be honest about
what we have going on here. Okay, if you're honest
about it, then it's it doesn't stink so much. You
could kind of joke about it a little bit too,
about what they call KMOSA DCA, the harsh reality. But yeah,
I was out there, I was standing on top. I

(03:55):
was filming a smile AX I think it was smile
Ax Smolia, and all of a sudden, I, I mean,
I heard the gunshots, which I'm just like whatever, and
then I started hearing you know that sound when an
object is moving by you very fast, and I'll hear
that sound. You know. I've got a sling, like slinging
rocks sometimes it's fun. And if you sling a rock,

(04:16):
you know, like David and Goliath style. Shit. I got
sent to this program for fucked up kids when I
was eleven, and some guy there taught me how to
make a sling, and so I'll sling rock. Sometimes if
you sling it really hard, the rock will spin and
make this sound. I don't really know what causes that
does anybody, any physicists out there can explain it. But anyway,

(04:38):
I was here hearing that sound with the bullets we're
singing by me, and fuck, I couldn't see anybody and
I was just full on exposed out there on top
of this this granitic knab, and so I'm you know,
getting down shit trying to film O. Fuck, can't see
where it's coming from. Runoff to the you know, down
slope to like the woodland where it was Orcas Georgiana

(05:01):
Corcus georgianis was growing really cool oak that's kind of
endemic to those thin soil there. It grows on the
margins of those knobs. I love this type of shit
because again it's a dry it's a drier plant community,
and there's so many cool endemics that you find. When
you've got this kind of setup, you've got a humid,
relatively high rainfall area. Not always in the case of

(05:22):
South Africa and Western Australia, it's not the case. In
the case of Brazil. It certainly is the case the
Atlantic Forest of Brazil on the east side of Brazil,
and then you go to these thin, soiled, rocky outcroppings
where it's a big granite knob or a limestone glay whatever,
and you get a totally different cast of plant species
that have what it takes, whether it's stem succulents or
geophitic habit or harrier leaves whatever, like Pacera Dubia, really

(05:47):
cool member of astarase with the yellow flowers and shit
that we saw at the Arabia Mountain. When I was
getting shot at everywhere, the kid wasn't shooting at me.
He was trying to impress his girlfriend. Yes, I don't
know what they were doing. We were with a guy
who I think was a ranger there. He was some

(06:07):
sort of authority figure, wonderful man, and he went out
there and talked to him. He's like, guyse, he can't
be shooting guns here. This is like a public hiking
Aerator's people everywhere. And they were just like, oh sorry,
just like that's how you go out, you know in
the United States, that's how you go out. You know.
Some more on with fucking half a brain, no offense.
Don't blame them, blame the education system. And it's only

(06:28):
getting dumber. Okay, it's only getting dumber. We're only getting
dumber here, I guess Trump just defunded PBS. You know,
PBS was too woke, and we don't have money for that.
I don't know, you got to give fucking tax cuts
the billionaires or something. Anyway, declining, declining, empliyer here, everyone's
in denial and not that smart. But anyway, you know,

(06:50):
you can't be shooting guns off at a public hiking area.
And so this young man, he was receptive and he
stopped discharging his hand gun at this spot, which was
of course totally I think shooting there maybe it was illegal,
but of course, being that it's the South, it's totally
legal to just discharge guns wherever. Probably is it, I

(07:13):
don't know who knows. Anyway, I'm glad I didn't get shot.
And then I went down the slope and looked at
callt me a latafolia, which, speaking of how stupid common
names are they, that's a plant they call Mountain Laurel,
which again is not related to Laurel whatsoever, which is
in lau race, the avocado family, the Bay Laurel family,

(07:34):
and then of course in Texas our Mount Laurel is
Dermatophylum secunda florum, which is unrelated to Cantia latifolia and
also totally unrelated to laurel. And if you can say
mountain laurel, why can't you just say the word colmia
the genus, you know, get it. Show some respect for
a plant. Learn the genus name, or learn the name dermatophylum,

(07:57):
which isn't that hard to say. Maybe it'll intimidate, you know,
some of the half wits out there, no offense to
them either, but dermatto phylum. You know, you could figure
out how to spell this stuff. Everybody did hooked on phonics, right,
dermtto phylum, mountain laurel, which you know, if you're gonna
go to the trouble as saying that many syllables, why
not just learn the genus name of the plant. That's

(08:18):
pretty cool. You might end up using it again anyway.
So that was a fun That was a fun time.
I'm glad I didn't get shot. I'm glad I got
some cultural insight. You know. The last day I was
in Atlanta as well, I was able I borrow a
bike from my hippie friend Josh. We went biking around

(08:39):
and god, it was so nice. Man. They're like bike
in an old style city where you can actually you know,
bike down the street without getting mote over by like
some four hundred pound no offense, four hundred pound man
in a Yukon, which is the state. In most of
the Sun Belt, that's like the status. And especially in Texas,
you can't. It's unsafe to bike many places in Texas

(09:01):
because people are just horrible drivers, either dumb or aggressive,
and they're just driving these giant trucks. They can't even
see you half the time. They probably wouldn't even feel
you if they ran over you. You know, it's it's
just but it was nice to ride a bike. They
gotta they get. They turned a beltline railroad in Atlanta
into a bike path so you can bike all round.
Everybody was out, hundreds of people on the bike path.

(09:22):
It was nice, but everybody, you know, it wasn't crowded,
it wasn't packed like ass to neck. It's just a
beautiful sunny sunday. We were biking around. Uh. It was
such a nice experience that I haven't had in a
while because I haven't lived in a real city and uh,
you know, four or five years. So that was a
nice time. I ended up taking my shirt off and
just biking on because it felt so nice the breeze.

(09:45):
It was hot. I was sweating like a pig, and
then the breeze just felt and I was like, fuck it,
I don't care if I'm gonna look like an asshole.
I'm gonna take my shirt off and just you know, oh,
it's so so lovely, you know. And they shut down
one of the streets. I don't know why they shut
the street down. The cops shut the street down for
some sort of street fair. Maybe it was a marathon.
I don't know what it was. Maybe they had maybe
they had the Shriners out, you know, in their little

(10:06):
lawnmower cars. I don't know what was going on. Where
was it? I saw the most American scene the other day.
Where was it? I forget where I think it was in.
It was somewhere in the South. It was in Georgia,
and it was like it was a couple, a married couple.
Presumably maybe they're just housing together. I don't know, who knows,

(10:27):
who knows what's going on. They fucking rent the so
expensive property value so expensive, and maybe people maybe they're
not married. Who am I to presume? Maybe they're just
both cohabitating to save money because everything they're getting reading
by the land. I don't know, but it was a
It was a man and a woman and they were
on either side of the driveway this massive yard, and
each one was riding. They had his and hers riding lawnmowers.

(10:50):
The only thing that could have made it made it
more American was if they had like a styrofoam mount
up light up cross on the back of it, and
maybe they had like one hundred and fifty extra pounds
each to him. It was a beautiful sight. It was
like someone should paint this. And they were just you know,
they were just each It was a group effort, a

(11:11):
couple's effort, his and hers riding lawnmowers. Which we get
the similar thing here in Texas to where you get
a guy doing donuts. But because it doesn't rain here,
we're further west and it starts to and it's so hot,
you know, we're thirty minutes from the Payote gardens, and
so it stops. It's the rain kind of tapers off,
especially if you move west that oftentimes you'll see a

(11:32):
man riding a lawnmower and there's no long to be mowed.
It's just a bunch of weeds. Mostly native weeds, rutero
plants pretty cool, and maybe some bermuda grass, but it's
it's sparse, and so when he's mowing it, it just
kicking up clouds of dust, you know. And probably a
lot of catshit too, because we got bad feral cat
problems here. So he's probably breathing in toxoplasmosis spores or

(11:54):
so usis usiss oh oh osiss toxoplasmosis sports or some
other you know. I don't think we get coccidio. My
coosa is out here valley fever like you get out west.
But it's a nice site, you know, and you have
to take that when you live in America in the
twenty first century. There's a man who's just so filled

(12:18):
with the call of duty that he's mowing a dirt
lot and there's clouds of dust going everywhere. It's the
same thing where they got the irrigation canal near my house.
And I guess there used to be a grove of
native sable palms here and they had to cut him down.
I don't know why they know why, the city hall,

(12:39):
the city the civic leaders know why because they hate plants,
probably because it's you know, it's they hate nature. It's messy,
it's dirty. Nature's messy. But either way, they completely scrape
the sides that irrigation canal clean. So and they've got
all this land subsidence and it just looks like shit
and it's just like barren. Oh God, I love it.

(13:02):
I love it. It's so fucking ridiculous. You can't make
this ship. Well you could. I could probably make some
ship up. You know. They hate plants here, so it's it's, uh,
they just want bermuda grass and parking lots, just the
whole concept of the urban heat island. It's too much.
It's gonna break the brains. It's gonna it's gonna fray
the wiring. You're gonna have a short circuit. Don't even

(13:23):
try to explain it. It's just too much. You're gonna
come on, you're gonna break the algorithm. But anyway, so, uh,
I want to go through these plants that we saw.
It's some of this, these granitic knobs, and it's actually
the geology of this area school So this is there
is there's granite there which is was formed from in

(13:44):
Atlanta and the Atlanta area. These granitic knobs stone mountain.
That's where they got the KKK rally, where they got
the Confederate statues, you know, the fucking Colonel Sanders looking
guy with a white hood on. You know, please a
plant plant? I guess I didn't get to see that.
I wanted to see if I puked, would the puke

(14:06):
run down and drip on? Like? How far is the
carving in the mountain beneath the cliff that you can
stand on its stone mountain? Like if how much vomit
would you have to vomit in order to have it
run down? And finally hit one of the Confederate the figures,
And I think, I don't know, I don't know, but
it was a nice thing to wander about and postulate on.

(14:27):
That was a great spot too, though. Again you go
up on top of these rocky knobs and you find
really cool plants up there. There was Vaccinium arboreum up
there as well. Sparkleberry. It's a silly common name, but
I kind of like it, you know, sparkly balls, sparkly berries,
sparkle berry. Up there there was smilax growing in the
cracks of some of these these fissures. So this is

(14:50):
a high rainfall area. I mean, I think it's sometimes
fifty to seventy inches of rain a year in the Atlanta,
Georgia area. But because it's a rocky knob and there's
not much soil there, again, you get all these more
drought tolerant plants like Opunthia. There was opunthia, say spotosa there.
It might have been Saxe potosa. I don't know what
it's probably says potosa. Same thing you see on Floyd

(15:12):
Bennett Airfield, the abandoned airfield in Brooklyn, with a host
of invasive plants slowly recolonizing the pavement. But Pakrodubia was
up there, like I said, And you know, the adaptations
you see in a lot of these plants that you
see growing on these granitic knobs are of course hairs, right,

(15:33):
reduced leaf size hairs. The same thing you see in
the deserts a much more extreme degree. Right, it's not
I can see like funeral stage like you get in
the Mojave Desert, which is so hairy it's almost white,
and the flowers are so reduced in size because of
the fact that they grow in these barren limestone cliffs
in the Mojave Desert. But you're gonna see similar adaptations

(15:55):
hair stem succulents. Of course, there was diamorphous smallly eye,
which is now just see the smallly I crass. The lacey,
little four pedaled flowers always flush the leaves. The succulent
leaves always flush in red with stressed pigments. I bet
it what they do grow green. They're grow in shade,
like the shade of a big rock or something. The

(16:17):
dimorphous small eye will have greener leaves, but that's an
annual so it just produces seeds and then the plant
dies and the seeds laying weight to germinate the next year.
There was so much cool stuff on these glad areas.
Again that Corcus georgiana as well, really narrow ranged oak
god I was having a blast. Tritiscontia was everywhere right.

(16:39):
We saw both Ohiensis and try to Scontia Hersseudoculus, another
succulent plant. One of the Coomalainace members, which is a
really cool family, and they've always got those weird ass anthers.
Some of the members of Comala and Ace have corkscrew anthers.
One of my most favorite members of Coma in Ac

(17:00):
was cocleiostema, cocleostema. Wonder what that means in Latin. I
gotta get that. I have one of those like Latin
translation for plants books. I lost that. I who, I'm surprised.
You know what? Is there? An easy one is there?
It's odd the one I had. The book I had
was like thirty years old. It's out of print maybe longer.
It was a Sterns you know who stern was right,

(17:23):
it was fifty years old. It's an old ass book,
but it explains what all these Latin words mean, you know,
and it was very helpful. But coclio stema odoritissimum. That
was a plant. Martin Grantham gave me weirdest fucking It's
it's like a it's like a comolinid that behaves like
a uh bromeliad. I don't even where's the native to.

(17:46):
I don't even know where it's native I put. If
you want to see photos of what I'm talking about,
go to my I Naturalists. Go to I naturalist dot org,
hit explore uh type in for the for filter over
on the right head side to go to film their
Joey Santaur and type in cochleos or hit Joey santaur
and then type in in the tax on field Cochleostema

(18:09):
c O C H L I O S T E
M A odoritsimum and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I put a bunch of money shots up there. I
think twenty. But this is such a weird plan. All
the members of comal and AC have weird anthers. Some
have dimorphic anthers, like two different sets of anthers and

(18:30):
uh and hairs on them like little filaments, and some
of the sometimes the the uh anths look like fly
fishing lures. So really cool pollination biology. This thing, Cochliosma
odoritsimum grows as an epiphyte in the neotropics and almost
resembles a bromeliad. And Martin Grantham gave me one. It

(18:51):
was growing in my kitchen and a sunny window in
Oakland and it did so well. Yeah, I gave it
back to him and then, uh, you know what, he
said he was going to send me one. I don't
think he ever did, and he's gonna send me another one.
I don't think he did, but it would probably hate
where I live now. It's probably too hot. Oh you
know what. Actually it grows in Costa Rica. But this
is a lowland plant, so we're not gonna see it done.

(19:12):
Our little foray that we planned in July for the
high elevation oak forests and Paramo of Costa Rica me
Allen Rockefeller Mandicr. It should already sold out. It's sold that.
We sold twenty twenty tickets already to this thing. It
should be great, it should be really cool. It's nine
thousand feet. We'll probably do another one at some point,

(19:35):
and I guess we're doing Ecuador in November. Yeah, but
we're gonna be you know, July is supposed to be
peak fungus season there, so we're gonna be looking at
mushrooms and all kinds of cool plants. I've got a
somewhat decent primer already on the plant life there, crazy
lineages of plants Perumnopotes, Stanley Ie which is now Pectanapoti's

(19:56):
Stanley Eye. Listened to the Costa Rica podcast if you
want to hear about some of these things. Two thousand
year old Potocarpus trees right, really cool, predominantly Southern Hemisphere
conifer lineage. I had no idea that grew way up
at nine thousand feet in a Costa Rican cloud forest
with a bunch of cool endemic raspberry species and crazy
birds and three or four different species of oaks which

(20:19):
should be host to some wonderful electo micro rhizol mushrooms,
as well as Camaro stapfless arbutoids, which is in the
genus Camarostaphlos, which is closely related to madrones. Yes, the
madrones you get in Texas, Arizona, and California and all
over Mexico, but higher elevations in Mexico, but is not

(20:41):
in that genus Camara Staphlus. Their fruit is a what
is It's a drup instead of a berry, but it's
called arbutoides because it looks like in arbutis it looks
like a madrone and those, of course are host to
ectomycorrhizol fungi as well. So this should be a nice
trip anyway. Uh yeah, but it's sold out already, so sorry,

(21:03):
I don't know. It's sold on like three days. I
could do that, shit, Oh yeah I should. I could
do like three or four of those. If I could
find a way to bring my kid down with me,
you know, she could help out, get her, get her
a passport, bring her down her, have her help out.
That would be so nice, you know, South Texas is
nice once in a while. I just think about that

(21:24):
the other day. I don't have to worry about crackhead's
breaking into my shit anymore. I live in a severely
culturally repressed area, but people are generally pretty polite and kind,
you know. But it's it's a trade off. Because people
ask me, how do you like living in Texas? I
always say it's culture is kind of fucked up, but
people are really nice. I hate the fact that it's
a car slum like this this state, like so much

(21:46):
of the infrastructure here in the cities is just dedicated
to cars. Like you have to spend your whole life
trapped in a car. It's like the most one of
the most pedestrian, anti anti friendly, anti pedestrian places I've
ever lived. To be miserable to grow up here, you know,
I guess, I guess it's to each their own. It's

(22:07):
different for everybody. For me, I like being able to
walk around, like being able to take public transit, especially
as a kid. I like being able to interact with people,
you know. Yeah, you've heard me random about this before.
I hate I hate the parking. I hate the way
everything looks when everything's you know, dedicated to parking and driving.
But uh whatever, But you know, I don't have to
worry about crack. It's still in my shiver. That used

(22:27):
to be a thing all the time, Like you leave
your your car, everything would get jacked, you know, like
everything would get fucking jacked. And then you'd have like
some some kid who grew up rich being like, Wow,
the person who's still your stuff must have really needed it.
And it's kind of fucked up actually for you to
be upset by it, because they obviously really needed it,

(22:49):
because you know whatever, it's like, yeah, I'm sure they're
like I'm sure, I'm sure whoever stole it's donating it
to like a food co op to feed under privileged
children with the fuck like what the fuck? Anyway, Sorry,
you know, but it's a trade off. There no public
land anyway. Let's not get distracted on this. I'm sorry,
I'm really on with today. You know, it's been bottled

(23:09):
up inside me. I didn't do a podcast for three weeks,
been bottled up. I got you know, you'd let the
cap off, and I just said, wow, he just starts
going off. You know, he was drinking those na's. I mean,
he'd been sober nine years, but he was drinking those
na's as if they actually contained you know, some ethanol. Okay,
uh but uh, okay, where what the fuck were we?

(23:32):
So we were talking about kamalin ac. I M just
pull up a little plant list here. Okay, make sure
when you type in if you're going to I natracy,
typeing in Georgia for the location field, you're hitting Georgia, USA,
not Georgia the country. Okay, no shade the eastern Europe.
But you know, we were focusing on a different thing.

(23:52):
So god damn it. Now everything's just a mess. I
can't even see it. Everybody. Oh yeah, Riby's cravadum. We're
talking about granitick knob endemics, okay, or near endemics, plants
that like growing on the thin soiled areas of these
granitic knobs. And the geology in this case in the
Atlanta area is really cool because this was it was metamorphised, okay,

(24:15):
and it's a remnant of a time. Did you know
that North America and Africa once slammed into each other
and then later came apart and split up again. So
this is geologically a very old area. I think it's
three or four hundred million year old rocks that formed
some of these granitic knobs. So anyway, the rock it
Arabia Mountain, for instance, which is where we were getting

(24:38):
shot at, not intentionally, is part of the Lithonian nice.
It's a granitic rock that was later exposed by erosion
in the mountain itself. Arabia Mountain itself is called a
monodnock and isolated rock outcrop left standing after surrounding softer
rocks eroded away. So lots of erosion here, just like
throughout much of Appalasia. Okay, these mountains were originally much

(25:01):
larger and then if you know, over time been weathered
weathered down, and they're actually for the for Appalachies, you know,
for the Appalachian Mountains. There were there were I think
three three or four major orogenes that is mountain building
events orogenes, not erogenies like your erogenous zones, not e
R O O R O you had. Uh, the Grenville

(25:25):
orogeny was it like a billion years ago? There was
the Taconic orogeny, which was shortly after the Cambrian explosion,
a formation of life, okay, of the the more complex
life and an The most important orogeny was the Alleghanian

(25:46):
which is roughly three hundred million years ago. And this
is this is the big one. This is when Laurentia
and Gondwana UH smashed into each other. Gondwana. Africa was
part of Gondwana forming and they together they formed the
super Conon and Pangaea Laurentia which was North America and Gondwana.
This is not, of course not doesn't look anything like

(26:08):
like modern day North America. And this is why you'll
find the same rocks both in like Scotland UH and
Newfoundland right like eastern northeast coast of North North America
and then Scotland, you know, the same exact same rock
formed at the same time, same age, same kind, et cetera.

(26:28):
And also i'll find you know east like where you
get those well witchi of fossils on the east coast
of Brazil and also in Africa. So you know they
were together at one point because the Atlantic Ocean wasn't
always there before that seafloor spreading center opened up, pushed
North America to the west and Africa or the East,
et cetera. But that was that was the big one

(26:50):
that built the Appalachians, the Alleghanian Orogyeny just like Alleghany
Pennsylvania is that's a spot right where Alleghany. What's good
Allegheny count What is it? I don't know. I haven't
spent much time in Pennsylvania, but you want you know
what I'm talking about. So, just like India islamming into
Asia today, so was going on between what is today

(27:13):
Africa and what is today in North America three hundred
million years ago and that's what formed the Appoachian Mountains
and of course ever since then. So that was the
cause of the uplift continental collision and then now they've
been weathered down and from what I can understand, correct
me if I'm wrong. I mean, this is a one
way conversation. But you know, take what I'm saying with
the Grand Salt. This these rocks were you know, originally

(27:38):
they've got a large grain size the granite that forms
Arabia Mountain, which was later cooked and metamorphoused, but they
were much deeper back in the day three hundred million
years ago when they formed, and so as the mountains
above them have been eroded and weathered down, these have
risen up. You know, they've had the lithospheric rebound. When

(28:00):
you take some off, you relief some pressure off the top,
and it kind of floats back up. All right. So
that's that's where the just came from. But either way,
they're immensely important. And you've got geologic events that happened
three hundred million years ago dictating what grows there today. Okay,
a lot of the stuff that grows in these woodlands
down below could not grow on top of these granitic

(28:21):
knobs throughout the Atlanta area. There's not enough soil there.
It's too dry. I mean shit, that's why you get
the prickly pit. You got cactus there. You got shown
a llyrium there, which has a geophitic habit. It's a
relative of a gave sunny balls. I love that plant.
Wonderful plant. It's got like a little bulb. Is it
a bulber of corm? I don't know one of the
two bulbs are leaves, corms or stems, But either way,

(28:45):
it's got a storage mechanism. It's got a storage tuber
and what does sunny balls look like in August? You know,
if it has a rained in a while, like, can
they die? I presumably they can just dive back to
that bulb, right they fly now they flower in April.
I was so nice to be there in the humidity too,

(29:05):
so fucking humid poison ivy everywhere in the Atlanta area.
But uh yeah, man, I don't know it was the
humidity is so nice. It's so weird for me to
be in a place where it rains so much. It
rained a shit ton fifty to seventy inches a year.
That's insane. Where I live. I live in one of
I live in the most humid desert in North America.

(29:26):
It's technically not. It's where desert turns to thorn scrub.
You go west towards like Del Rio, Texas, that's more
you're hit in desert. Then you hit West Texas, Brewster County, Percity,
a kind of that's more true desert. Right where I live,
it's humid. The peote here grows on top of the ground.
It doesn't grow recessed into the ground like it does
in that little small population in West Texas where it

(29:49):
just kind of sinks it's at the top of the
plant is flat with the limestone that it grows in,
so it's it's humid here. I mean, we get like,
what is it, twenty two inches of rain A little,
I don't know. We're two hours from Brownsville more humid,
but over there, you know. And that was what was
cool too, is parts of parts of the Atlanta area

(30:12):
really felt like a milder version of the tropics, all right,
like the same kind of plant communities, not the lowland tropics,
the six thousand foot tropics, right, except you get a freeze.
It freezesn't there in the winter. So there's a lot
of shit that you're not going to get tropical species,
but you've got congeners maybe species that grow in the

(30:34):
same genus related plants. You're gonna have similar, similar enough,
at least taxonomically evolutionarily related, some of those same so
some of those same plants. And then of course you
can have you know, tropical stuff that doesn't families that
are tropical that don't grow. Can't cut it in Atlanta
at all. But it was cool to see because to

(30:55):
me it felt like parts of like Highland Wahaka or
some of the forests and Coast Rica, you know, which
also you get a lot of rain in those places
like Veric like highland, not highland, but you know montane
areas of Vera Cruz, Mexico, or Wahaca Wahaca, Mexico or
even uh Morelos Mexico. You know, the mount like directly

(31:17):
east of Mexico City and the mountains there seven thousand
foot elevation, that's kind of what it felt like at
like a thousand feet in the Atlanta area and a
similar rain, similar duff on the ground, somewhat related species oaks,
et cetera. You know, I remember seeing if there was
a fucking viburnum I saw at nine thousand feet in

(31:37):
Costa Rica, and you got viburnums all over the East
coast native ones, so that was really cool for me
to see. I bet the mushrooms are fucking nuts there too,
depending on what time you're out. But again, I was
obsessed with these these these you know, glades I generally
think of as limestone, so these were just what is

(31:58):
the term for these then just granted out croppings. I
don't know, knobs, I'd like to say in the word knob,
but anyway, yeah, so this this is these these thin
soiled plant communities. All right, so cool, so cool to see.
And I was surprised at how much facilia there was here.
All right, there was a lot of facilia facilia. The

(32:18):
genus boragineci to borige family are predominantly western. Most of
the diversity is out west. They're certainly more adapted to
the drier to drier areas. All right, Facilia is a
is a more xeric genus, a more drought adapted genus.
But of course on these thin soiled granites. You know,
I must have seen three or four different facilia species.

(32:40):
So Facilia dubia, uh, Facilia perchei. Where was that? I
think that was in Alabama. That was on a limestone glade.
Facilia bipanitifiah, Facilia macilatta. I think that's it. Facila congesta.
It's a Texas one. But yeah, so Facilia percii, macilotta,

(33:02):
and by panitifida. So you know that was what was
cool for me is you see what's mostly a western genus,
but you're gonna see it on thin soiled areas, on
these uh, these granitic knobs. Also got to see a
runding area gigantia and flower. There was a colony flowering
member there are a bamboo technically, so they're all gonna

(33:23):
they're gonna flower. They've got that gregarious monocarpy, so they
all flower at the same time. What the fuck else
did we see? Oh? You know what? Shout out to
Alicia and Dave who invited us out to their land
in northeastern Alabama where I got to stand on a
cliff watching drunken turkey vultures soar over a beautiful valley

(33:46):
and uh with there was Pinus virginiana everywhere, which is
I'm pretty sure it's a two need old pine again
it was again it was a rocky area, thin soiled,
rocky area. There was a puntia. Uh everywhere there was liatris.
It wasn't going off yet, but there was I think
two different Liatris species growing all over this cliff. Got

(34:09):
it was such a cool, such a cool sight, and
saw a bunch of box turtles too, box tortoises. God damn.
I just went to use the can. The fucking toilet's
broken again. You know these plastic pieces you got to
take the lid off and then flip the little handle
it's pain in the ass. Anyway. So again with this
theme of dry sites in western genera of plants that

(34:32):
have more Western species. Ribies is another example. We had
Ribies curvadum, but wonderful, white flowered, really cool where curved petals.
The gooseberry genus, the genus of gooseberries. Ribies is the
genus of gooseberries, of currants berries. That's not like a
British currants. Gooseberries got like, I don't know, fifty something

(34:57):
species out west, all right, like west of Illinois, and
then on the east coast you got like twenty four.
So most of the diversity is out west. There's a
species of Ribies that grows in Baja. What species was that,
by the way to I forget? Oh yeah, it was
Riby's torchi woes. That's a sick one. Got the flowers
and it looked dope. Oh god, I remember that one. Anyway,

(35:20):
I saw that growing with Asculus perii, the dwarf buckeye,
a buckeye that grows with giant cacti. But but anyway,
you know, again, it wasn't surprising that primarily a genus
that has most of its diversity in the arid west
of North America, I would find growing in Georgia, in
Atlanta on a thin soiled granite knob that was its

(35:42):
stone mountain, you know, the place where they got the KKK.
It's well, I guess it's the Confederate, the same thing
they got the Confederate, the you know stiffs carved into
the mountain side, you know where it's trying to see
how far would I have to puke to have it
dripped down anyway? So just for me from you know
what I know. The other species I know in many

(36:03):
of the genera that I was encountering here, another plant, uh,
Pilea rutasi, Tilea trifoliata. The species that I was encountering
here was really cool to see, you know that, you
know from what I know of them where they grow
out west, the more arid areas they're growing here on

(36:24):
this these thin soiled spots. Femoranthus was there too. The
what do they call fame flower? What is a common
name for this fame flower? You shouldn't should just stay
away from all these common names. Just learn the learn femoranthus.
Because Femoranthus is a genus. You're going to see it
glades throughout the Midwest and East coast, I still saw
cool femoranthus in Joplin, Missouri. I love these glade habitats,

(36:48):
these these whether it's limestone, which I generally think of
as being a glade, or you know, a granitic knob. Right.
There was Yucca filamentosa there as well. That was at
Arabia Mountain. Philadelphus Inodorus, Quirkish, Montana. That'sa oh, the Philadelphis.
Where did I see that again? Yeah? The you know

(37:11):
what was really cool was Trediscontia herseudocullus. It was a
hairy again hares confer adaptation to drought, a very hairy,
almost obscenely so uh, Tretiscontia. So not only that I
have the stem succulents that had the hairs as well,
and then just to be able to stand up on

(37:32):
top of one of these these knobs and look out
the fucking view is beautiful. You can get up there.
So cool. But the highlight for me was seeing isoeedes
melanospora or melanospora if you want to call it that,
which is a relative of the great lepidodendron, which of
course are the you know, one of the scale trees
that built the like a direct descendant of lepidodendron, one

(37:57):
of the scale trees that built the whole force of
the carboniferous Right, they just used to grow fast as
hell and then would just when they die and they
would just pile up and there. You know, this is
when you know, large plant life was still relatively new.
This is like three hundred fifty million years ago, so
there wasn't enough Fungi and other microbes hadn't evolved yet.

(38:19):
I mean there was fungy, but not ones that could
decompose quickly decompose all this uh lignan and cellulose that
was being created in these coal forces. So that's why
we have coal. We're bringing back coal. Man, Jesus Christ.
He's the reminders of today's idiocracy. So uh so, yeah, man,

(38:41):
that was I mean, you know, isoheedes grows up on
this granite. You've got these little divots where water collects
and will form these ephemeral ponds. There was another cool
aquatic plant there, Gradiola amfiantha, which I was not familiar with,
and it was yes, it's critically in dangered. I was
not the normally it's submerged, it's in the it's in Plantagenec,

(39:06):
the family plantagen Ac. But much of the water was
already dried up. I mean it was still semi wet
like parts of the isoetes were still green, but they
were not submerged anymore. But Isoetes grows with this gradiole
and they grow in these little ephemeral ponds. They are
only a few inches deep, and then like on the
edge of the pond will be an opunthia, like a
prickly pair because it's it just is so dry, and

(39:30):
a lot of cacti, even peoti can be you know,
once they're adult size and it's hot enough, they can
be submerged in water for a day or two, uh
you know, and just without without rotting, you know, and
they just suck up all the water and then it's
an ephemeral pond so it drives out. Not a big deal.
But I think, I you know, this will be in
the video and that's coming out. I don't know when

(39:51):
you're listening to this thing. I don't know when I'll
release this fucking podcast, but the video should be out
this weekend. Isohetes is cool. It's literally an inch or
too tall. Doesn't look totally you know, inconspicuous plant, not
something you would stop to look at, doesn't look showy,
doesn't look that cool until you get up close to it.

(40:12):
If you have no context for it'd be really easy
to not give a shit about. But knowing it's a
relative of these ancient these ancient plants that reproduces by spores.
The spores are contained in like a little almost swollen
black sack at the base of these leaves, and that's
normally under a little matt of pebbles or soil. I
was stoked to see it, and we get an Isoetes

(40:33):
species here on the granitic knob that we have in
Texas near Fredericksburg called enchanted rock. Again, these names enchanted?
Why is it enchanted? Enchanted? Gloryhole? Right? Enchanted? Why is
it enchanted? It's just a granitic knob. Do you have
to bring in like these weird fairy tale references, you know,
like we're fucking children for Christ's ex well grown man.

(40:55):
I don't need it to be a check that. Just
call it a granitik knob, nab. It's a granitic knob anyway,
another very old piece of interesting, ignious rock that's got
a bunch of cool plants that it forms a thinner
soil area, you know, in Texas, though it's already by
that point when you move west through North America, it's
already drying out enough, because as you move west, it

(41:18):
continues to dry out. You know. You got that, You
got that one hundredth meridian right in the center of Texas,
where everything east of there is generally more music, everything
west is more dry. It's the dividing line we you know,
as biogeography enthusiasts, consider the dividing line between the arid

(41:38):
west and the more music humid east. But and I've
never been to enchanted Gloryhole, Enchanted Rock. I'm sorry, I've
never been there. You know, but if you do, go
to the adult bookstore near Joplin, Missouri. They give you
your materials in a black plastic bag. Now, so you
don't have to be you don't have to walk out,
you know, look of shame when you're walking your truck.

(42:02):
I'm just kidding. I was teasing a friend about that.
And you go through Missouri, it's always the most repressed
areas where you get the dirty Where was the there
was a dildo shop? I saw it was painted pink
and what's Merle Haggard's hometown in Oklahoma? Shit, I forget.
I don't know. It's too early for this. I forget. Anyway,
let's not go down that road. I always got to

(42:24):
find a way to filter out the squares somehow. I
don't want I'm listening to this podcast right that said,
this podcast is not sponsored by Native American Seed. Okay,
I wanted to come there and do a video and
I was, you know, I love what they do. They
have a wonderful seed catalog, but they did not want
any affiliation with me, and I understand. I totally understand

(42:45):
I would not want any affiliation with myself either. So
I have to go on the record expressly stating that,
despite my encouraging you to buy seed from Native American Seed,
they are not sponsoring this podcast. They do not approve
of Crime Pays, but Botany doesn't. So I don't want
any you know, any of the stiffs or prudes who

(43:06):
don't like what I do, to think that because I
endorse Native American Seed that they're on board with me.
They're not endorsing me. They are not okay with me.
All right? And thank God, because someone's got to stand
for decency here for the genteeles. Right it is, after all,
it's Texas. It's a little you gotta be prudent here,
you know, a little repressed, a little prudent. We don't

(43:29):
like to use cuss words and call everybody sir, and
we don't approve of his filthy mouth nor his delivery. No,
they're doing great work, and they don't I don't think
they don't like me. They just don't want any affiliation
with me, which I understand because they have to do
the hard work of working with the stiffs and getting

(43:49):
their support, and you can't do that if you're any
of if you're having any affiliation with a guy that
you know, talks about duffel bags full of DilOS, or
how he's you know, a dirty bookstore in Merle Haggard's
hometown or something anything you know, which I think is funny.
I do employ toilet humor a lot, but I don't

(44:10):
want anyone to look down on Native American seed. They
do not approve of my endorsement of them. Okay, they
want nothing to do with me, all right. Some of
the people who work there really cool, by the way,
and they've got a great seed catalog. But I don't
want anyone to get the wrong impression that because I'm
endorsing them, that they, you know, somehow, you know, approve

(44:33):
of what I do. Okay, they don't. So don't you know,
if you're one of these these the pasty Texas stiffs,
don't don't get the wrong idea. I want you to
still support them too. They don't have anything to do
with me. But they've got a wonderful seed catalog too.
You should check it out. Okay. So anyway, so isoetes

(44:56):
milanos melanospora milanospoil was up and the ones at the
margin of this pond were dying out. You know, these
ponds probably pond probably filled up like a day after
I left because it rained too. It rains so much there,
Like what's the longest that the Atlanta area goes without rain?
I don't know. I mean, apparently long enough for these
ponds to dry out. But still, it was really cool

(45:19):
to see where their sporangia are, where the spores are produced.
It's again, it's at the base of those leaves, like
in a little sheath god. Isohetes is so cool to
have fallen from great heights you go to the Field Museum,
you look at the fossils of the scale trees, and
you think, you know, you've fallen from glory, my friend,

(45:39):
but you're still glorious to me. That's what you say
to the isoetes, is what I was thinking to isohetes
when I was looking at it. Excuse me, that was
I'm sorry, that was really, that was really you didn't
need to hear that. What else was up top? So
we had smilax smolly I too, growing in the cracks.
I already mentioned that we had Rubus pennsylvanikis, which is
a native of raspberry, with white flowers forming these kind

(46:02):
of arching branches. I was almost worried that it was
not native at first, but then I looked into it
and it's, sure enough it is. I didn't, you know.
I just I saw this raspberry species and it was
thriving in some areas so well that I thought, maybe
it's not native. It's behaving like it's got no natural

(46:22):
checks and bounces, But indeed it does. Rubus pennsylvani goes
again all this stuff, and these were growing out of cracks,
so no soil here, but they've got these cracks that
they can send their roots down into Who knows how
deep there was vaccinium or borium there too. Galcemium semperverance.
Does anybody who's not in the South, No, not know

(46:42):
what gelcemium is. It's a really cool I first became
familiar with it when we were filming Kill Your Lawn
in New Orleans because Swampfly was planting it. You know,
the ladies at swamp Fly were planting it in some
of the yards that we were doing. But apparently it
can take it just finds a crack to grow on,
and it can take these kind of laid nob habitats
in Atlanta really well. Supposedly it's mildly psychoactive. I don't know.

(47:07):
Galcemiace is the family how what is a taxonomy? How
many yeah, Galcemiace I think how many genera Galcemium must Mustuia,
moss Tuia, and Tileo karpa and the order gentian Aleies.
So three genera, I don't know how many species, and
it's in the order Gentianalies. But yellow flowers, yellow five

(47:30):
pedal flowers. When it's going off, it's a fine line between, uh,
you know, between psychoactive and toxic. So do with that
what you may. If you decide to put some in
your ass or smoke some. I don't advise it, but
you know people are going to experiment to escape the
bleakness of modern day. There was a Helianthus portery there.
They were just getting started, little seedlings. That's an it's

(47:53):
a sunflower. They are like many members of Asteraci. They're
late summer bloomers, late summer early all bloomers. Kyan Anthos
virginicus fringe tree was there. Olyac, the olive family relative
of ash trees. Plants are generally dioecious that the will
either produce male flowers or female flowers. The male flowers

(48:15):
are supposedly the most showy, right. The male flowers are
the one sas Shane you know around a parking lot,
you know, calling everyone you know derogatory names. Oh, and
Moninuria uniflora another one of these arid microsite endemics. These
plant these are the plants that you see and it's

(48:35):
an indicator of like, oh, the soil is not too
deep here. And we saw the same thing when we
went out with Kyle from Native Habitat Project to Alabama.
The next day growing in the Limestone Glades. And that
was really cool to see because I mean, he took
us out to this spot that that was kind of

(48:56):
how he got in to plants. He had been going
there since he was a kid, and he talked about
like the first time he went out there, he's tried
to spray it with round up. I think what he
was trying to do. I think he was trying to
like clear it out or increase the potential for wildlife
to inhabit it, for turkeys or something. You know, he's
a hunter. I still don't understand how people can be
against hunting. You, I mean, I do, you have to

(49:16):
be ecologically illiterate. So I don't want to shit on anybody,
but it's just you know, it's checks and balances, if
you know, if there's no hunting of deer, the deer
populations get too big, they start impacting the plants and
then everything else that lives. You know, it's like any ecosystem,
too little or too much of something and the whole
tower stuff, whole Jenga tower starts coming down. Anyway. So

(49:39):
uh well, maybe that was a Puntia music canta. I
don't fucking know. I'm so over trying to figure out
what Puntia uh, you know, especially in the East coast,
if there's when you're in Mexico, it's different because there's
more variation between the prickly pair of species. But you
know hume ethusus that s Potosa music canta, that could
the differences between these Upunthia species can be very very

(50:03):
nil or or very subtle. Linaria canadensis purple flowers with
a nectar spur. It was another cool plant to see.
I forget what is it. They call it toad flex.
I don't know. It's not related to bastard toad flex,
which is a semi parasitic plant that we also saw
at one of the prairies in northwestern Georgia. Linaria canadensists

(50:28):
purple flowers, uh, nectar nectar spur which implies, you know,
butterflies hit this things. We can stick the proboscos and
the nectar spur whatever. That was common on the glade
habitats as well. But anyway, we went to uh, the
the granite habitats as well, but have Yeah, so Kyle
showed us this the spot where it all started for him,

(50:51):
you know, his journey, his journey into uh into botany
and just you know, native plants and restoring habitats. That
guys doing so much good work, and that brings up
something for me that was just smacking me in the face.
Every time that I was there was you're okay, you
get fifty to seventy inches of rain a year. I

(51:11):
think it literally rained every day I was there. I
was there for a week, maybe one or two days
it didn't rain. When you get that much rain, everything
grows so vigorously, and so you need something to check
if it's not megafauna, which are all basically extinct on
the East coast, especially the bison. If it's not megafauna

(51:32):
keeping these plants in check, this plant life is just
going to grow and grow, just like the the cold
force of the carboniferous, right, the fun guy in the
bacteria that break them down can only do so much
and move so fast, and so you know you need
something in these habitats or else it just gets choked out.
I mean, Kyle took this to another glade in Alabama.

(51:55):
It was a thin soiled limestone glade. It was kars,
so there were like the beginnings of caves. There were
huge divits that were sometimes three feet deep in this limestone,
and it gets so much rain that the like these
this glade. Well, first off, the only reason where we
were where the glade was open there it was because
it was a power line going over, so they had

(52:16):
to keep it clear. They would come through, spray, moll whatever.
But on the sides of the where that power line was,
it was like thick juniper I think junipers Virginiana, probably
oaks and stuff. And so there's so much rain that
even these thin soiled glade, this thin soil glade, which
there's not much elevational change between this and the surrounding

(52:38):
landscape like there was on the granite knobs or the
nice knobs, the g N e I s s metamorphous
granite knobs like we saw in the Atlanta region. This
is in northeast Alabama. That even these glades would would
slowly eventually not actually not even that slowly, they would

(52:58):
they would just get smothered. We'd just get too dense.
The plant life will get too dense, and all these
cool glade endemics, these things that don't get that tall,
that can thrive in thin soiled areas, would eventually get
choked out. And shaded out by juniper and oaks, and
so thus the importance of fire. You know what I
was getting at. Fire is so important in these East

(53:19):
Coast habitats, and it was likely practiced for thousands of years.
I mean, we know it was. It was It likely
was one of the main ways that tick populations and
sugar populations were kept down because not only are you
incinerating the ticks and the chiggers, you're burning up the
duff that they need to help retain the humidity when

(53:40):
they're you know, overwintering or going into the nym stage
and the soil, so you burn away all that duff,
you burn a ray, all that schmutz. You know, the
fire was so important. I think it was like some
of these habitats is like one to three year intervals.
Like Lily, my friend that Florida Native Plant Society talks
about how well you know, the the fire down there,

(54:04):
it was like a one to three year interval. And
again fire suppression, which is basically what you've had since
the you know, the euro settlers came in since the
I don't want to say honky menace, but you know
what I mean, came in because it's a cultural thing.
It's not about race. It's a cultural thing. It's you know,
it is the part of the death cult or not.

(54:24):
But ever since they came in and you know, wiped
out many of the natives or pushed them out and
then started taking over the land and not knowing how
to manage it, and so they of course suppressed fire
because fire is bad generally. It's what they think or
what the what the you know, what the the accepted

(54:45):
thinking was of the day. And so you have two
hundred years of fire suppression and you've got you know,
these habitats are just totally altered for the worse for wildlife,
for people, uh not for tics or chiggers. It's much
It's great for tics and jiggers because it helps, you know,
now they can retur and all this humidity they've got,
all this extra veg dead veg, et cetera. That's great
for creating a little humid microclimate. You burn that away.

(55:08):
Not only do you make it easier for new plants
to come up and you enrich the soil, you also
remove the stuff that the takes and sigers need to thrive.
As well as incinerating takes and sugars, and you know,
it's it's kind of what resets the scoreboard, what resets
the canvas for everything else to you know, creates a

(55:29):
blank canvas for everything else to go to grow. And
so that's what Kyle's been doing. He showed me this,
this land they purchased for the leafy prairie clover, which
is Dlia foliosa. Delia is a big genus, plenty of
species in the genus Dahlia. We get a shif ton
in Texas. Great genus, really cool. It's in the pea
family Fabasi, in the subfamily the p subfamily, known for

(55:51):
their p flower morphology faboidy. And so he showed me
this habitat where they were burning, and he, you know,
he said, when we first got this habitat, it was
choked out. And now we've been burning and this endangered
plant is now popping up everywhere, like the seeds that
were probably in the soil forever are now able to germinate.
You know. That's and that's what he kept telling us about,

(56:13):
was that the seed bank is able to now come up.
So burning has been so good for this landscape. And
it's not like out west where you get these Santa
Ana winds and it's so dry it doesn't rain for
six months, like southern California. Of course, Mediterranean climate dry summers,
fire is inevitable, but it can also be much more
disastrous because it doesn't rain for six months, especially if

(56:34):
you've had a century of fire suppression and the fuel
load is built up east coast, it's more humid, it
rains more often. It can be hard to keep a
fire going, all right. And this is the same thing
that you know. I remember growing up hearing about the prairies.
My mom would tell me how the natives would burn
the prairies. I couldn't understand, but once you've been to

(56:55):
a prairie you could see why. Again they've you know,
all that veg starts to pile up after a year.
You burn it, you reinvigorate the soil, burn away the
ticks and the chiggers, get it going again. So that
was something that I kept thinking about everywhere we went,
and we would drive by forests that were just choked
out and smothered, and not just with invasives, but with

(57:15):
natives too, I mean just really dense forests, Like the
burning is so important there. I want to have a
burn day in Chicago. You know, we need some we
need some goth teen arsonists to set fire to the
forest preserves in Chicago, you know, like a late summer,
late fall day or something. Kill all the buckthorn we
might have. You know, where was it Chiller Woods on

(57:36):
the Northwest Side. I always talking about, maybe have like
a buckthorn clearing party, you know, get a cooler full
of na beers, a couple of stogies, you know, maybe
accidentally light the woods on fire. I don't know. You know,
Chicago's not ready for that yet. They're not ready for
prescribed burns right now, like good old Jerry Wilhelm does

(57:59):
in his yard, author of the floor of the Chicago area,
burns his suburban yard in Glen View or glenn Allen,
wherever the hell he lives. I don't know. God, that
guy's yard is amazing too. Oh what an o G.
I saw him at the uh what was the thing
I went to in February, the Wild Things conference? That
was fun. That was a nice time. I saw him there.

(58:23):
It was cool to shoot the shit and say hi
to him. But that guy lives in a fucking man.
That guy lives in like the suburbs and he still burns.
And you know, I don't know how he worked it
out with the fire department, but they just I guess
they're cool with it now. He probably had some explaining
to do for the first three or four years, you know,

(58:43):
but just again, just by being polite and informative and kind,
he was able to get it going. But burning in
these eastern habitats is so important, man, so important. The
ticks alone would be reason for me to just want
to light everything up. Anyways, Also want to give a
shout out to grimmy alevi gotta, which is a little
it's like a bearded moss. It saw another it's in

(59:04):
the family grimy Ac. I saw other species of Grimea
actually in West Texas, and a grown with peoti and Aerocarpus,
the living rock cactus. But this was a that was
a much hairer, more whitish, more drought adapted form of Grimea,
a little tiny fucking moss. But this was grime olevia gotta.

(59:25):
And this is what's growing on many of these, uh
these granite knobs in the Atlanta area. So anyway, after that,
we went, uh we went west through northwest Georgia, for
towards the Cusa Prairie, and it was started. It was
about the damn thunderstorm on us, black clouds on the horizon,
but we still decided to do it. And that started

(59:47):
getting really cool. Because I love prairies. I didn't expect
to see Stilpiu and terrabinthinaceum there. The prairie doc, the
same prairie doc you get in the Chicago area, which
I love so much, can live a century. It's in
the sunflower family, gets you know, twelve foot tall inflorescences,
flower spikes, and then has leaves that can be upwards
of three feet long in some cases. It looks like

(01:00:08):
a dam tropical plant forms a massive route that can
shoot down thirty forty feet in some cases, emblematic of
the prairies of the Midwest, and here it was growing
in northwest Georgia. So that was fucking wonderful to see
Critagis pruinosa get into the genus Critagus there, which I get.

(01:00:31):
You know, we get that in Texas too, but I don't.
I can't remember if I'm that familiar with any out west,
like in California. I'm sure they're there, but I just
never really paid attention to them. Low nisra some perverance
right native red flowered honeysuckle obviously hummingbird pollinated. Got kind
of a white colored ab axial that is underside to

(01:00:55):
the leaf ilex lounge apes. Saw some baptizia there. You know,
you're going through like pine plantation to get to this
prairie remnant. This that's well managed, that's burned and that
it's you know, well taken care of. But but god,
it's just it's pine plantation everywhere. It's the native pine.

(01:01:16):
Was it was it the loblollie or I don't know.
I don't have much interest in the pine plantations. But
but you eventually make this little prairie outcropping. And I
was really excited to see Marshallia. There's a species of Marshallia.
It's Marshallia MOREI. I think it should be blooming now.

(01:01:37):
It wasn't blooming when I was out there, but we
saw Marshallia abbovada. These are members of the sunflower family
of ast Raci that have flowers in floresce a flower
head that looks like it's like it's an onion flower.
Really cool. We think we get one or two in Texas,
but it's a cool genus. Most of the diversity is

(01:01:59):
in the east. Something I saw before we got to
the prairie that I was stoked to see was the
asarum the which is the genus of wild ginger. It's
in the Aristolochiac family to pipe vine family, which I'm
sure from me rant them out before toxic leaves on
Aristolochia aristolochic acid host plant for many cool butterflies, including

(01:02:22):
the black swallow tail. Crazy ass flowers that trap insects,
that trapped flies pollinated by flies and temporarily trap them,
and they've got a Gyno. The flowers of pipe vines
have have what's called a gynostamium, which is a column
that contains both It's a column on the inside of

(01:02:45):
the flower that contains both the anthers and the stigma,
all right, kind of similar to what an orchid does.
He's got a column that's got the you know, anther
on it, and the case of orchids, most orchids only
have one anther and the stigma. So it's got this
this this structure. But in Aristolochia, it's uh, they're protogenists,

(01:03:05):
so the flower is female first, and then after that
goes into the male face, and that's to avoid fucking itself,
to avoid self pollinating, to ensure better genetic outcrossing. And
the female part the stigma is up top of this column,
and then the anthers are on the sides. And that's
the same thing that was going on with the genus Asarum.

(01:03:26):
The wild gingers again no relation to ginger at all.
Ginger is a monocot, Aristolochia is not. Aristolochia is one
of the more early branching angiosperm lineages. It's technically not
a udikot either. But what was the genus that they
were calling. They were calling this something else. I think.

(01:03:46):
I think Weekly's Flora treats it something I don't know. Offense,
he makes up all, he makes up a bunch of stuff.
He'd like. They got their own taxonomy. It doesn't make
it up, but they make their They make their own taxonomy.
It doesn't always jibe well with angiosperm alogeny group. And
it begins with the H hexas stylist. That's it. Yeah, okay, yeah,

(01:04:08):
I guess I don't know man, so I naturalists and
APG don't recognize hexas style hexas Stylus is being different,
but weekly does hexas stylus is different anyway, If they're
basically they're in the same family, they're closely related Asarum,
as a ar Um and hexas stylists. And why are
these cool? Why is this worth memorizing the name, remembering

(01:04:30):
this genus name this this you know, wopping six letter
genus name asorum or in the case of hexas stylists,
nine letters. Because they've got this cool pollination biology also
utilizing flies to pollinate them, and they create these tiny
little flowers that are at the base, they're under the leaves,
all right, really easy to miss. You see this thing

(01:04:52):
as the leaves kind of look like an aeroid in
some cases. And then these tiny flowers are blooming on
the forest floor, all right, three pedaled flowers, which is
another trait protogeny being female first, having a flower a
perfect flower that's female first. And also you know, a
flower in numerals of three, which you would normally think

(01:05:15):
would be a monocop But again, this is the the
early branching lineage that is in the family Aristolochiace aristolochiac
is in the order piper Ales. It's one of the Magnoliads.
All right, that's the kind of the the I guess
said informal clade, the Magnolias. Not really, it's not an angiosperm.
Phylogeny poster four orders Canilelees, piper alesh Loreles, and magnoli Alies.

(01:05:43):
Aristolochiace is in piper Ales along with piper the genus piper, Pepperomia,
et cetera. So anyway, yeah, so it's it's got three petals,
which again is weird. You normally see three petals a
three maras flower and think it would think that's a
you know, it's a trait you normally see monocots. But again,
the magnolias, it's a little different. They're an earlier branching.

(01:06:06):
They branched this lineage branched off the Anglo spring family tree,
prior to the monocots where it's thought to have. Anyway,
so this is a this is a really cool genus.
It's it's how many species we got in it. They're
all fly pollinated. They're uh, let's look this up, how
many they're all fly pollinated. So far as I know,

(01:06:31):
they've got these kind of maroonish colors to the flowers
growing shady woodlands like this was growing in the understory
of tulip poplars, which are not a poplar leriodendron. There
are another magnolia. They're in the They're related to magnolias.
Some oaks and what else was there? I think sassafras.

(01:06:52):
That's a sassafras can be damn weedy in this sassafras,
liquid ambar, et cetera. Did you know that liquid ambar?
The sweet coms grow in chiappus and icars man. There's
a saarum in Ah. It's all over the world in
the northern hemisphere, leaves lots of diversity in Asia West coast,
not much in the Central United States like the Rocky Mountains.

(01:07:16):
I think there's any there, and then a bunch of
the East coast. Supposedly some in Europe too. Goddamn Asarum's everywhere.
Not much in the southern hemisphere. But anyway, Yeah, so
that was that was really cool to see that asarum
arifolium because it looks like a like an aerid arifolium califolium,

(01:07:40):
which I guess some people call hexas stylus, And in
this same habitat Ozma riiza lunges stylus was going off.
I saw on Ozma riiza species in Chile, you know,
apac Cara family, so leaves looking like a parsley, tiny
white flowers and a compound humble. What's the common name?

(01:08:00):
What is this? Sweet? Cisely? The fuck does that? Why
is it? What is cisely? Long style sweet root? But uh,
but yeah, this was this was that was abundant, that
was everywhere again, this this shady understory, this woodland. Josh
was going there to get you know, he's a hippie,
so he's got to get it spring water. He only

(01:08:22):
drinks the spring water. So he went there and did
that and then tolerated me while I ran off into
the bushes looking at plants. God, I got some nice
macro shots that at the asarum wild ginger now relation
to ginger. And then after that we headed out to
Thecusa prairie where we saw you for bea corolatta, which

(01:08:43):
that is a plant too that you also get. It's
another prairie plant, cool prairie plant. Uh. There was Zizia
aptera out there, another member of apac To Carrott family,
Lithospermum kniscence hori pecoon, which is another great indicator of

(01:09:04):
thin soil areas in this prairie too. I believe the
limestone was still pretty close to the surface. I saw
Nostok there that looks like green snot that cyanobacterial film.
Anytime you see nostak, you know you got either hardpan
or thin soiled areas. And Comandra umballada was there too,
that weird ass bastard toadflex is. The common name is

(01:09:29):
it's another hemi parasitic plant, five white petals, a bunch
of flowers are like size of a marble if that.
And it's in Yeah, it's in Santa Leasi, which right there,
and it tells you it's parasitic, full parasite, like obligate parasite,
or partially parasitic, because the whole order Santalales, so far

(01:09:52):
as I know, and all the families contained therein are
partial or full parasites. And so anyway, speaking of parasites,
Pendicularis canadensis was going off with those those yellow hoods
paintbrush family ooral Bancs, which is not in Santa Leeles,

(01:10:12):
not in the order Santa Lallies. There was some white
flowered siserankiums. The Siicerenkium diversity can be nuts in North America,
and it's one of another one of those genera where
the differences are so minute that I just I just
don't care, and it drives me nuts because some of
these keys that you look at for these plants, they're
written by somebody in an arbarium who may or may

(01:10:34):
not know the ecology and the ecological behavior or the
habitat preference of these plants, and so can't you know,
the differences might be more than you would initially assume,
but because they're looking at them in an arbarium, they're
relying on things like, you know, how the seed, what
the placentation of the seed is, and the fruit or

(01:10:57):
what the you know, these subtle characteristics that are not
really easy to use for identification if you're keying them
out using a flora, and so I kind of lose interest.
They either have to go see the plant and habitat
or see it in an urbarium to get an idea
of the differences between it, the difference between the species

(01:11:18):
and the same genus that look look very similar. And
then of course you can for some of these you
can assume that they're hybridizing or there might be more
plastic or whatever. So I just in order for me
to care what, you know, how great the species, the
differences between two closely related or closely look alike species

(01:11:40):
in the same genuses, I have to see. I have
to you know, be able to know the difference between them,
whereas if they just look alike, I'm just like, it's
a cisernkium and that's good enough for me. I just
I'm not one of these people who fixates on these
subtle differences and has to know everything. That's some weird shit,
to be honest with you, right, Like, morphologically, I don't know.

(01:12:02):
And it's just it's so frustrating too, because again, some
of these keys are written by someone who maybe doesn't
get onto the field that much, you know, and it's
just again looking at shitting in an arbarium versus I
would love to write my own flora one day, where
it's like, not flora, but you know, a summation of species,
where it's like the shit you would hear in a

(01:12:23):
conversation with someone. Well, this is different because it likes
to grow in a wetter habitat and it's like the
more thin, soiled rocky habitat, or you know, they this
thing kind of grows on the west side of this
mountain range. This thing looks grows on the east side.
They look a lot alike, but you could tell the
differences in bomb bomb bomb these different ways, you know,
just to kind of like normal, shoot the shit, casual
summation of species differences. You don't have to rely on,

(01:12:46):
you know, these subtle ass traits that someone in an
Arberia herbarium who's writing a flora might depend on that
in an ideal world. Okay, that's what I would be doing. Okay,
you know, the time for a break. I want to
tell you about this thing I saw. This is a
sick This is a sick ass thing to do. I mean,
like literally disgusting, but I thought it was pretty funny.

(01:13:06):
I had to send it to like nine different people
that I'm friends with. I follow this page called regret Maxing,
and he just posts, uh, all this different shit that
he finds on the internet, you know, in the in
the gutter of the Internet. And it was a picture
of some dude urinating into one of those dicing that's
so terrible. Of course, someone like me would laugh at this.

(01:13:28):
It was in a public bathroom and someone had one
of those dice in you know, those like super amped
up hand dryers that just like blows like if someone's sick,
it just blows shit ever, you know, it blows like
viral particles everywhere. It's like a you know, and fuck Dyson. Anyway,
I had one of the vacuum cleaners once and a
broke after like a year and a half. But uh,

(01:13:50):
those dice in hand DRIs and this dude's just pissing
into it. Just aerosol, aerosolizing all the urine, just totally disgusting,
in heinous, but at this but at the same time
kind of funny. It's like, what kind of sick fucking bastard.
Only in the United States, you know, only in the
United States, Only in this in this special country, this

(01:14:12):
special place in time which someone come up with I
don't know. Oh god, it was so gross, man. So
oh just aerosolizing. Okay, So you got to take time
to laugh in the dystopia in the decline. Okay, So
moving right along, let's talk about the limestone glade we

(01:14:33):
saw in Alabama. Alabama is so cool, man, It's cutty.
It's like in northeastern Alabama. It's cutty. It's remote. It's
not like, you know, it's not a hotshot area. It's
pretty mellow. We went to a Mennonite bakery there that
felt like, you know, you were living in a pre
inflation United States. Like the prices and all this stuff
was nice, really nice, like really you know, like ten

(01:14:56):
years ago, you know, and they sold like I bought
like a wooden from my daughter that I found there,
you know, like they had like all it, you know,
like the it's like a Mennonite store, like not just
the deli, it's like a Mennonite store. Right. They need
to start selling T shirts. You know, what would a
T shirt that you sell in a Mennonite spot, you'd
be you know, like I like my I don't know,

(01:15:17):
I like my funny hat. No offense to them. I'm
just saying, you know, something you could do like a
I don't know, Mennonite tourism shirts something like that. It
was a great place to be though. It was really nice,
and then of course the the thunderstorms. It was like
overcast and I don't know, it was cool. I was
pretty into pretty into Alabama. But Kyle took us to

(01:15:38):
a bunch of different glades. Finally got to see the
genus Levinworthia, which is a mustard. It's in the Brassic case.
That was great, so four pedaled sinnapomorphies of the mustard family,
four petals, four sepals, six stamens. Levenworthia is you know,
you get them on glades in Tennessee. They're like a
it's a glade genus. It likes the thin, soiled, rocky areas.

(01:16:00):
I think we saw what we saw was levinworthy acrassa.
Earlier that day, I had seen one of my favorite
plants in North America, the American smoke tree Cotinus abbervedus.
Of course you'll see smoke trees the genus Catinas planted
in human landscaping often, but it's always the asiatic species
because it's got the red leaves or whatever the shit.
It's not a native. This was really wonderful to see,

(01:16:23):
and I think it's called the smoke tree because when
it flowers, the flowers are so small, so tiny, that
they kind of look like smoke, and they're on these
panicles like the family anacardiac, the mango sumac and poison
oak family normally gets tiny white flowers on panicles, but
in the American smoke tree, the flowers are so small
and they're so greatly spread out that it kind of

(01:16:45):
looks like smoke. And this is a plant that comes,
it grows around the Austin area, but it's exceptionally endangered
and rare, and it would I would love to see
it being grown more. If someone could master the art
of growing Cotinus abbervedus the American smoke tree, you'd be
doing us all a favor. And if you're in Texas
and trying to do it, try to find the Texas

(01:17:05):
populations and collect seed. I think Michael Easton at San
Antonio Botanic Garden was growing. I know he's got one
in his yard in Alpine, but god, it's such a
cool one. I've seen it. I saw a small population
on top of a limestone outcrop that I think Eric
Knight gave me to point for and it was on

(01:17:26):
some cutty road near Wimberley or something. And probably you know,
it's like most Texas plants, it's a rare plant that
there's like one or two places you could see it
on like a public right of way, and then maybe
there's a huge population and someone's land somewhere, but they're
nuts and they'll shoot it you if you come and
try to see it. Who knows, But in any case,

(01:17:46):
it's a really cool plant. And where we saw it,
it was growing on a limestone outcropping with a whole
bunch of other cool shit roosts aromatica, which god damn,
the roos Aromatica I'm used to is like a small shrub.
This was a big leaved shrub that grows. I guess
I've just never seen the east the Southeast ecotype before,
but it was really cool to see. And then there

(01:18:08):
was Poleia what is it, Poleia andromeda the coffee fern,
what's that? What's the common name birds foot fern, which
is in Terra dacey no is Polea atro papurea, which
of course the sporangia, the black spores are on the
underside of these like plastic feeling leaves growing along the margins.
But and it was growing in the shade at this

(01:18:29):
really cool fucking limestone outcrop you could tell had been
a quarry at one point. And there's fucking poison ivy
where we have to look where you step. There was
a really odds I don't know if it was an
ecotype or what of Delphinium, which it was. Ainett was saying,
it's Delphinium caroliniaum. I looked at every other Delphinium, both

(01:18:52):
on the Consortium of Herbaria and on I naturalists that
grew in the area, and I couldn't find anything that matched.
It had really thinly. It was really unique. Like first off,
Delfinium caroline ain'tum the lark spurs for the common name.
They got a nectar spur. They got a fucking cool
flower morphology. It's a it's a really cool genus. You

(01:19:13):
get some out well, you know, they could look like columbine.
Sometimes they're in the same family Ranunculacy. What is that
the buttercup family? Guy said, a stupid common name buttercup?
What is a buttercup? Somebody tell me what the fuck
a buttercup? What is a buttercup? It sounds like some
deranged sexual act. I don't know what a buttercup is anyways,
stupid common name ranunculacy. Okay, many many toxic members, many

(01:19:38):
medicinal members too, but it's always a fun How cool
is it. What is a yellow finch outside? Fucking cool?
I went outside the other day there was a warbler
in my truck and it took a shit in there.
I don't know how I leave my windows open so
it's not hot as balls, because where I live it's
so hot. I went in and there was some kind
of warbler in there, and I said, you got to

(01:19:58):
get out. He couldn't get out. He didn't know how
to get out. The window was open. He was kept
trying to fly into the fly, you know, into the
windshield on the dash, and then he took a shit
on my dash. I said, you gotta get out. So
I realized the only way I'm gonna let him out
is if I opened the door and just walk away,
which is what I did. And then he finally got
out of there, and then I had to go clean
up as shit. You know, I gotta worry about bird
flu these days when you're hanging out with some of

(01:20:19):
these passer reins. But this delfinium that was growing, where
where the fuck was this? If you live in Alabama,
you gotta go check this spot out. I don't mind
blowing up a spot because it's in Alabama. And I know,
everybody who lives in Alabama needs shit to do. Anyways,
how good is the acid in Alabama? That's what I

(01:20:40):
wonder about. Somebody came out to me. God damn it,
I forget his name. He was so nice. Fuck, I'm
so bad at names. If we meet and I forget
your name, you gotta forgive me. Man. I'm got like
nine things in my head at any given time. It anyway,
but he had some acid. He was telling me. He
was like, do you want someone? I'm like, no, I
actually haven't done acid in two years. I'm just always
encouraging able to do it. That's not true. I did

(01:21:03):
acid last year. Fucking Leo Leo, fucking Chicano hippie. You
got me to microdose at the Boyce Thompson. I was
out there. You give me some ass, I said, fine,
I fucking do it. Micro dos had a wonderful time,
and I was looking at their collection of South American
creosote bushes South American larrea, which I have to say,

(01:21:24):
there's some wonderful species in the genus Larrea. I mean,
if you live in North America, you just know the
one we got here. Larrea tried and tight. I say, wow,
there's some different, some other interesting species. Anyway. Uh, if
it's off of Union Hill Road east of Woodland Mills, Alabama,
and you got to go check out this spot. It's

(01:21:44):
a little it's a little quarry carved into the north
side of the road. Go collect some seed of Cotinas
abba vedas. It was flowering two weeks ago. I don't
know how long it takes for the fruits to mature,
probably by fall. But and then you could see this
Delphinium there too, which is supposedly Carolinia aum But how
many different species of Delphinium Carolinia ainum are there? Not

(01:22:07):
species subspecies? Right? This was a weird one in the
Delphinium caroline aanum. I mean we get the same what
is supposedly the same species in Texas, but it's got
white flowers. You always see them with white flowers. I
refuse to believe that it's Delphinium carolina anum. Somebody's got
to do work on this. Why is somebody not doing

(01:22:28):
work on this? Split this up for God's sakes. Ha
I saw a bunch of different Delphinium species there. Yeah,
look at this, the white the ones in Texas have
white flowers. They're telling me that's not significant. Jesus Christ,
you know Dallas white flower Delphi looks totally different and

(01:22:49):
a leaf morphology. This is driving me nuts. I hate that.
I hate calling this Delfinium caroliniaanum when there's like, what
is there's probably three different species and it's cluster five
talk of a of a tax on. No one's no
one's doing the work and splitting it up. Same thing
with like Rebecci Aherta. There's a sand species or a

(01:23:10):
sand endemic eco type that Ken King was at my
house the other day, brought over the floor of North America.
We're trying to look at it and it's one of
those things where it's got these maroon spots on the
on the rays quote normal, Rebecky, I heard it doesn't
have that, and it was just, oh, it's just a different,
different type of Rebeccy, you heard it. It's a different

(01:23:31):
type because it's a different species. Who wrote the flora? Ha?
I want to find out who and and give them
a stern talking to it. Maybe a spank on there, Fanny. Anyway,
But this spot, I was in love with this spot.
This was really cool. I love these goddamn rocky sites.
And if you see kotainaso vedas there, you know you

(01:23:52):
got to say wow, because that is a that's a
rare one. I guess it's rare. Kyle had never even
seen the American smoke tree in that county before, So
someone please go there and collect seed. And if you
live in Texas, please collect seed and try to grow
Cotinas alba vedas or send it to us. Me and
James peace right. He's my nursery guy. He's my go

(01:24:14):
to a nursery guy, all right. He used to work
for another nursery that wanted to grow boogain vias and
other shit, and they fired him because he didn't want
to grow this horticultural atrocity garbage. So anyway, we're gonna
be at This is probably way too late to to

(01:24:35):
notify you of this, but we're going to be at.
We're going to be at the Cactus Mart tomorrow in Austin,
Texas till one pm, which is at what is that
Live Oat Brewery, And then we're going to the Carnivoro
thing for my friend Drew's carnivorous Plant Nursery at the
Jester King Brewery. You know, for someone who doesn't drink,

(01:24:57):
I got nine years sober. Now this is a lot
of breweries gonna be it right. I don't know what's
up with this. Hopefully they got Na's. I might smoke
a stoga or something nice. I didn't smoke a fucking cigar.
That's bad. That's bad form. I'll just drink a lot
of green team be run in my mouth. Trying to
loosen people up. You know, it's Texas. Everyone's a little stiff,

(01:25:19):
and it's you know, the bleak dystopia we're living in now.
Two people are a little bummed too, So a little repressed,
A little depressed not a good concoction. You gotta make
people laugh lit, but you gotta loosen them up, you know,
even if it's just by like letting one rip when
everything's quiet, you know. But uh, anyway, so we'll be
there tomorrow, uh, selling a bunch of plants, including we

(01:25:42):
will have uh, We're gonna have ari agonam harass a folium,
which is a cool buckwheat from West Texas, nobody grows.
We will have Liatrius carizana, which no one grows. That's
an incredible liatriss fucking wild like wild. Look it up
on an asurist Liatris carries on it c A R
I Z A N A couple cuttings of Mandeville and

(01:26:05):
New Genosa moth blooming shrub from South Texas. We're gonna
have a bunch of stuff. Salvia darcii right, wonderful smelling,
red flowered sage from the mountains of Nuevo Leone. It's
one of those plants that's only known from one or
two locations, but is becoming more common in cultivations. Jatropha

(01:26:25):
dioheca variety Graminia, which was seed I collected from. It
was growing sympatric with peyote, with the West Texas population
of peyote. Jatropha dioheka. It's a fucking great plant, really cool,
forms these colonies. Likes full sun, likes getting blasted with
full sun. Can tolerate frost. It's a succulent. They call it.

(01:26:49):
Leather stem is the common name. I think you can
tolerate temperatures down to like ten or twenty degrees fahrenheit.
But it forms these massive underground colonies. Ormes rather Simzia calva,
another cool member of astraci from the limestone Vernonia Baldwinnie.
I will have a couple ooh, Vernonia Larcinie from Sanderson

(01:27:10):
with love. Limestone vernonia that doesn't look like any of
the vernonias that you'd see in the East Coast or Midwest.
It's still got those cool magenta, bright ass magenta flowers,
but it's got hairy, white thin leaves because it grows
in limestone deserts Eryngium Levenworth. The i it at sebanger

(01:27:31):
Hibiscus marchianis Payoti gardens hibiscus. I just like putting payote
gardens on stuff because it gets people interested in it.
This is my this is what I'm trying to do.
This is my inn because a lot of people don't
see how cool these natives are unless you mention a
plant that grow with like payoti that they're already. Everybody
loves peyote, right, My four year old, my five year
old daughter loves peyote. She knows what it is. She's

(01:27:53):
never had some. But you know, except one of my
friends who is in nac You know, you go to
like there, you go to like a peote meeting. There's
little kids eating medicine, you know, left and right if
they want to, they could stomach the bitter taste, right.
It's just it's it's part of the native culture. It's
a wonderful thing to see. Anyway. I don't want to

(01:28:15):
get distracted here, but uh, Salvia Gregy, I will have
some of those salvia bleff of fire. James really butchered
the ship out of some of these names. I don't
know how he did it. No offense, James, but you
know you're doing great work, but you got to get
some of the spell some fucking spelling of these names down.
Salvia Pence, the minoities, that's a rare one. Tried to
grow it down here in South Texas. It fucking hated it.

(01:28:37):
Og Nadia Speciosa. See in South Texas where like a
hundred feet elevation. I think Austin is like a thousand
feet elevation, So it's you know, where's five hour drive south.
But still the differences between some of there's just a
lot of shit. You can grow up there, we can't
grow down here. But anyway, Yeah, so we're gonna have
a bunch of good stuff come out, will be We'll

(01:28:59):
probably stick around on cact the smart uh, which is
at live O Prairi, which is kind of near the
airport in Austin, will be there until one or two
pm and then uh, we'll be at Carnivoros thing from
like one one or one one or two pm to
five pm. Is this gonna where I gotta call make

(01:29:20):
sure one is? When is what's what's shutting down? Like
hopefully Carnivoroes opened later, but I'll be selling shirts, books, uh,
maybe some prints, some kill your lawn yard signs all
that shit and uh and plants too, so come check
it out. Okay, So anyway back to Alabama. You know
what was this is another cool thing. There were these

(01:29:41):
fucking millipedes everywhere everywhere, these really cool millipedes. The subfamily
I think was riiso desmony r H Y s O
d E s M I n a E. They look
like a millipede that I one of these armored fucking
millipedes that I saw in Ecuador. Probably close related, well

(01:30:02):
maybe not, I don't know, but either ways, they they
fluoresce under UV light, so you get like a black
light flashlight, and these things just glow hot, almost as
hot as scorpions, which we also saw it, and even
though there was an East Coast scorpion, you know, living
on this glade habitat, at the spot where Kyle's got

(01:30:22):
Delia foliosa, the leafy prairie clover spot, we lifted up
a rock and there was a cool scorpion under their
beautiful fat little bastard too, not like the little beige
ones that we get, you know where I live, and
you know, the New World scorpions are all pretty harmless
so far as I know, not like the ones that
can kill you from you know, the Arabian Peninsula or

(01:30:44):
from northeastern Africa, et cetera, or South Africa. Remember when
I was in South Africa, we saw some scorpions and
size of hamburgers down there. But this is ve Jovis Carolinianus. God,
it's a beautiful I want at Fluoresce's too. Ah. The
southern unstriped scorpion uns. What does it mean to be unstriped?

(01:31:07):
Wouldn't it be non striped? Who? Who? Where's the common
name it is? Where does it come from? Why is
it not? Why is it unstriped versus non striped? Is
there a non striped it? Never? Never mind? Never mind.
This was in Moulton County, Alabama. Goddamn Alabama's cool man.
You know the only time I've been through Alabama before

(01:31:28):
was riding a freight train to Birmingham from New Orleans
circa two thousand and four or five. Then I got
off and had pie in a little diner, the type
of little diner you can't find anymore in these these
these trying times. They've all been shuttered or turned into
like a fucking bootique coffee roostery. But it was a

(01:31:48):
little diner on the outskirts of Birmingham, and I had
pie there in a black neighborhood, a cool area, a
little cool area, a little cool rost belt area of
a lot of you know, a lot of wonderful electric
blues musicians that I listened to, you know from back
in like sixties seventies electric blues, sixties electric blues actually

(01:32:11):
uh from uh from Alabama anyway, but uh. But yeah,
so that was that was fucking wonderful to see a
little scorpion there. But on this glade habitat, what was cool?
This this habitat that Kyle has, there's like giant boulders
of carstick limestone everywhere, like it's on a slope. It's

(01:32:35):
on a hill, and so we were like, you know,
like four foot off the ground, these like flattened boulders.
I mean, really, it's just sedimentary rock where the Betting plane,
you know, the is still there and the rock has
eroded and weathered. But goddamn, it was cool. I mean
you're like you have to jump over these large crags,
these cracks in the ground, and there's you know, timber

(01:32:55):
rattlesnakes that live there. They weren't out that day. I
would have loved to see one, but yeah, it was
a really cool, uh, really cool spot. I would love
to spend more time there someday again, if I can
take my kid. I just hate being away from her.
Once I can take her, gotta take her out of school.

(01:33:16):
You know what to teach these kids in school? Anyway?
You know what are they teaching these kids? I don't
She'll learn more with me anyway. I could say she's sick.
I'll say she's got mono or something, you know, drag
out with me before she hates me when she's twelve
or fourteen or fifth however old. Also at the spot

(01:33:39):
was Sylphium pinnat of Tiffitum pinatiffitum. We also saw Sylphiu morii,
which is Sylphium is the genus coloaqually known as rosen weed.
Sylphium Terrabentanaceum, which I've ranted about is in uh is
known as prairie doct These are members of the sunflower family,
big genus in the midwest and southeast of North America.

(01:34:03):
Some of them can live for a long time, very
cool leaves, very cool flower late flowers like so many
members of Astra I see late summer flowers Selfiu and
Pa pintifidum, you know, pinnate leaves or pinatifid leaves, Selphia
and moriy I. I was blown away at how woolly
Sylphia and Mori. I was. I've seen I've seen it

(01:34:25):
in Kyle's videos before at you know, the Native Habitat
Project page, but uh, you know, to see it up close,
I mean, goddamn, the hair. I mean this this thing
where I saw it was growing kind of in the
shade of the margin of a woodland. But but I
guess it's more of a glade species. And you would
think that seeing all the hairs again, because hairs confer drought. Uh,

(01:34:51):
you know, drought evolution with drought drought adaptation. Unless you're
in the Parama of Costa Rica, hairs can confer adaptation
to UV exposure and freezing night temperatures. But anyway, so
Kyle was really just taking us around, showing us some

(01:35:12):
of the habitats he's been working on, these different spots.
He took us to like four or five different spots,
showed us areas where stuff is burned. It was uh,
he gave us like our own guided field trip. It
was awesome. It was so cool to see. But again,
I think, you know, Kyle loves grasslands and glades. I
love grasslands and glades, and that's primarily what we were

(01:35:34):
focusing on, not so much on woodlands. Pygnathomum tenuifolium mountain
mint Pynathemum, the genus of mountain mint, lamey ac Oregano family,
sage family Picnathomum's got a lot of diversity in the
east and southeast. Probably a lot of cool ones in
Florida too. In fact, I remember I think Lily telling

(01:35:55):
me about that. Yeah, damn it, Sophia and Moria. It
looks like the almost looks like a plant someone would
call lambsier, which again I don't common name, but it
just tells you how whooly it is. Sylphia and Morie
and the basil rosetta leaves was just getting started, but
I guess I can get it up, you know, eight
or nine feet tall. So if you live in Alabama,

(01:36:16):
that's definitely one to be growing. Sylphia and MOREI Sylphium pentitifitum.
All the sylphiums, they're all dope. They're all cool, Silphium
terrabin the nacium especially they. I asked Kyle too, It's like,
who is growing? Do you guys have like a native
nursery here, like a native wholesale nursery that you can get,
you know, plants from. He had a bunch of cool

(01:36:38):
stuff growing in his yard too, Croton, Alabama, and says,
fuck man, that thing's incredible. Disjunk population in Texas, I
guess too. Really cool leaves like silvery leaves with like uh,
I think there was a rusty color as well. That
is a fucking stunner of a plant. But I just
wish that there was. If you've thought about starting a

(01:36:59):
nurse free do it if you've got a bank roll
up by selling drugs, or I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding,
you got a bank roll up by knocking over a brinkstruck.
I'm just kidding. If you gotta whatever you gotta do
to bankroll a native plant nursery, do it, or just
backyard growers, like so many native plant nursery start with
just backyard growers. But just grow the shit out of

(01:37:19):
all this stuff. Figure out what it takes to crack
the coat to make you know, the soil mix that
the species in your area need, whatever the sun exposure,
et cetera, what it takes to get some of them
to germinate. You know, where I am in South Texas,
it just takes cooler temperatures. A lot of stuff just
pops when it temperatures drop into like sixties, you know,

(01:37:41):
like the sixty degree, fifty degree even fifty degree mark,
like Prunus texana, Thymaphola tefro luca. Those are all rare
plants that people need to be growing. They germinate. You
sow the seeds in April, they won't come up till November.
But just figure out what it takes. Figure out the
rare plants in the area, figure out what's cool and
grow ton of them and then just politely push them off.

(01:38:03):
And people that need to kill the fucking loss. It's
not that hard. Do it. It's worth it, or just planting,
you know, get involved with your city, find places where
they want to schools want to plant native plant gardens.
Sometimes they're open to it. But get this stuff out
there because it needs to be being grown and we
need way less bogain villas and boxwoods and all this
other shit, you know, berberous, Thunbergie. It's a big East

(01:38:26):
Coast horticultural atrocity. But I ask kind of I'm like,
who's growing this stuff? Anybody's like, no, man, right, there's not.
Not every place has a Pizzo wholesale nursery. Pizzo Illinois's
lucky because he got Jack Pizzo there. That's a fucking operation. Man.
What was the video I did on Pizzo owner? I forget,

(01:38:47):
but if you got a chance to watch it, there's
a video on YouTube from shit what was it? Twenty
twenty three? I think though, God, man, what a fucking
dope nursery. Every if every state had a Pizzole wholesale
nursery or equivalent. They grow the healthiest plants, and they
grow them in these plugs. I don't think they I
think their wholesale only. But I'm sure if you showed

(01:39:09):
up and begged with like a wa of cash, maybe
they'd throw you a flat of like Ilamna iliamna ramota
or something. But god, man, you know, or like big bluestem.
But their plugs look so good, and if you could,
you know, but we need one of those in Texas.
You need one in Alabama. You need one in Florida,
where there's so many endangered and rare plants that need

(01:39:31):
to be grown, and where fire suppression has been practiced
for so long and the cult of the lawn is
still strong, right, you need someone growing this stuff. And uh,
you know, but I think that's the thing any native
plant nursery struggles with is that people aren't ready for
it yet. You know, the mashes aren't. They still want
the horticultural shit, the garbage whatever. But then if you

(01:39:52):
could convince like home depot, I hate going to home depot.
My friend Charlie though, is always he's like, man, if
you could get the thing to do is get the
box stores selling native plants. Right. I don't like Home Depot.
I'm not going to go there. When I go there,
I fucking hate going there. I don't like what they
stand for. I don't you know whatever. But but if

(01:40:12):
you have them growing this stuff, it's just a strategy.
Think like a criminal, right, an ethical criminal. It's just
a strategy. You don't need to endorse the store. You
just want them to sell native plants. You end up
seeing less shit, right, less of the horticultural garbage that
then ends up invading the what few little crumbs of
native habitat remain. Right. I would love it if like

(01:40:33):
Low's and Home Depots sell sold native plants. To do that,
they need, you need, you got to create the culture
for you. You need to get more people stoked on it,
you know, which is like what Kyle's doing and a
bunch of other people are doing, so, you know, like
why could that stuff not be? I mean in California
and other places you get you know, they still have
the depressing strip malls and you know, parking lots that

(01:40:56):
Americans love so much, and fast food, but the lands,
the landscaping's native. I went through a fucking Starbucks in
a Oh my god, you went to the Starbucks. Jesus,
I went to a Starbucks in Tucson and they had
like euphobia anti syphilitica, a cool West Texas native plant,
and some of the what is the leafless milk weed

(01:41:19):
out there, the stem milk weed a scleepiest there's like
two species in the Mohave Desert. Anyway, they had that
growing in the strip mall landscaping. I was blown away.
It was like, this is so fucking cool. These are
rare plants that not rare, but cool and unique plants
that I'm always excited to see when I see them
in habitat and they're growing here in a bleak strip mall.

(01:41:40):
If every bleak strip mall in the United States, and
it's a lot of bleak strip malls, had cool native
plants in it, maybe the suckage would decline a tiny bit.
You know, you'd have more cool insects, more cool birds.
You're creating, you know, life for life, the life that
other life needs to thrive instead of shipped like crape

(01:42:01):
myrtles that evolved, you know, six thousand miles away and
have no ecological relevance whatsoever in North America anyway. Nothing
like that exists in Alabama. So it's up to you,
the backyard grower, right to grow this stuff. Right. Not
every place can have a pizzol wholesale native plant nursery anyway,
Moving right along, what other plants did we see from

(01:42:25):
this area? Oh? Yeah, the glade area we saw so
that there's that Levinworthia. This was on some ladies land.
Kyle just approached the landowner. She was really cool and
he told her what she's got and kind of how
to protect it and how to manage it whatever. So
that was where the Levinworthia was, the Levenworthia crassa. There
was a euphobia spat the a lot of there which

(01:42:46):
is not rare. But there was Mono nuria. Was that
what that was? Where the fuck? Where am I now? Yeah?
Mono Nuria, Pachula triodanis portfolio. That's companiolac purple flowers, seed them, pulchellum,
A bunch of good stuff there, A lot of really

(01:43:07):
cool stuff, and I guess there was. He showed us
a spot where he found Solidago portery, which is a
rare golden rad that also needs to be grown a lot.
I think it's known from like only a handful of sites.
It's it's pretty rare, but he had he had found
where it was a spot where it was growing on
the margin of a woodland. All this stuff again suffering

(01:43:30):
due to fire suppression. I don't know if the solid
dogo was necessarily but anything to get out competed, you
know it. It does a plant in Ramnassy, the buckdorn
family that I had never seen before, Berucimia scand ins.
It looks the leaves look like Karwinskia, which is a
buckthorn from the Payota gardens down here in South Texas.

(01:43:52):
Grows on down into all the way to Wahaca, Mexico.
Very toxic leaves, but cool flowers. Apparently it produces extra
floral nectaries of some kind, because I saw a bunch
of bees just mobbing it once in Pueblo in Tewakan
Valley bioos fere reserved even though it wasn't flowering. They

(01:44:12):
we're getting something off of it. It's got some glands
on it or something. I don't know, but the leaves
look like that like karwinski It was Bercimia scandons, and
it grows kind of like a vine. It's one of
those plants you can tell what family it is just
by the way the leaves look. That was a really
interesting thing. That was a new species for me. But

(01:44:33):
uh but yeah, so this this little glade area was
pretty unique. Man afraid of Virginica, which is you know,
it's like a succulent perennial a gave. It's somebody was
trying to lump it in with the genus of Gave
at one point, but man afraid of Virginica a false
aloe they call it because it kind of looks like

(01:44:54):
gallo But it's just again, just the succulent monocut Camasia ciloides,
which no botanically, you know, it's an edible plant. Surely
indigenous people were were farming this wild farming it, you know,
just spreading seeds around. It's another relative of a gave,
purple flowers when it blooms. What is the common name,

(01:45:18):
Oh yeah, wild camas, wild hyacinth, or atlantic camus. But
there was a spot where we saw that coming up
that had just been flooded. All the leaves were kind
of knocked over again. The rainfall here just wild lots
of rain. Corcus niagra Carrick's gray i Snicola odorata, Amsnia

(01:45:39):
taberne montana. It's another moth pollinated like so many of
them are Fasbium chapmani. I what was this? I forget
what this is. That's a carrot of some kind, obviously
apac Where the fuck was it? Where do I see
this thing? I can't remember where I was? But but yeah,

(01:46:00):
out there's lots of good stuff, lots of good stuff.
This this wasn't on the glade now, but this is
so oh. Dlia gettingeri gattinger gatten geri, so same genus
as the leafy prairie clover. But this thing had an
ecology where it had been it was taken to you know,
you can basically walk on it. It's got really cool flowers.
It's a dahlia again, really species rich genus in the

(01:46:24):
pea family. But and this has like hot, hot, pinkish
magenta inflorescences. All the dahlias are so cool, right, closely
related to a Morpha, which is the genus of lead plant.
But Dlia gatten geri has taken It's got an ecology
where it probably grew in bison wallows. You know where

(01:46:45):
bison would you know, take a little dirt bath, and
because it takes so well to being walked on or
treaded on and probably you know, wallowed on by bison.
And then of course they'd create this barren area and
then the seeds would grow there too. So, uh, that
was pretty cool to be reminded of the important ecology
created by the American bison, which again were reduced to

(01:47:09):
like less than one hundred individuals by market hunting and
the general death cult mentality of euro settlers, et cetera. Right,
so now moving on to the glade. The glade we
were at the end of the day. We're in the
video that I filmed. You know, we almost got struck

(01:47:30):
by lightning. That was a fucking wonderful spot. This is
the Limestone Power Easement glade where we saw pence them
in Tenu of Floris. Again, pence them in another genus
that's so species rich and has had so much ecological
and evolutionary success out west on er drier habitats. Where
do you get it. The few species that you get

(01:47:51):
on the East coast, you get them in drier habitats. Right,
the arid western genus you're gonna get on drier habitats
in the Music East, and so that's where this grew.
And I think this has a relatively restricted range. It's
got kind of an odd flower shape too for a pencilme,
and kind of looks like it's been flattened like a

(01:48:13):
little frog mouth. White flowers flattened like a frog mouth,
many flowers to a raceme. And it was growing on
a carstic limestone glade where there's just like giant two
foot deep holes in the ground, probably tons of caves
beneath as well. You get seventy inches of rain a year,
fifty to seventy inches of rain a year, and you

(01:48:34):
have limestone, you're gonna start creating some caves pretty quick,
my friend. And it was on this where we saw
some of the coolest plants, including my favorite of the day.
Pedomelium Pedomealium suball call Pedomealium is the genus known as breadroot.
We get him in Texas. There's some really cool ones
I saw in Wyoming. They almost kind of look like

(01:48:54):
a loop in flowers are a little different. Then, of
course they build this giant under around the tuberous root
that they can die back to. And I guess if
you you know, after thorough leeching and probably cooking, you
can eat them. And this was certainly a plant that
was being spread by indigenous people. It was very important

(01:49:14):
to them. It's massive, you know, ethnic botanical history here.
And it just looks fucking dope. It's just got a
beautiful blue spike of flowers, faboidy flowers. Oh, I guess
it's in danger too. I didn't know that. How many
observations on a naturalists God, I love pediomealing. Man, it's
such a cool genus. Right, some of them get big,

(01:49:38):
but they can look a lot like loopin. They've got
palmate leaves. And let's see what is the range it is.
I think it's just the northeast Alabama, northeast Alaba. Oh shit, yeah,
you got it in Tennessee too. If you live in Tennessee,
goes out up into Nashville, Chattanooga. There's a population supposed

(01:50:00):
northwest Georgia, Chattanooga Nashville area, and then northern Alabama. And
it was man, someone's got to be growing this thing.
Please please find seeds of this and grow the shit
out of it. Grow the ever loving shit out of it,
and you get some seeds going. You could put them

(01:50:22):
in the ground. You have like a sunny area in
your yard or something you can mimic a glade. Right,
keep the competition away, Grow a couple of stock plants.
You put everything in the ground. It does way better
than it does in a pot. It wants to go home,
It wants to go to the ground. Grow this. There
was also Primula media which I was against that name change.
It used to be Doda kathe on. The flowers of
Doda Kathion look totally different from every other species in

(01:50:47):
the genus Primula, and they have a different pollination biology too.
They're poorus cytal, they're buzz pollinated. This is a Doda
katheon species. Who was it who lumped it? Was it Reveal?
I think Reveal lumped Doda kathon into Primula. I don't
think that was a wise idea. It's just forming the
the It's just it's just due to the rules of
taxonomic nomenclature. They would have had to split other stuff

(01:51:09):
out when they looked at the DNA, and it was
really revealed that Doda kathon was nested within Primula. So
you split other stuff out like the same thing they
did with manfreda and agave. They created a kindo agave
and paleo agave. Whatever you know this is because this
is such a big the flowers are so different, the
pollination biology is so different, you're obscuring that when you

(01:51:31):
lump anyway, Doda Kate the on media shooting star. What
is the common name for this one? White flowers, nodding
flowers that turn upright after the flower has been pollinated. Yeah,
it was a cool and like fleshy leaf rosettes. And
then of course another cool one was uh, Frassera, frasezera,

(01:51:56):
what do I call it? American Colombo? I don't know
where that came from. Wasn't Colombo. It was a detective
the seventies Detective series Frasera caroliniana, which is monocarpic, so
it's like a gave. It'll just sit there collecting sunlight
for thirty years, creating sugars, storing it in the heart

(01:52:16):
of the plant, and then when it gets enough and
it's triggered by whatever else it needs the trigger flowering,
it sends up a big five or six foot tall
inflorescence with some really cool looking flowers on it. Four
petaled flowers with hairy nectaries, hairy nectar glands, cool speckles,
cool patterning. The flowers look absolutely fucking fantastic. They look

(01:52:39):
fucking dope. And then the whole plant produces a shit
tennesseeed and dice. And that's what that's what this Frasera
was doing. And they were just starting to open when
we got there. And I know the genus is another
genus that I know from. I'm assuming this Phrasera is
more of a dryland plant too, because I know it

(01:53:02):
from like alpine areas or subalpine areas in Wyoming and
then rocky areas in Nevada. What's the range on Frazerah, carolinianstis?
Where does it grow? Let's see, we got Alabama, Northern Georgia,
basically the southern Appalachians. Oh, it's in Kentucky. Two it's

(01:53:24):
in eastern Missouri. No shit. Oh wow, you could probably
grow it in Chicago. Wow it does. Supposedly it does
grow in Chicago. No shit, where is that? Where does
it grow in the Chicago area? Crazy? I had no
idea Western Michigan. There's some in Ohio and Pennsylvania too,

(01:53:49):
and even then up by Toronto. That's fucking cool. I
didn't know Hamilton, Ontario. But oh, they're all obscured because
it's rare. I suppose, I suppose it's kind of rare.
It's cool. I did not know that. I did not know.
It's such a far ranging I think it's so much
habitat's been destroyed in the East coast compared to the

(01:54:10):
West coast that it's easy to, you know, lose track of,
or it's easier to go your whole life without knowing
that a certain plant exists because all the habitats been destroyed.
There's just so much more development. Yeah, Frasera albiculis speciosa
albo marginata. Those are the other phraser I've seen. God,

(01:54:33):
the flowers and all of them look so cool though,
such cool flowers in another small and dainty plant. But what,
of course, which deserves mentioned because of how evolutionarily cool
it is, and also for the fact that it's compared
to other plants, it's got extensive numbers of chromosomes. Right
in the case of like ophioglossom reticulate them up to

(01:54:57):
twelve hundred and sixty chromosomes. It's six undred than thirty pairs, right,
so extensive polyploidy in the genetic history of this genus
of Ophioglossom, and just because it looks weird. It's a
firm but it looks like a tongue. That's the name Ophioglossum.

(01:55:17):
But Ophioglossum Engelmannia, which is the common name, is adder's tongue.
And it was coming up on again on the karst,
so that was I mean, I don't think I've even
seen I've seen Botrichium, which is in that family, which
is another weird fern, the grape ferns. But you know,
it's got these little tongue like leaves and then it
sends up are maybe four or five inches tall, and

(01:55:39):
then it sends up a spike of spores of Sporangia
that almost it looks like a rattlesnake tail almost, that
gets upwards of like nine inches tall ten inches tall.
I don't know how many species are in the genus Ophioglossom,
but they're unique, and it's it's one of those genera
that you learn about in botany textbooks because of the

(01:56:02):
high chromosome count, and also just it's it's in its
own weird lineage it's it's uh, let's see what is it.
I've just taught this h O fio gloss sales is
the order I know that. Let me let me look
up the text on I mean is because the risk
ferns are somewhat closely related to them. They're ferns that
don't really look like ferns. Yeah, they're in their own

(01:56:24):
They're in their own subclass O fio glossity order ohio glasses,
which has the family O fio glass ace and uh
votrichi oid E HELMINTHO stachioid E subfamily subfamily man choid E,
subfamily O field glass O field glossy oh field glass

(01:56:46):
soid e. So uh wait where the hell? Oh yeah,
and siloed them. The wriisk ferns is order silo tiles,
and those are the only two orders in the subclass
oh fio Glossity. I don't normally pay attention to class,
class or subclass in terms of taxonomic order, but with
some of these old ass lineages of bizarre fern relatives,

(01:57:07):
you have to so subclass opioglossity, order ophioglossles, and then
order stylotles only to orders in this clade. So and
the whisk ferns, of course, are another plant you learn
about in botany textbooks because just they're so damn weird.
And I think both these the gametophyte stage is a chlorophilis,

(01:57:30):
and you know, it's an obligate micor rhyzyl plant. It's
or micoheterotrophic, maybe parasitizes micro hyzyl fungi of both adders
tongue and the whisk ferns. Maybe not all of them,
but certainly so that's another thing underground micro hyzyl gametophyte
micaoheterotrophic gametophyte. So so notable for a number of reasons,

(01:57:51):
both in looking fucking weird, both just by simply looking
fucking bizarre and also and you know, genetically and in
terms of what's going on with it. So but goddamn,
that was a yeah, man, it was a really great
experience seeing this glade area, you know, the pedium meal

(01:58:12):
and then of course there was a punthia there too,
like the cactus. So just wonderful diversity that you don't
see in these areas. And again it would have been
overgrown had it not been a power line. He's mint,
So what they need to do on the stuff that's
not under the power line. Theasement is burnick, get rid
of some of the junipers, the quote cedars not true seedars,

(01:58:34):
but whatever, and and just open it up, you know,
reinvite all those glade species. The seeds are probably still
in that soil waiting for their chance to grow. But
that was a really cool spot to see. Part of
One of my favorite spots from this trip was that
power line. Of course, Kyle knew how cool it was,

(01:58:55):
saved it for last and then that's when it started
pissing on us. It was pouring and there was just man,
it was like at one of those points I thought
it the cloud started swirling. I was like, oh shit,
is this a tornado. Goddamn, I'm not used to this,
but you know, he assured us it wasn't, but it

(01:59:16):
wasn't moving fast enough. But geez man, crazy weather. I'm
not used to that. It's at East Coast weather piss break.
I just got word that they're cutting as part of
our nation's dessent into idiocracy. I guess they're cutting. The
government is cutting under Trump's plan, the usgs B LAB.

(01:59:36):
The usgs B LAB is currently defunded under the President's
budget for twenty twenty six. Of course, of course, because
this is you know, this is a culture that worships
rich fools and has no respect at all for anything
that requires intellect or science. So anyway, not directly, but
the Group Ecosystems Mission area that funds the b LAB

(01:59:58):
is not being funded in the proposal. Labs and programs
throughout the Department of the Interior are facing similar cuts
and pressure to quit their positions. Fucking idiots. This, God, this,
what is this country gonna look like when he's through,
when he's through with it, you know, God, ah, just
what a shame. Man, Just just so much dumber where

(02:00:23):
this whole culture is going to get so much dumber.
That's a drag. Sam Drogi, of course I did a
we did a podcast together back in twenty twenty three.
Wonderful dude, smart as a whip entomologist studies bees. Really
cool guy, and uh, you know the native bees, not
the European honeybees. Fuck the honey bees, no offense, not

(02:00:46):
honeybees just don't care. And but the native bees, man,
the you know, the native living world that evolved here
in North America is Uh yeah, this this lab studies
I mean, it's really cool. I've actually been to this lab.
It's amazing. It's a really cool sight. And they test

(02:01:07):
out what plants attract the most pollinators. They're basically studying
the ecology between the pollinators, some of the most significant
pollinators in North America and the plants they pollinate. This
is stuff that needs to be studied. This is the
living machine that keeps our world alive. And here's the

(02:01:27):
Trump administration defunding it. So's I wouldn't expect anything less.
What a drag anyway, Okay, so moving on from talk
about our dystopia, let's move on the last day, or
one of the last days we were there. We hit
up I got to see some really cool plants, including

(02:01:52):
nevi Usa where let me find this thing, the plant
colloquially known as snow wreath, which is in the rose
fans Rose si. And I know there's a West coast species.
This is a weird genus because there's a West Coast
species that yeah, nevi Usa alabamenses. And this was a

(02:02:17):
growing in the same spot with a whole bunch of
cool stuff. Jeffersonia difila. Again on these like limestone bowlders,
these carstick limestone bowlers, and I know nevi Usa from
uh the only other species in the genus. Is it
the only other species? Or let me let me check. Actually, yeah,

(02:02:40):
it's there's only two species in the genus and they're
they're really far apart ones in Shasta County, California. My
friend Julie discovered it like ten or twenty years ago, No,
nineteen ninety two, thirty years ago. Excuse me, uh, nevi
Usa Cliftonia. It's limestone endemic, really really restricted rain from

(02:03:00):
Shasta County. Limestone, which again limestone for that area, for
northern California is rare because it's mostly volcanic or it's
serpentine in that area. It's probably limestone under the volcanics.
But anyway, so it's a rare. It's a rare. Plant
grows north of Redding, California, never Usa CLIFTONI and then

(02:03:25):
never Usa Alabama. Nsis is known only from h northeastern Alabama.
Where is it? Man? Is that a goddamn Yeah? Yeah,
northeastern Alabama, northwest Georgia. And supposedly there's some in Tennessee.

(02:03:46):
Is there some in that's not right. Is there some
in Arkansas? No, shit, there's a disjunc population of never
Usia Alabama NSA's Alabama snow wreath in Arkansas. Well. Primarily
found in the southern Appalachians. Never Uca alabamicus also occurs
in Arkansas, specifically in the Boston Mountains in Arkansas Valley,

(02:04:09):
with a few south central ozark Highlands occurrences. It is
considered a threatened specie. That that's fucking cool. Wow, I
had no idea. And then you don't see it for
fifteen hundred miles two thousand miles until you get to
Shasta County, California, don't see the genus. So that tells
you this is a You know that that's a cool
That is a cool disjunct. But I've still never seen

(02:04:33):
the Shasta County species, which grows in an infantasmally smaller area,
has a small much smaller range than Alabamensis. But anyway,
so yeah, rose family rose c. And it was growing
in this area with jeffersoniadifila, which is berber A decei.

(02:04:53):
And I think this is a pre They call it.
Twin leaf is the common name, which I think is
this is kind of a No, it's not a rare.
Is it rare? I don't know. Now, there's six thousand
observations on iat. But it's an odd one. It's got
a little it's got a kind of a weird kind
of a weird fruit looks like a little knob, a

(02:05:14):
little swollen ass. But it was growing with another rare plant,
which was nowhere. It was by no means uncommon at
this site. It was everywhere. Again, it was like understory
of a forest with Cornophilus what is it, Conophalis americana

(02:05:35):
bear corn, the plant the parasitic plant they call barcrn
or bank case. It does look like corn in the
cup and it forms these massive colonies parasitizing the roots
of trees. That was everywhere. So it's growing in the
shady understory. But there was like these carstic limestone boulders everywhere.
Polymnia levi gatta as through acy, which kind of looks

(02:05:59):
almost maybe like a small lanthis or something, but has
kind of like pinatifid leaves. And that's in the tribe Polimny.
I'm not even familiar with that. What else is in
tribe Polimny? Oh, just that weird that's a yeah, man,
that's it's a weird one. I really wanted to see that.

(02:06:21):
It's a rare, a pretty rare plant. But again it
was common here and very hairy, very hairy leaves. So
I'm wondering if this is like another limestone and you know,
another limestone plant or a rocky microsite plant, so that
so many hairs, it kind of looks like wooly webbing
on the stem. And then one that was growing at

(02:06:44):
a spring it looked like a dirty water spring, like
it was cloudy water. I don't know what happened there,
but it was a little cool spring in the middle
of this woodland. You could actually like you could get
inside and go swimming. There was the plant known as
bladder nut staff Stephilia Staphilia which is in staff is

(02:07:06):
staphil ace which the order is Chrososamatales, which I've only
seen a plant in a couple members of that from
desert areas. But Staphilia like staff, like you got a
staff infection uh y leah y l e a uh
staphily a C. Three genera in that family darien dary

(02:07:31):
dal rim dal Rimpelia. Where the fuck is that? Native
to Interpenia and Stephelia, So three genera in a family
staphily Ace, order Krososamatales, which is an order I don't
think I had much experience with that. I would have
to help me check ain at at some point and
see how many plants I've seen in the order Crosisamatales.

(02:07:54):
That's a weird one, man. But h but that was
growing too, and it's got these like little bladder bad
you know, it looks like little bag fruits again. You
know this, you guys with this East coast, you know,
flora are blowing my mind. We went to earlier in
the day, we'd gone to see Ciprepedium, a call the

(02:08:15):
lady slipper orchid, another stupid name for it, but there's
no taking epic. They're known everywhere. They're known throughout the
world as lady slipper orchids. And why because they've got
that inflated bag labellum that that you know, that pedal
that's been modified into a little inflated bag trademark of
the orchid subfamily cip Repedioid, which is notable for having

(02:08:37):
two stamens, not just one like so many like all
the epidendrums basically, et cetera. So it's it's got two anthers,
not just one anther like so many orchids do. And
then it's got this bagflower. Be's got to crawl in there,
dupes of female being the crawling in there, the bes
to crawl out, pick up a pollennium on her back,

(02:08:59):
and then and fly off to pollinate another flower. But
I guess supposedly from pollination studies on this genus and
syprepedium a call which curs. You know, it's pretty wide spread, uncommon,
but wide spread, you know, Wisconsin, Michigan, the southeast, et cetera.

(02:09:20):
Apparently the bees learn pretty quick, and so you know,
there's a lot of dud fruits. There's a lot of
fruits that don't produce produce seeds. But again, orchid seeds
are so tiny. One fruit can produce you know, half
a million maybe more tiny seeds, and you know, so
one fruit, I mean, the thing gets around. This was cool.
There was like a pretty large population here growing in

(02:09:43):
the understory of this woodland at like two thousand feet
in the mountains of northwest Georgia. And also here, you know,
there was a lot of there was sassafras. Everywhere there
was leaf stuff on the ground. I guess they've been
burning again, which is cool. We saw a lot of
areas where they had been burning in been reintroduced. But
there was castania and tada. There was American chestnut seat

(02:10:05):
not seedlings. These are probably old plants, but they get
so big and then they get infected with the chestnut blight.
The whole tree dies and then the American chestnut the
roots stay alive. It'll just send up new growth. The
compartmentalizes that dead shoot, the shoot falls over rots, and
then it just sends up a new shoot and that
can only get so big before it gets infected with

(02:10:26):
the chestnut blight again, which again involved in Asia, and
it was introduced in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century.
And you know, I remember seeing those before only once
somewhere in Pennsylvania. But you'll still see them, you know,
re sprouting again. It's pretty sad, but it was great.
It was still cool to see, like, oh they're still here.

(02:10:47):
You know, the species has almost been wiped out for
a century, all the large trees have, but there's still
re sprouters, you know, found intermittently throughout the range. But
the cyprepedium was a fucking that was great to see.
I mean, orchids are you gotta give it to them, man,
deceptive pollination they've always got like the flowers on orchids,

(02:11:09):
they're they're not just attractive, but there's always a puzzle there.
There's always something cool they're doing. I just saw a
siper pedioid when I was in Ecuador. Yeah, that was
a fragment Pedium perci, which had a really unique looking
column and staminode. That's the other thing. They've got two
stamens and then a staminode. The cyprepedioids subfamily cipropedioid E,

(02:11:33):
which what either four or five orchids subfamilies orchidoid E,
epidendroid E, siprepedia in five, vanilloid E, and then the
base almost subfamily Apostassoidy. Those are weird. Apostasia. I've still
never seen one in flower. I think they're all Asian.
Maybe maybe Asia they're Asian, but uh but yeah, god,

(02:11:57):
that was a nice one. That was a nice one
to see. Got some nice wide angle money shots, you know,
out here looking like a nineteen nineties alternative rock music
cover with the fucking Scyprepedium acall in the background. And
then lastly, I saw a micoheterotroph so a plant that

(02:12:18):
partially parasitizes fungi, called the obel Aia virginica. I mean,
does it really could you call it's partially it's thought
to partially parasitize fungi. It's producing big flowers, and the
leaves on this thing are do not look big enough
to feed it, you know, to produce the sugars via

(02:12:39):
photosynthesis necessarily to feed it. Obelaria virginica from the family
gentianac which is a family which has quite a few
micoheterotrophic members also, some of which I saw in Ecuador,
like a species of Voiriea that someone, some specialist in
the genus wrote me and told me might potentially be
an undescribed species. What other there's quite a few members

(02:13:02):
of the Gentian family that let me see this thing. Yeah,
it was Voiriea that I said. On there. Of the
Gentian family that are micoheterotrophic, so or at least partially micaheterrotrophic,
I saw the genus Helenia and the Parrimo that to me,

(02:13:23):
it's there's like a there's like a way to look
at the color tones sometimes of the leaves and the
flowers that to me, and this is completely just gestalt.
There's not that I have no science to back this up,
but that just to me, they kind of look like
they they're partially there's something we're going to have with
a funky They are maybe micahedrotrophic, like there's chlorophyll there,

(02:13:46):
so they're not fully micoheterotrophic like the genus voiriead I
saw an Ecuador, which is just fully white, no green
and whatsoever. But the Obilaria Helenia, which again is neotropical
genus of gentineac that just look they hint I can't
describe it. They hint that they're partially micoheterotrophic. They're stealing

(02:14:08):
or parasitizing from fungi, maybe taking more than they give,
or maybe just taking and not giving anything. But Oberaleria
I think is actually has it been confirmed. It's not
just my conjecture. Helenia is just my conjecture. I think
Hellnia is probably my go headotropic Oblaria I think has

(02:14:29):
been confirmed either way. It's a cool little plant grown
on the understory of these these East coast, you know,
temperate forest woodlands, these East coast temperate forests growing on
the understory that is producing four white petaled flowers and
little ovate leaves that are sessile and a stem doesn't
get that big. But a cool plant, really cool plant.

(02:14:52):
And I think, is it rare too? I don't know,
I would assume how many observations you get, I don't know.
I was I was fucking you know, I was a
little tickled to see it. I was excited because some
of these weird you know, the ecology of some of
these things, especially the Michael Head. Oh yeah, God, look

(02:15:13):
at this thing purple flowers. The ecology and some of
these things, it's just it hints it a lot more
going on. There's a little there's a little bit more context.
They're a little mysterious, all right. It's not rare at all.
It was like five thousand observations on inept. But what
is the range? What is the range on oval Aria?

(02:15:34):
Oh gets into southern Illinois, central Indiana, southern Ohio, central Pennsylvania.
I don't think it gets into New York at all,
and then south to northern Alabama, northern Georgia. So anyway,
I was tickled to see that. And then there's a
new Critaga species, not new, but it was thought to
be extinct that Josh found and at the same year

(02:15:57):
some other guy found it as well. And I was
there with my friend Adam Black, who is collecting arbarium
specimens Critagus austro montana and uh, I think there were
a few individuals. Anyway, pretty exciting thought to be extinct,
lost for a while, you know, in this clusterfuck of
mountains called the Southern Appalachians and clusterfuck of northwest southwest

(02:16:20):
to northeast trending mountain ranges called the Southern Appalachians. And it,
you know, it was rediscovered in twenty twenty four, Critagus
montana austro montana critagas from the Southern Mountains. So how
many observations only three observations that a naturalist, that's cool.

(02:16:41):
That's weird, man. What has been going on in these mountains?
How many plants have been lost, like wiped out that
were you once grew here? And how many I mean
there's a couple of documents, how many of how many
plants have gone extinct that were never documented? I don't know.
I wonder about that though. I mean, you know, with
the ecological disturbance that has been caused since colonization, since

(02:17:05):
the death cult arrived, you know how much was wiped
out before it could be documented. I don't know anyway,
that's it. That's a two hour and fifteen minute podcast.
If you're in Austin, Texas, come see us tomorrow. What
else You'll have a book out next to April Concrete
Botany be looking for it. I think it'll be pretty good.

(02:17:27):
I'm pretty satisfied with it as always, selling shirts, stickers,
that kind of shit. If you're interested, email me crime
Pace at Botany doesn't at gmail dot com. Costa Rica
Foray is in July from July what is it, ninth
to seventeenth, and then at the end of the month,
Alan Rockefeller and I will be at the New Mexico

(02:17:50):
Mycological Societies. It'll get together. I think it's the last
weekend in July in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. Beautiful Cloudcroft. How
many thrifts stores they got good thrift stores there, probably,
I don't know. We'll go check them out. We'll go,
we'll go give them a gander. I haven't been in
New Mexico for any significant amount of time in a while,
except when I was there last year and tore off

(02:18:12):
the bumper of my truck in a cook's peak range.
So anyway, that's all I got. Have you got your day,
go fuck it up by it. Thanks for listening.

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