KYL LIVE @ the Hideout

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Different katie DIDs, and then you get these wafts out
of the plants. It's like, you know, some invasive shit
like Artemitia ludoviciana, and then there'd be cottonwoods and box elders.
But I didn't know any of that at the time.
I just know that when I rode by the vacant lot,
it was a lot more pleasant to be around, and
it was nice. And so that heat island effect, imagine

(00:21):
that amplified by ten in places like South Texas or Phoenix,
or southern California wherever. Right, so, the the heat islands
goes into a apple transport of cooling. Lawns don't offer
a apple transport of cooling. I dragged you out here
to come to a bar to show you fucking science diagrams. Right,
but this is good. This is good. It's not gonna

(00:42):
fucking hurt you. You know, learn about the world you
live in. Everybody know what stomata art does. Anybody not
know what stoemates are, You could be forgiven obviously. Still,
mota are the holes. They're generally in the undersides of leaves,
and that's how plants. Part of how plants support the
rest of the biosphere. They take in CO two and
as they take in CO two they let out water,
vapor and oxygen. Right, everybody knows we need oxygen, that's important,

(01:04):
But they're also letting out water vapor. That water vapor,
and this is just passive transport. Like, the plants aren't
actively pumping water up from the roots. It's just capitlar reaction.
The water gets pulled up as water gets evaporated out
of the leaves right the flow them making all the
sugars and shit that's made in carbohydrate. That's active transport.
That's actually actually pumped by the plant. But the water

(01:25):
is just passively pulled up. And that's because as it
goes out of the stomata, it goes through a liquid
to a gas state. That pulls more water up from
the roots. But when it goes from a liquid to
a gas state, anytime matter goes through a state chains
it takes energy. And where does that energy come from?
Where's the heat? And it comes from the surrounding air,
thus cooling it. That's just what a swamp cooler does. Right.

(01:46):
That's plants are nature's swamp cooler. Little picture of a
stomanta looking like a little puking mouth, the stomate, and
then yeah, just swamp cooler. Nice diagrams. I just pulled
these off the internet, right, So plants cool the landscape,
but they also shaded. Here's someone took these massive shade

(02:07):
cloths to shield their patio because this, you know, stone
and rock and asphalt has a high heat capacity, and
it just gets charged up with the sun. It's like
a battery gets charged up with the sun, and then
once the sun goes down, it continues radiating heat until
two or three in the morning in some cases. This
is a beautiful parking lot off of between Phoenix and Tucson.

(02:31):
I've actually been there. This wasn't my photo, but uh
it looks great though. I really do think it looks great.
It could use some graffiti all over it. It's you know,
it's a closed shopping center. It's a failed failed strip mall.
You know this, I mean, don't get too happy. There's
like ten thousand more of these in central and southern Arizona.
They even use some native plants. They're kind of forced

(02:51):
to down there. They got Palo Verde, they got in Celia.
But this whole thing, imagine a spot where it gets
one hundred and fifteen degrees. The Sun's intense as fuck.
This is only like a thousand feet above sea level.
It gets so fucking hot. That's probably the most miserable
place you could think to be on a summer day
in July. Right, you park your car in there, and
you fucking go and you buy some dumb plastic shit

(03:12):
that arrived in a shipping container from China and later
ends up in the ocean. I mean, you know how
it goes. But anyway, so this whole thing just becomes
a battery once the sun goes down. And this is
what I was talking about. Like we were getting the
bottle of Carla Rassi and Sirmac Road in Western I'd
ride by the the you know, riding up there, I'd
go through the parking lot and just start sweating. More's

(03:33):
just hot as fuck. The ground as a space heater.
That's what happens to places like this. This is why
Phoenix becomes a heat island. Now imagine this but a
surface area and you can see it from the satellite.
A surface area of i don't know, forty miles by
forty miles, sixteen hundred square miles. I mean, imagine what

(03:53):
that does it just turns the whole fucking area into
a giant heat mad It's insanity, right, but it's good
for the economy. Gotta do it. There's no other way.
Lawns are much better, right, Why would this be any better?
It's a little bit better, but it's not that much better.
There's nothing protecting the sun from hitting the ground. There's
only two inches of leaf blades. But look at the lines.

(04:15):
Don't they look nice? I just like that. You really
watch people go down this fucking neural you know, this,
this neurotic wormhole with their with the lawn care. It's hilarious.
I just pictured these suburban men like if you could
just give him MVM a therapy, you're fucking dose them
for fuck's sake, Like what would come out? Like they'd
be like, I didn't have to do this shit anymore?
Why am I doing this? Right? My friend Kyle Liiberger,

(04:37):
he's got a Native habitat project. He's out of Alabama.
Really cool guy, really nice fucking guy. One of the
only people I don't bust his balls about only using
common names. He took one of those COVID thermometers and
he pointed it at the UH he pointed it at
the you guys play nice over there. Okay, he points

(04:58):
the COVID thermometer at the ass fault. It's like one
hundred and forty degrees. You'd expect that, And then he
points to it a lawn and it's like one twenty five. Right,
it's not much better. This is why when I'm trying to, like,
you know, work on people that have a lawn, and
I'm like, well, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.
And it still gets hot as fuck, and you know
it always like, well, my kids like playing in it? Really,

(05:18):
your kids like playing on that in a fucking July day.
Like when I was a kid, the last thing I
wanted to do was go sit in a fucking you know,
open sunfield with no exposure. It just yeah, you hit
me right, like with right, like, and lawns have a
place like in a park, you need a spot to
fucking maybe play some sports, kick a soccer ball, or
have movie night in the park, or the dog needs

(05:38):
a spot to shit or something. But to the point
where it became the norm, I mean I drive through
some of these towns and it's it's not just about
the lawn. There's like a whole ethos. That just fucking
chokes me. You know, I'm like, God, this fucking probably
calling the cops on me that, you know, I really
go down a wormhole. So anyway, so this is we've
established that's hot as fuck. Do get a nice little

(06:00):
urban heat island effect. I put these in there just so, uh.
If you want to download this presentation later, just email
me and I'll send it to you in PDF form.
This is where I live. This is Edinburgh, Texas, ninety
eight percent Hispanic area, but it's called Edinburgh. Don't ask me,
but this is. This is a Walmart parking lot. This

(06:21):
is gonna be one of my scenes of hell for
when I get there. Just fucking bleak and just again
the law, I mean, the lawn like this is they
use Saint Augustine grass, which is a coastal Texas grass
gets a lot of rainfall. It's milder by the coast,
just like it's milder by the lake and and so.
But they got to irrigate the shit out of it.
And it's really nice when you go by here at
like you know, fucking eight in the morning and they're

(06:44):
watering the pavement, you know, like at the sprinklers on
and it's just all going. You're like, what the fuck
are we? What are we? Why are we doing this? Like?
What there's nice? Look you go, you got burger king,
you got fucking just fucking brutal future development. I think this,
you know, I think I got this from like the
Chamber of Commerce website or something. They're all they're fucking

(07:05):
proud of it. They're fucking proud of it, right, And
then of course the landscape. I mean to bike in there,
you have to fucking we're like full hockey regalia in
a fucking helmet. But why would you bike anyway? That's
for poor people? Why the fuck you want to do that?
You know, you got on your Dodge charger. You're fucking
jacked up pickup truck. And then you wonder why you
come down with metabolic diseases at age forty five? Well, no,

(07:27):
you get type two diabetes. How'd you get dead? So?
What was here before? What was here before all this
bleak bullshit? What was what was there before that? That?
That's our conservation property. There's probably fucking god knows how
much peyote in this photo. Right. We put our pig

(07:50):
trap right there, We've killed like eight of them. The
Texas tortoises are just everywhere. We get reticulated collar, lizard's bobcats, coyotes.
The coyotes got some fleet problem. I want to I
want to dose them with trifexus or something. I don't know.
He looks mangy on the trap can as we got.
But anyway, so this is a you can imagine what

(08:11):
this does. So we've got av appo transpiration. This is
a giant swamp cooler. It fucking smells amazing. The roots
go down deep, which means the soil is gonna take
in water. This is stuff we don't think about. Imagine
you're pouring water on a brick, right, like a big
ass brick, like a brick the size of a coffee table.
What's gonna happen. The water's gonna hit it lila, bit's
gonna get it, get absorbed, but most is gonna roll off. Now,

(08:33):
imagine you're pouring water on a fucking dry sponge the
size of a coffee table. What's going to happen. It's
gonna get absorbed, right, The sponge has a bunch of
porosity in a bunch of porous holes. Same thing with
the prairie or the thorn scrub or anything. It's got
a bunch of porous holes in it. Why because the
roots have fucking penetrated through it, and there's they're branching

(08:54):
all throughout it. If you could look at a X
ray vision of underground, you'd see this huge network of roots.
God knows how deep some of them go. I mean
like Sylphium goes fucking thirty feet deep, miskeap goes thirty
feet deep as well, free out of fights. Those are
plants that tap into really deep groundwater, all right, So

(09:15):
those roots go deep, and the whole time they're providing
scaffolding for cool insects and fungi and bacteria, a lot
of species of which we don't even know exists yet,
because the only way to study him is really with
DNA DNA sequencing, and nobody sequenced them, especially in South Texas.
I'm going to put this up here so I don't
trip and break my hands. So this okay. So also

(09:35):
there's lichen on all the trees. Right, It's I mean
you think it's a desert, it's more like a you know,
seasonally dry subtropical scrub. This is like twenty six degrees latitude,
five hundred feet above sea level. And so there's lichen
on everything, and what's that tell? You take it like
it and you need water vapor in the air. That
mean the plants sweat vappo transpire every morning. It's foggy

(09:57):
out there. My good front Javier, who runs the nonprofit
with me, he'll go, you know, he's stayed out there
a bunch. I haven't been able to do it because
I'm normally out of town, but they'll stay out there
a bunch. And he's like, man, the morning's are the best.
It's like seventy five degrees and there's fog on everything
and just smells amazing. And so this is what was
This is what was here before the Chase Bank, the Walmart,

(10:21):
Murphy Auto Supply, Dunkin Donuts, What the fuck is that
firehouse subs? What the fuck is that hobby lobby? You
know all this bleak shit, right, I just wanted to
put that photo up. This is this is Jim Howk County. Yeah,
it was just so nice. I was like, this is
fucking this is nice. As I can't He'll put this
in there. And you got the calcareous rock right, remnants

(10:42):
of one hundred and ten million year old oceans ripe
to the western interior seaway. Right. And I know all
these plant species by name. They're like good friends. You know,
Sydney attend you a folio, Senegalia, Berlandier. And I know
it because I spend a lot of time in these places.
The more time how am I spending places like this,
the less I want to die when I have to

(11:03):
go to places like this. Right, It's like taking a
preventative snake anti venan. You know, they got like rattlesnake
vaccines for dogs, like the same thing. Like you know
your dog might get bit by a rattlesnake. You know,
you might have to go sit in front of ross
dress for less when you're you know, cashing a check
at the bank or some shit. You're gonna take that vaccine, right,
So why do I like you destroy this. Sure, you

(11:25):
gotta have some of this garbage, but you got to
take all of it. I mean, it's just that's the
economic model that's set up, especially in Texas where all
the land is private, or in Florida. Florida's even worse.
Florida is one of the bleakest places for it, just
no appreciation. But why does this matter anyway? Because what
does it do? Can you eat any of those plants?

(11:46):
Can you? Maybe a couple is? Are they medicinal? Who cares?
Get rid the fuck rid of them? But it doesn't
do anything? How's it benefit me? He's just sitting there
doing nothing. So this just stays what we've already established
here the first two images or depressed shitholes, right, that
commodify human beings and kill the spirit. Right, it's more
than just it's more than just a land issue. Right.

(12:08):
These are just bad places to be. And you can
tell it too. I never you see how many miserable motherfuckers,
you know, they don't know anything else. This is what
you grow up in. I would be on opioids and
fucking playing Call of duty all day too, probably, I
don't know, you know, if I had to live in
a place like that, that's all I knew. I didn't
know there was anything else, you know, And then you're

(12:29):
you see stuff like this and you're like, hey, what
about snakes? What about the snakes? There's ticks and it's messy,
and you know, all the down here, it's even harder
because the plants have spines. I was doing a native
plant install. They got to you're the only thing on
the menu. How are you going to keep shit for
meeting you? There's deer down here. It's hot as fuck
all the time, but there's deer down here, right, So
you got to keep stuff for meeting you. Eventually evolve spines.

(12:51):
That's just what happens, right. Anything it doesn't evolve spines
gets taken out, right, So the plants have spines. So
then it's more reason for people not to like it.
It's got spines. I don't want to put in my yard.
I was doing a native plant in stall for this
lady two weeks ago, and she was like, I got
a whole fucking I'm like worse than the Jehovah's Witness.
I'm like a very aggressive Jehovah's Witness, right, like spreading

(13:15):
the gospel of this shit like the living world. You know.
It's a nice antidote to help keep the puke down.
And she's like, he said, well, I don't want anything
with spines, And I said, you live in You live
in South Texas, man. It's like, I mean, the Peote
gardens are only like twenty minutes away. That's like going
to the beach and not wanting to see sand. I mean,
it's you know. But also the plants stopped producing spines

(13:35):
at eight feet because again it's it's a waste of
energy and the production of spines is triggered by stress hormones.
If the plant's growing in a garden and you're watering it,
it's and nothing's chewing on it, that's gonna produce stop
producing as many spines. Especially at eight feet, they stop
producing spines because no herbivore can reach that. It's a
really cool thing plants do. There's a cactus in northern

(13:55):
Chile eighteen degrees latitude, eight fucking thousand feet up right,
It's eight thousand feet in the air, and it's there's
cactus there. It's also where the ancestors of tomatoes come from,
and it's it's called Broninia candelars and it looks like
a big they're these beautiful fucking monolists, you know, multi stemmed,
you know, twenty feet tall, and they produce these spines

(14:15):
that you know. This is another presentation I give on
like xara plants, the spines are like that long. In
some cases, like there are fucking foot long foot long spines. Right,
you could tell this thing got fucked with it. It's
evolutionary past. It's just saying stay to fuck away from me. Right.
But then at eight feet it stops producing spines and
it just has these little fuzzy dots in lieu of
where the spines went, and you can put your hand

(14:37):
along them and they don't stick in you. And it's fine.
It's well, I produce spines if nothing's gonna eat that
high anyway. I guanaco can't reach tar on eight feet,
so anyway, So the others a living skin consisting of
a dense network of relationships. That's the thing, right there,
dense network of relationships between living things which were not

(14:57):
even close to fully understanding. It took millions of years
to evolve. That's net work of relationships. What is that like?
It's like it's I like to always make the analogy.
It's a living machine. Some people don't like that. Well,
it's a machine. It sounds synthetic and it's you know,
it works fine, It's fucking fine. It's a living machine.
Every species is a cog in the machine, and they

(15:17):
all function to do the purpose of the machine. Which
is support the life in that region. That's what a
fucking ecosystem is, and it took millions of years to
evolve it. This is something I always argue with the
invasive plant deniers about You're like, well, how far back
do you have to go? It's not about that, jack
as it's about these All things relate to each other.
When you zoom out and you see, okay, this there's

(15:39):
fung guy that only eat a certain kind of bark, right,
like the cypresses for example. I mean there's numerous species
that do this. There's monterey cypress. There's a species of
fung guy that only occurs on monterey cypress stuff. The
only thing that it's enzymes can eat that it secretes
ends the hyphee can secrete enzymes to eat are the

(15:59):
the foliage. The foliage scales. They look like juniper. When
they fall to the ground, they turn brown, and the
bark that's all I can eat. Right, That's I mean,
how long do you think that took to evolve like that?
The specificity in that relationship. That's one example of like
five million right insects, mammals, birds, et cetera. There are

(16:19):
very specialist relationships and So when you're just looking at something, well,
can I can I eat it? Or if I put
it in my ash and make a poultice out of it?
Is it? Is it medicinal for you know, some imaginary
ailment they might have, Like I always say that, like,
not against herbal medicine, but are you sick you need
it or whatever? I get it some people. If that's

(16:41):
how people connect to this shit, I'm all in. I'm like, yeah,
let's get you in the door. It's a nice hook.
You know you're herbal medicine. Get it the fucking here,
and I'll tell you about ecology. Right. Oh, you're like,
you want to learn about payote because it's you know,
it's psychoactive. Yeah, let's get the fucking here. I'll tell
you about I'll tell you about the story of its
evolution and the phylogeny. Right. So, anyway that we're destroying

(17:01):
this stuff to make way for this it's sick, doesn't
make any sense. But I think it doesn't have to
be that way. You want to You want to change things,
change the culture, show people how cool it is. So
plants reduced peaks, some are temperatures by ten degrees at
least in some cases twenty degrees of fahrenheit, mainly through
a apotransporation in shading. If apotransporation is an active form

(17:22):
of cooling, it's the same thing as swamp cooler does,
and shading is just keeping the sun off the ground.
We already went through this the root to shoot ratio right.
I taught a semester of botany a year ago, and
this was something they talk about. This is in Raven's
Biology of Plants textbook Root to shoot ratio Right. You
want the roots to grow deeper, don't cut it, let

(17:45):
it grow. You're going to get increased absorption whatever I mean,
I recommend removing the lawn altogether if you have it,
or even if it's not your own lawn, and go
fuck up someone else's long. Fuck it right. But that's
just how all plants work. And this is the same principle.
Like you know, when the border will was coming through
South Texas and we were you know, peop all the
like local botanists and plant people and plant thereds were

(18:06):
going down there to salvage and quote rescue, it's not
rescuely salvaging. It fucking sucked to do it, was It
was felt horrible. But we're digging all these plants out
because they're going to put a two hundred foot wide,
you know, fifty mile strip of clear land right there
on the border. The amount of Payotia that almost got
destroyed was amazing, I mean just crazy. I mean that's

(18:29):
like a you know, a very special plant, a very
sacred plant to a large demographic of this country. And
it was just being fucking just get it out of
the way so we can put this border wall in there.
But we were moving plants. We were moving you know,
woody plants too. And I saw my friend Ken, he
was digging up you know, a big gog Nadia hype Luca.
It's a remember of the sunflower family. It's like a

(18:51):
woody shruve that can get twelve feet tall and grows
in a place where it's one hundred and five degrees
for six months. Out of here. He dug it up,
and he immediately, like ten inches above the roots, just
chopped it in half. And I said, why are you
doing this? And he goes, because I'm just closing holes
in the bathtub. I don't want it to leak out moisture.
I just ripped it out of the ground. I destroyed
most of the roots and doing it, it's really hard

(19:13):
not to you know, I mean unless you came in
with like a back hoe and scooped up the whole
mass of soil that it was in. And so there's
not going to be enough roots to support what's up top.
I chopped it in half. It's got buds, it'll re
sprout new branches and boom, there you go, and it survived.
They survived. You leave. If you would have left that
those shoots on, there wouldn't have been any roots to
support it, and it would have died. It wouldn't have

(19:33):
made it. So if you're ever moving plants, you got
to just chop the shit out of it. And you know,
of the top and root the shoe ratio. This is
nice to go at this, this nice flooded fucking suburban backyard. Right,
not enough light for the grass and it's mowed anyway,
and so right that brick pouring water on a brick

(19:55):
versus pouring water on a dry sponge analogy is really
what's going on. That's why purpose of bioswales, It's why
the prairies are so amazing. Right, it's roots matter, Root
the shoot. This is just the case you try to
download the PDF later. I put it all in there
for you in case you remember what I'm talking about. Right,
if I can keep most of you for two hours,
I'll be amazed. That will not be offended if you

(20:16):
need to fucking dip out. So so, keeping any plant
perpetually stressed, which is what we're doing with the lawn
and cut, makes a drug dependent, necessitating consistent applications of chemicals.
So what are these? What are some of these wonderful
chemicals two four D? That sounds nice, right, That's like
a fucking recipe for lymphoma in twenty years. Mimics the
plant growth hormone. And why why do we use this

(20:38):
on a loan? Because it only hits broadly, It only
hits diecos only hits broadly plant. It's gonna leave the
grass alone. So you can dowse the grass. You you can
douse all your Kentucky bluegrass in two four D. Your
kids might get cancer in a decade, but whatever, at
least your loan looks good. And uh and uh and
all the all the creeping Charlie and the clover and
the the things that break up the monoculture that that

(21:00):
you want will die, but the grass will be fine. Right.
International Agency for Research on Cancer identified it as possibly
carcinogenic to humans. I'll take that as a yes. Also
been linked to endocrine disruption. This lady is having a
good time carbaryl. There's a nice broad spectrum in zecticide, right,

(21:20):
because you got this monoculture. Nature doesn't like monocultures, right.
I can think of a few cases where it does,
like creosote in the extremities of the Mojave Desert, a
Sonoran desert where it's so fucking hot and the water
the rock is just volcanic. There's little else that can
grow there. But in most cases, nature doesn't like a monoculture.
So what happens. Shit starts getting in there to exploit it.

(21:42):
You got a monoculture of turf grass that's stressed anyway,
what's gonna happen. You're gonna get beetle grubs, right, those
little weird looking worms that look like the metroid character.
You're gonna get all kinds of other stuff. So you
know you don't want that because that's gonna lead to
spots and it's not gonna look like a nice clean
monoculture with lines in it, and so you gotta you

(22:02):
gotta use carbaryl, right, and so that's been classified as
a likely human likely likely human carcinogen. They can never
just say it causes cancer. It's it's to cause it. No,
it's likely it might, it might cause cans. And then
neo and the cottenoids, which are just synthetic nicotine analogs,

(22:23):
nicotinees and alkaloid. It evolved in the genus Nicotiana and
quite a few other members that are sol and ac
the night shade and tomato family. And uh, it's it's
a it's an alkaloid that evolved to keep insects from
chewing on it. And it does a great job of
it too. You get little glandular trichomes. It's just the
it's just the word for sticky hairs on the stems
of There's like ninety different species of Nicotiana, right. Some

(22:46):
are pollinated by hummingbirds. They get pink flowers. They grow
in the andes. Some are pollinated by moths. They grow
where I live in South Texas. Got really fragrant white flowers,
but they're all sticky. You run your hand along it.
It's oily it leaves a residue. Right, it's a great
It's great at keeping insects off of you. And so
that's why it's used as a systemic insecticide, meaning you
pour it on the ground, the plant absorbs it, and

(23:09):
it will kill anything that's trying to feed on it, right,
including bees or you know, caterpillars whatever. Right. And it's
probably not that toxic to people unless you're drinking it
or something, but it kills everything. And this is what
drives me nuts too, is you know, it kills all
the shit that keeps the pest insects down. Like I
was in I was in Ecuador, and I was in

(23:32):
Ecuador in uh when the fuck was that in February?
And I thought, you know, I'm going it's the Upper Amazon.
I'm only in three thousand feet. I'm gonna get eaten
a live by mosquitoes. I'm gonna get fucking dengay. Oh shit,
you know, I grotewn this like hypochondriac hole. And I
went there and I got like two mosquito bites the
whole two weeks I was there. And I was really confused.
I was like, everything's wet. It rains every day there's

(23:53):
water everywhere, there's I mean, it's a fucking rainforest. Why
am I not seeing any mosquitoes? And I'd listened to
thes at night and it clicked and I was like, Oh,
this is why I'm not getting eaten alt by mosquitos.
Because there's literally thousands of frogs. There's thousands of things
that eat mosquito larvae that keep them in check. And
it's the same in the prairie or in other places.

(24:16):
You know, where you support that, you plant the things
that support all the other life forms, they help keep
it in check. That's the way an ecosystem works. Right.
Mosquito species like eighties of Gypti can be really bad
because they've spent the last twenty or thirty thousand years
evolving with people. They're not even native to North America, right,
They're like pigeons, They're like they're like coyotes and crows.

(24:39):
They benefit off of human development. So you come in
and you completely annihilate the living skin of the earth
in a region and you start putting up concrete in houses.
But of course it's still rains and there's water catchment,
and they can breed. You get mosquitos and there's nothing
to keep them in check. They can thrive and they
take off right, especially because you're spraying neo nicks on everything. Right.

(25:02):
And then fungus fungus control. There was a species of
fungus I found. It was that eats a certain turf
grass species. I wanted to find out if one of
my my college's friends could cultivate it, you know, put
in a petri dish and I could make little capsules,
you know, like little pellets and just go throwing them
around golf courses and shit. But at which case they

(25:22):
would just use propaconasol if I did that, you know,
and they would just apply it, you know. And there's
another thing that you know causes probably is that's very
specific liver cancer. It's probably tied to liver cancer. This
is not stuff that you want to be ingesting. Right.
Root systems, the prairie plants, this is why they they're
so good at holding holding the the turf, holding the

(25:46):
soil together and helping water penetrate. And I've killed a
lot of lawns. I've ripped them up, I've torn them
up with a shovel. They're really easy. I mean, there
I can attest to the fact that the roots of
turf grass doesn't go down deep. I've killed a lot
of fucking lawns. I've seen how deep it goes. You know.
All you got to do is come in with a
sharp shooter, shovel at at a low angle and it

(26:08):
comes right up this little It's like you know, feeding
a dog, trying to get it to eat a pill.
You put it in the hot dog. You put the
little bits of scientific knowledge in the presentation. Die cot
roots have a taproot. Monocot roots, whether it's a gaves
or yuccas or asparagus or whatever, they got fibrous roots.
Now is my favorite part. Horticultural atrocities, right, and this

(26:32):
is probably what you'll see here because there's not a
lot of room for law in a city in Chicago.
I mean people make room, of course, but mostly what
you're going to see is horticultural atrocity. Shit. That's just
you know, you just plant it because it's pretty. That's
the only purpose of plants. They're just supposed to be pretty.
You just just sit in the back and just look pretty.
They flower all the time, you know, or they got

(26:54):
variegated leaves, right, because the plants are generally kind of boring.
You gotta make them. There's got to be a gimmick.
Got variegated leaves, it's got different colors on it. Some
of it it's yellow, and it's got stripes in it,
and it looks it catches the eye. Right, These are
fucking crape myrtles. This is one of my most hated plants.
I'm sure they're great where they're native in Southeast Asia.
Probably cool to see there where you can see what

(27:15):
habitat they grow on and all the other things that
have relationships with them. But you know, you think, thank god,
you guys don't get these up here. Got a fucking
fucking hey crape mrtle, and they've got the smith bark
and they just blim all the time. It's just right.
And then we've got the topiaried hedges. I don't know
why the fuck this is? What is this? It looks

(27:35):
like molars or something, right, But this is what. This
is what American horticulture does. So you grow up in
a place where all the all the native habitat around
you is destroyed and you have no chance in hell
of connecting with anything that's real. Right, but the plants
that are around you is this shit. It's stuff that's
you know, native to seven thousand miles away and completely

(27:56):
pulled out of the relationship that it has with everything else.
There's no context for it here. It doesn't benefit any
of the cool solitary bees, it doesn't benefit any of
the cool dragonflies or counterpillars. It's just right. But that's
all you get. And not only is it not native,
but in a lot of cases, a lot of the
shit that gets planted in horticulture isn't native anywhere. It's

(28:18):
the product of the last one hundred and fifty years
of hybridization and breeding in a greenhouse by people for
traits like, oh it's pretty, it's got pretty flowers. This
thing flowers longer, This doesn't make a mess, this is sterile,
This doesn't drop fruit, you know, right, I mean, I
mean a lot of the shit that a lot of
these plants you go like if you go to the
home despot garden section, a lot of the plants you

(28:38):
find there don't even the flowers don't produce nectar or pollen.
In some cases they've been bred out. You can breed
those out, you know, you grow a thousand different phenotypic
individuals germanyated a thousand seeds of one species, and you
pick the two that have the prettiest flowers. I really
like the way that flower looks. And then you just
keep breeding those. You know, I think this is marketable.

(28:59):
You make a cult of right, so some fucking rich
housewife is gonna find it and find that you know,
wanted attractive and want nine of them planted, you know,
at three hundred dollars each in her front yard. You
know her husband's in orthodonas she's not paying for it.
So I mean this same thing here, these are these
are all the same clone because you don't you can't

(29:21):
plant different different phenotypes there. You know, we're all different
phenotypes of the same species. Almost satanis. You can't plant
different phenotypes because the one the other one might not
have as bright as flowers there are My only flower
for two weeks instead of three months, Right, So you
want that consistency. Just like if you go to a
chick fil A in fucking Iowa, it's gonna be it's

(29:41):
gonna taste the same as a chick fil A in
Fort Worth, Right, it's that same shit. It's you want that,
and you gotta even space them. I don't know why
the fuck they do this either, because you never see
that in nature. I don't know what the ship this is.
I don't want to know, you know. And so this is,
this is, this is the plants that you grow up.
But this is why people think plants are boring. This
is why I thought botany was boring. It's like, I
don't give a fuck about that. What am I gonna do?

(30:03):
You know? I got kicked out of the Chicago Botanic
Garden for pie and on a tree. I later found
out it was flashing a whole trailer full of old
women with tinted windows and it they called security. I mean,
but I went to Chicago Botanic gards like two thousand
and nine and it was, you know, it was this
kind of shit. I mean, you still see this and
a lot of botanic gardens. It fucking kills me. Man.
I love making fun of it, don't get me wrong.

(30:24):
It's like a nice dopamine rush to just ridicule how
silly it is. But but this is and where does
this come from? You know? Where does where? Why do
we do this? Like? Where does this? Why is this?
What's been normalized? See everything like the uniformity of color
right here, and we've got this line. See it's all
in lines. And then we've got a grasp. But then
to draw the eye into the back, we've got these yellow,

(30:45):
very great variegated shrubs right here with yellow leaves looking
somewhat chlorotic. And you got the mode lawn. And of
course we you know, little curves to imply that some
of the shit you hear these fucking landscapers say is ridiculous.
Like calm down, buddy, you're not Picasso, all right. I
know you'd like to think of that. You know, your
next bent from sniffing your own ass for the last
twenty years of your life. But just take it easy.

(31:05):
This is not this is not day lilies. I think
these are daililies who cares. It doesn't matter. They're just
supposed to look good. This is in South Carolina. I
had fun looking for these images too, I mean really
it was like the gag reflex. Look the symmetry here,
this is nice right boom boom boom boom boom. And
you've got they think coming, he's tinn here and you

(31:26):
get they think red and big purple, and right here
and take mirror image and again everything's the same clone.
It's the same clone, it's the same phenotype. The good
thing about that is if one of them gets sick,
they all die, right, there's no phenotypic variation. They've all
got the same response to a you know, a pathogenic
fungus or something which you know makes me happy? This too, right,

(31:51):
I mean, this is you know, someone thinks this is
a great job. Someone's someone, This is in somebody's portfolio.
I did that. You know, get the Japanese maypole and
the fucking box woods and whatever this shit is. And
if you think this shit doesn't affect you, this is
just landscaping, what do I carry? I mean, this is
the subconscious imaging you're exposed to. It's like living in

(32:12):
a world full of personal injury attorney billboards. It's the
same thing you think that doesn't make your life feel
a little more bleak and hopeless and desperate. You've gotten
nothing of the actual intact living world or anything resembling
quote nature, an intact ecosystem, But you've got this kind
of hideous bullshit, right. I mean, I'm sure the people
who live here think it's lovely. It makes me want

(32:33):
to die when I look at it. If they saw
my yard, they'd probably you know, freak out too. But
it's all just the values thing, and it all goes
down to being disconnected, you know, the natural words. The
natural world is boring, right. Plants are just something you
drive by an eighty miles pro in the freeway. Who
cares what they do? If you can't eat it, you
can't put it in your ass. It's not medicinal. What's
the point of it, right? This is why you go

(32:55):
to botanic gardens. The Garfield Park used to do this.
They don't do it so much anymore. They've got some
great shit there, but you know, I remember going in
there once and they had like a whole fucking bed
with like five hundred of the same that you know,
the geometric shit. It looks like a fucking DPI on
a pixelated image, you know, just brutal, like why why
are you doing that? Who wants that? Man like you?
You could be displaying cool plants with cool ecologies or

(33:18):
cool like weird fucking looking plants too, like the shit
that I give the rest of my presentations on. And
you're you know, you put a little plaque up there
showing what the label showing the family and the name
and where it's from and what it's adapted to and
what's cool about it. People come out of there. It's
like they went to the museum. That's fucking dope. That's
really cool. I didn't know that. That makes me kind
of want to learn about botany instead. You're planting this

(33:38):
gimmicky shit. You know, plants that don't even exist in nature.
They've been hybridized. They got you know, bright purple flowers
and they're all the same color of mauv or violet.
And we plant them in a line, diagonal lines, even
lease space. It's fucking brutal, you know. But why design
spaces like this? And why the insistence on colors in uniform?
Where's this? Where's this archaic bullshit come from? Right? I

(33:59):
think we all know the answer. It comes from, you know,
aristocratic Europe. This is some nineteenth century shit. This is
some old I mean that looks again. You know how
much did they pay it, the topiary guy to come
in here and make that look like a butt plug?
I bet he charged five grand a tree, five grand
a fucking tree. But because it'd be boring otherwise, you

(34:20):
know that we got these. This is a cute garden.
We got the tulips all the same color, and I mean,
that's just what the fuck do these people who do
this shit spend time in nature? Do they get out?
I mean, fuck, it's it's crazy, man. And so this
is what is everywhere. You know. This is why I
grew up. This is why I grew up two miles

(34:43):
from where Sylphium terebinthinaceum grows. And I had no idea
what it was until I was thirty five because everything
had been destroyed. It's like a four foot tall leaf
petiole and everything the roots like a giant fucking turnip.
It's the size that it's. I mean, the root balls
like this as at a stool, and then the roots
go down thirty feet and they can live a century,

(35:03):
probably longer. They've been clocked at a century, right, And
this is what I hear when I think it is stuff, sir,
we've already called security. Don't make it fun for me.
Don't make it fun. You couldn't pay me to live
in a spot like that. And that's what I think
of too. I think they're like minecraft. I think a

(35:24):
video game. I think I like, you know, circa two
thousands video game landscaping. I had an N sixty four
when I was a child, you know, before I got
into vandalism. I was the sims right, that's another one.
That's what this stuff looks like. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

(35:45):
Look at this. I mean these are the same image.
This is real. This is from a fucking screenshot of
a Why who actually thinks that's pretty? Man? I mean
maybe I would have when I was ten. I don't know,
you know, but I've actually the more I've seen of
the living world, the more I'm like repulsed by the
ship I see landscapers doing Nandina domestica. You guys can't

(36:09):
grow this here too, Thank god, I think it would.
It dies in the freeze. Who knows what climate change.
Keep an eye out for this fucking thing. Start sawing
those down if you see him. It's from Asia. It's
Berbera d Ac. It's the family. We got a ton
of cool members of berber at Ac and the forest
preserves here. They're the spring ephemerals. Some of them. They
have fucking great plants, and we plant this shit. I

(36:30):
went the four worked Botanic Guard and they had this
plant that is a specimen tree. I couldn't. That was
ten years ago. I shouldn't. I should stop telling that story.
Maybe they've come correct now, but it was, you know,
this is like but these are this would be like
a great spot to urinate. That's probably where I would
go because I try to avoid urinating on a concrete
or the asphalt because then, you know, we all remember
to see TA in the UH in the mid nineties.

(36:50):
Maybe dating myself there, but you know, you get some
of the urine when it collects on concrete, it really
becomes sticky and it gets a foul smell to it,
and p on the PM in the soil paint by numbers.
Me and Al had a UH when we were doing
to Kill Your Law. We did four episodes in Chicago.
We caught one of the fucking landscapers trying to do
this with native plants. At least at least you gotta

(37:13):
watch them. At least they're using natives. But they're still
trying to do this shit. And we said no, And
it's always, you know, some fucking affluents and whatever. They
gotta I get why they're like it. They have they
have an audience, they've got a customer base. They need
to please. It's kind of like working for a tattoo parlor,
Like you want a tattoo plants and people are gonna
come in and beg you to tattoo you know, pirate
ships and koyfish and I'm no finish to anybody that's

(37:34):
got those, by the way, but you know what I mean.
I have tattoo friends, tattooist friends that you know, talk
about how they wanted to kill themselves because people just
ask for the same shit. And anyway, okay, let's not
get into that. I might be a fending some of
my clients. Till here. This is I think this was
Chicago Botanic Garden. I mean, this is just fucking the colors.

(37:55):
This horrible. And I didn't realize how fucked up this
was until I went to a spot like you know,
used to sneak into UC Berkeley Botanic Garden all the time,
not saying you should you should support them if you can,
but if you don't have money whatever, have the fence.
But I go there and they did. They didn't do
this kind of shit. They had like one little section
where it was all, you know, kind of corny. I
think it was like leftover, you know, Rose garden shit.

(38:17):
But then everything the whole botanic gardens group by geography,
Like there's a Chile a section of South America, section
of Mexico, section of fucking South Africa section. I've been
to all these places, and when I go to that
part of the garden, I see these rare plants that
nobody else would grow because they don't flower all the time,
and you can't put them in a uniform line like
that and make them look nice. But I would see

(38:37):
these plants, and that's how I learned a lot of
these plants. Like before I went to Chile, I knew
a lot of the plants because they were already planted.
They'd already been planted in the botanic garden. It's more
of like a museum style approach, you know, it's actually
exercising your mind to go there, and it gives you
some context. You know, this this is well witchy and mirabolis.
It looks like a fucking giant mop sticking out of

(38:59):
the desert floor and the closest thing it's related to
is redwoods. It's not related to flowering plants. You know,
it's holy shit, that's cool, it's weird. It's things like conifer.
What so anyway, this is what they seem like. There's
a nice thing. They kind of look the same, don't they.
One's a dollar general the shelves of a dollar general,
and the other is a classical botanical garden whose ideology

(39:22):
and horticultural ethos is rooted in nineteenth century Europe. It's
the same shit. Again, none of these exist in nature.
These were all there are all the products of hybridization
for look for esthetic. They don't feed any of the insects.
Maybe you'll see honey bees on them. This is Nandina domestica.

(39:47):
That one's lost. I can't blame you, guys. It doesn't
grow here, thank god. Right this daylilies look daililies and
just the line. Shit, it's fucking brutal, man. It looks
it does It looks like it's product's on a store.
Shep use the bedroom with the Starbucks if you go in,
or I got a nice bathroom. So where do you

(40:07):
look to for Where do you look to if that's
the wrong shit to do? Where do you go? Where
do you go to to look at? What to emulate? Right?
You go to places like the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma,
A giant granitic pluton. Okay, this all was like a
big mass of molten rock that cooled fifty million years ago,
very slowly underground, that was later uplifted, and you get
all this cool shit on it. You know, this is

(40:29):
the dry season. It had been a long drought. But
I see places like this and I can't wait to
get into them, Like, holy fuck, I bet there's so
much cool shit growing in there, even if it's not flowering.
You know, twenty years ago I would have seen this,
say it's pretty, I'll go take a picture of it's boring.
And now it's like I got some context. I want
to go get into it and look, and where's that.
That's Tedstone, Tedstone prairie and beautiful Hodgkins. Tedstone Prairie and

(40:54):
Hodgkins right off the two ninety four I fifty five interchange.
This was a destroid's side. I don't know what they do.
I think it might have been a lance landfill at
some point, but some native plant, some people who knew
how cool the prairies could be restored it thirty or
forty years ago, and now it's fucking dope. I mean,
this would be a nice spot to microdoes if you

(41:14):
ever get a wild hair up your ass and you
know you want to go out there, you know, But
standing here, I mean, I can hear and smell this
photo like I remember what it was like. The prairie
sunset's intoxicating, it's psychedelic. It's fucking crazy, man, I mean.
And there's a little prairie plant things in downtown Chicago.
There's prairie plant things, you know, actually throughout the city.

(41:35):
It's pretty impressive. You know, you could hear all the
insects in them, you can hear the birds. It fucking
smells wonderful because again, all those the plants are breathing,
they're letting out all that water vapor. And with that
water vapor as they take in the carbon dioxide. With
that water vapor coming out, they're letting out all the
volatile compounds, all the phyto chemicals that they use to
keep up their metabolism, to keep insects off of them,

(41:56):
to make them taste unpalatable to deer. And that shit's
knows good like dear hate members of the mind family,
lay me ac Salvias mintce of Regano's time. They smell
good to us, but to a deer. It's horrible, Like
that's the one thing that deer will leave alone. If
you have like a bad deer overpopulation problem in your neighborhood.
They don't like members of a mid family. It smells

(42:17):
amazing though. This was in beautiful Gary actually, and this
wasn't This was like near a slag heap. This was
just Monarta speaking to members of the mid family. And
it just took over right. We were coming back from
tour me and now and I said stop the van.
I had to piss it. Got out and looked at
this and I said, holy fuck, this is crazy. It
went on for for like one hundred yards in either direction,

(42:40):
and over here there's like a power light easement and
a railroad embankment, you know. But you know, you get
a suburban homeowner in there with a lawnmower, and they
would just say, why would I don't want this? Like
maybe the flowers are pretty, but there's ticks and blah
blah blah. The reason you get ticks is because of
fire suppression. That's the main reason ticks are so bad.
I have a friend in Vermont. He wrote me, He's like,

(43:01):
we used to not get ticks in Vermont, and we
just started getting them five years ago. I mean, I
can't believe what that would be like. But fire suppression,
two hundred years of fire suppression and then eradicating the
predators that keep the deer populations down. You're gonna get ticks,
right a deer. One deer can host like a thousand ticks. Man,
it's snarly, you know. And so so that's what we

(43:25):
deal with. Like the forest reserves of Illinois. Man, there
was off Ogden in two ninety four, there was I
remember going in there once to look at the spring
ephemerals and like the minute I stepped off the path,
that were just ticks crawling up my legs. Right, So
what's the way around that? Start burning? Right? Fire was
immensely important to all of North America, but especially the

(43:47):
eastern half. And why is there? Remember I was talking
about the Hunt of Meridian and you look at a
satellite photo and west of the Huntred Meridian, it's bays.
You can see the deserts start. You can see the
great planes start to turn into the deserts. It gets
really dry. Rocky mountains have some moisture in them. That's
because they're at higher elevation. But overall, like the American
Southwest is base. You look at the eastern half, it's
fucking green and the furthest east you go is where

(44:09):
you get the highest rainfall, sixty inches of annual rain
a year along the eastern seaboard in Maryland. What does
all that water do? It makes everything grow very vigorously,
and it keeps it. Eventually it starts piling up. And
we're just talking native plants to I mean, this is
like six hundred years ago, you know, when fire was
still practiced. I mean the fire suppression in the East

(44:30):
Coast really started. Two hundred years ago was when it
got bad. But not anyway. You get such a massive
explosion of growth, and it's especially if it's a prairie,
it all just dies every year, right Eventually that will
build good soil if you give it enough time to
die down. It's just a giant compost heap. That's why
the prairie's got annihilated for monocultures of soybean and corns

(44:50):
so quick when Europeans came here, because the soil was
so rich, because you'd had thousands of years of plant's
growing and dying, growing and dying and just just building
up this rich black soil, and the bedrock is thirty
forty fucking feet down. Man, that's crazy. Where I live,
the bedrock is like no one's got basements because the
bedrocks like five feet down. It's all limestone. But here,

(45:12):
because of the prairies, the bedrocks deep. And so it
was in a lot of plays in the East Coast too,
And so what's a way around that? Like? Why did
well before native people got here thirty thousand years ago?
I'm sure there was still a lot of fire because
there's lightning, right, and you get so much, so much
debris building up, it burns. And I mean we know

(45:33):
that fire was a part of the landscape here because
a lot of the plant species have seeds that won't
germinate without fire. Right. I mean California too, there's there's
species of Arctostaphilos, really big genus, ninety species in it.
I got friends that germinate the seeds because some of
them are really rare and they're trying to do conservation.
How do they germinate the seeds? They take fucking stubs,
liquid smoke, cooking smoke, and they mix it with hot

(45:54):
water and they let the seeds soak in them and
they get germination. I mean, this is a thing in California.
It's a thing in you know, glade habitats out east,
it's a thing in South Africa, anywhere, especially the Mediterranean
climates where you know, the summers are dry and don't
get any rain and fire adapted plants everywhere. Right, So

(46:15):
this is Jerry Wilhelm's backyard. He's the author of Flora
the Chicago region. You meet this guy, he's like, you know, old,
old white guy, looks like he might be kind of conservative,
and then you learn that he sets fire to his
suburban backyard every November. He's had the cops called on him,
you know, many times. But this was twenty years ago
when he started doing it. Now they just know it, okay,
and now that he's used to it. But you know,

(46:37):
you pick a cool, wet day when it's going to
be when it's actually hard to get it to stay,
and you burn and you kill all the ticks, you
kill all the chiggers, and most importantly, you're killing all
that dead debris because the plants are still alive, but
they're alive in the roots and the roots don't burn
because they're under a bunch of duff and soil, and
you're removing all that duff. You're killing any ticks that

(46:58):
are hanging out on the plants, but you're also moving
all that which is where the ticks over winter and
lay eggs and where the nymphs are. And so a
prairie that burns don't you don't get ticks there. It's wild.
You may get one or two from that season that
got brought in by a deer somebody. You don't get
ticks there, right. But also when you burn all that ash,
all the phosphorus and the potash just reinvigorates the soil

(47:20):
and that helps you get that massive, you know, flush
of growth. It's like getting a haircut, you know, making
way just clean slate for new plants. So this is
Jerry Wilhelms's backyard. It looks messy, it looks like it
be full of bugs. It was fucking delightful to be
back there, and not just because I know what all
the plants were. It was very cool. It was it
was alive, It had a wonderful smell to it. It

(47:41):
was lit up with the sound of singing insects. Right
kind of get like the wave machine effect, like nice ASMR.
And why does he do that? Because he studies the life.
He studies the living world in this Chicago region. He
knows what prairies are. He knows how dope it is
to be in a spot like this. You know, I

(48:01):
didn't know how cool this was till I was fucking
thirty five years old. I would I'd been alienated from it,
you know. And I just kept thinking why am I
so mad when I'm in the strip mall, Like why
do I just fucking hate being here so much? Like
why is it so bleak? And then this when I
saw this and answered it. There's like six different species flowering.

(48:22):
There's a bunch more in the back that will flower
later on in this season. I think I took this
in like July, A lot of prairie stuff, especially flowers
later in the year, arnold glossom. That thing's not flowering yet,
relative of a synesio and sunflowers. Right, bunch of diversity.
And what's even cooler is all these plants have specific

(48:45):
insects that can only eat that plant right, checks and bounces,
plants that act as other organisms that act as an
you know, antagonist or a mutualist for it. It goes
so deep. I mean, if you were to draw a
map of all the relationships in the network, it looked
like a giant bowl of yarn. This I took this
a couple of days ago, and this shit like this
gives me home. This outide the Field Museum. I took

(49:07):
my kid to the Field Museum and she loves it.
She's running around and she actually it got fucked up
for because she saw a night at the museum, you know,
six months ago, and she was telling me, all this
shit's gonna come alive if we need to get out
of here. I was so bummed. I was like, fucksh,
I didn't see that one coming. I shouldn't let you
watch that movie. Fuck, But I you know, I walked
out and I saw this, and I was like Jesus Christ,

(49:27):
when you got golden rods, you got sylphium right there,
you got you know, uh all Joe Pieweed right there
like these fucking dope plants that I know, and they're
all there was bumblebees and sparrows and all kinds of
cool other cardinals and other shit hanging out in there,
and dragonflies and it was just sounded alive. It was
fucking intoxicating. And I remember I thought, how odd that is,

(49:49):
because when I was a kid growing up, I don't
remember anything but the same, you know, minecraft landscaping of
tulips planted in lines and what other horticultural bullshit. I
was really kind of blown away. Hey, this is just
a vacant lot behind my friend Jonathan's house that they
don't spray. The railroad is this is kind of like
a neglected railroad line. There's only one job that goes

(50:09):
out there maybe three times a week, and so the
railroad doesn't come in spray like they would in other cases.
And so it's a mixture of invasive plants and natives.
You've got plenty of natives. We got pioneer species for
species to show up after disturbance, plants that are really
good at growing out of cracks and sidewalks, right. A
lot of invasive plants are good at doing that because
they're pioneer species where they're native, right. And we have

(50:33):
a bunch of native plants that are good at doing
that because they also are pioneer species, and our native
pioneer species some of them can be really invasive in
places like Europe. Is Europe and America in the United
North America have been isolated for like nine million years, right,
the ecosystems have, so Golden Rod gets over to fucking Germany.

(50:53):
It doesn't have any checks and balances there. You know,
the fifteen to twenty different species of insects that you
know hit salid Ago altissima and and you know, put
galls on it or chew on the leaves. They don't
exist in Europe, so it's got cheat codes. But anyway,
I love this, man. I mean, this is just like
a vacant. I mean, you can see how easy it
is for this to come back. Right. This is why

(51:16):
I can't stand the landscapers, man. I show them pictures that,
you know, great yards I've seen. I don't even call
it a garden. It's just the fucking yard. It's your
piece of prise. It's your chance to bond with the
life forms around you. It's your chance to engage with
the life around you. Pick the fucking seed, sniff the flowers,
pull the fucking leaves, get out there and just bathe
in it, you know, and let it cool you down

(51:37):
from all the Bullshe had to deal with from the
few hours before, right, But I got into it with
this guy and he's like, that just looks messy. There's
the you know, there's the ice. I don't know if
he talks like that. I assume he's from an affluent background.
You know, he had some very very glamour shot type
photos on his profile page. You know, you can tell
he probably paid for him. But you know, it's just messy,

(51:59):
and it takes a whole team of to do this.
The fucking You're not building a spaceship out of toothpicks
and trying to get to the moon. Man, this is
the shit, just recreating the shit that lived there two
hundred years prior, you know, before we came and just
fucking cleared everything and annihilated the landscape. And there's proof
of it. No one planted any of this shit. You
got ilantic Altissima Tree of Heaven, which is invasive. You

(52:19):
got some other invasives, you know, but you got a
lot of natives. It looks great, it's covered in cool
life forms. Was me and Kyle. I don't know why
I put that in there. I just wanted to. Actually
I do know. So this is a glade in Alabama.
And uh, and you know, he told me he used
to come here. He his he got into plants through hunting.
He liked hunting whatever, and uh, and so he was

(52:41):
trying to make the land more palatable for wildlife. And
he knew when it's all smothered, the deer and turkey's
didn't like hanging out there. So he came in here.
This is a spot he'd been hanging out since a kid.
It was like his neighbour's property. His neighbor didn't care
if they would go there and fuck around his kids.
So and so he showed up and and you know
he didn't know either. It was like I just sprayed
round up on everything because I wanted all the plants

(53:03):
to die so the deer and turkeys would hang out.
And he's just annihilated it. And then after a few
months he realized it wasn't working. Like there, you can't
just clear all the shit out of it. Like yeah,
you're you're getting rid of the smothered mess, right, because
remember you get a lot of rainfall. It's at fucking Alabama.
Shit grows really quick. And you know, these were all

(53:23):
areas that burned and the native people who lived there
were absolutely burning this, you know, either on one year
or three year, five year intervals, and so he realized, like,
why are they not coming? He realized because actually a
lot of those plants they needed. They ate them, They
they you know, ate the seeds, they ate the lea whatever.
And so then he started burning. And when he started burning,

(53:46):
shit took off like you'd burn at the right time
of year. There's a science to it. It's not super complicated,
but there's a method to it, and the ship would
just take off. And so then he started seeing all
kinds of plants he'd never seen before popping up. The
seeds had been in there for decades, but the fire
aheadn't and so the seeds didn't germinate, and so all
this shit came up and he saw how great it was,
and the wildlife came back. They started hanging out, and

(54:09):
that's that's how he got into Bondy. This is Native
Habitat project. He's got like a big social media page.
He gets paid it through consults and shit, and he's
doing a lot of good work. Spread we have different
target audiences, needless to say, but uh, he's doing a
lot of good work, you know, getting people to uh,
to just appreciate the living world around them, and that's

(54:29):
all it should be. It shouldn't be some political shit, man.
I just I don't give a fuck about arguing about
conflict algorithms with people. I've got my opinions. I'll keep
it to myself. As long as you can kill your
lana plants and fucking native plants, that's all I care about.
The ship is sinking anyways, guys, you know it's anyway
I put the you know, skip the slide one seventeen
because this is all just Central Texas stuff. But uh,

(54:52):
I could talk forever about all these plants. They're so
fucking cool. This orchid is pollinated. It it emits pheromones
that mimic the smell or the alert pheromones of aphids.
Like when aphids are being eaten, they emit a pheromone,
they emit a smell to warn other aphids, stay the
fuck away, our predators here. And so that's what this
orchid does. It produces pheromones that mimic aphids, the alert

(55:16):
pheromones of aphids, so that it gets the predators of
aphids to come pollinate the thing. And that's one of
the eggs of a hoverfly. A hoverfly is a predatory
fly that comes and eats aphids. Fucking wild. I mean,
you see, you start, you start looking closer, and you
realize how how close all this shit is, how specific

(55:38):
some of this shit is. You know, how long did
that relationship take to evolve? All right, let's get the
fuck out here, let's keep going we at anyway. No,
you're landing local biota. Here's the native prairie flower. They're
going off right now, Gentiana Andrews. I was at the
Luri Garden and uh north of the Art Institute yesterday.

(55:59):
They before and Gentiana's were everywhere. They got you know this,
they got Gentiano's going. It's a great They got some
non natives in there too, but they're not invasive. Right
right there in downtown Chicago. Blew my fucking mind. Man,
there's gentiana down here. So no your land. So it's
again herbaceous perennials. What's that mean? The top dies every year.
The roots stay alive. The roots can live for decades,

(56:20):
in some cases centuries, but the tops die. The vegge
dies every year. Right, it gets cold, that's too cold
to grow whatever, So they they just close up shop
and go dormant, right, and then so this, I mean,
that's the other cool thing about the prairie, the tall
grass prairie too. I mean, some of these prairies, like
that one at the Field Museum will get so so

(56:42):
thick that you can't see through it, and it's six
feet tall. None of that was there three months prior. Right,
it's gone. It's gone for the winter, and in two
more months it'll be completely gone. They'll just be a
pile of dead stems and leaves on the ground. Maybe
some bumblebees overwintering in this stems. Maybe some birds as
they're migrating south coming by to come pick seeds out
of the flower heads and you know, eat at the

(57:03):
buffet and then before moving on. But they're gone. So
here's some of the cool prairie plants. Ciympio trichem Nova
angling New England. Aster is the common name. Really easy
to grow, really fucking easy, like happy as a pig
and shit. And the climate of Chicago. You put it
in full sun, you plant it in May, it turns
into this within a few months and it's just blooming

(57:25):
and covered in cool bugs. Here's what I'm talking about.
With that U that one hundredth meridian. I mean, you
can see it clear as they evaporative intex eridity index. Right,
how does the commodity change as you go east to west?
And I put this up there because this is when
I first got into native plants. I thought, you know,

(57:45):
the people I always heard talking about it, it'd be
like some snobby white dude from North Berkeley. That's that
native you're into. I wasn't when I got into botany.
I wasn't into natives. I was into, you know, very
specific families of plants, like I was growing right, like
growing redwoods because they would grow tall and grow fast,
and I knew they'd fuck up the concrete later. And
I wanted to just grow shit that could live. I
will live me, right, And so I was planting all

(58:05):
kinds of shit, you know. And I did graffiti as
a kid, so I already had it in me, like cool,
I can affect the public surroundings and you know, and
start affecting the I see these places, I don't like
the way they look. They look like shit, I'm gonna
change them, fuck it. And so I started planting gorilla gardening,
as they call I started planting stuff illegally, just you
know where. I saw that there were holes in the

(58:27):
city's infrastructure, and so I started doing that. But I
realized if the first year it wasn't working. I was
planting dawn redwoods, which are like a they're great trees,
you know, they grow fast as hell. They can take
Chicago winters. But they're like Riparian trees in China. They lived.
They went extinct in North America two million years ago,
at least according to the fossils. But I was planting
those everywhere. They grow in floodplains in China a right,

(58:49):
But I was planting them in Oakland, California, where it
doesn't rain from like April to October, right the hottest seasons,
the driest season, and so needless say, they were dying.
So I started I started thinking about Someone was like, well,
why don't you try planting cypresses. California's got a lot
of cool cypress species and they're all drought tolerant and
as long as you plant them in the winter, that
get established. And so I started doing that. But to

(59:13):
get seeds, no one grew them. So I would go
find out where they grew, and I'd trek out there
my little beater Honda Civic, which I really fucked up.
I put a lot of work into ruining that car.
Was proud of it. And so I would go out there.
And as I go out to these places to collect
cypress seeds, which grew great as long as I planted
them in the ground on this you know, abandoned freeway

(59:33):
where this freeway had once stood, the cypress freeway. As
long as I planted them in a wet season and
went there, they made it through the summer fine. And
some of them are still standing. They're like thirty feet tall.
And so when I was going out to get seeds,
I would go to these beautiful places. You know, I
was like looking up for barium records, trying to find
where these things had been collected. And that kind of
helped get me more into Bonnie as a science. But

(59:56):
when I'd be going out there, I would see all
these other cool plants and I'd be like, what the
fuck is that? That looks weird as hell? What is it?
It's like a it looks like a bright red lily
growing in this fucked up volcanic area, Like what is that?
I want to know what that is, you know, because
it looked so cool, and being in these places felt
so nice. You know. I spent most of my youth
pissed off and wanting to fuck things up and just

(01:00:18):
not in a good place emotionally or mentally. And suddenly
that was starting to go away. I was in these
beautiful places, and I was like, Wow, it feels nice
being out here. I want to spend more time out here,
you know. But I didn't know what any of the
stuff I was looking at for. I was just looking
for this one species, so I want to know more.
And as I got to know more, I realized a

(01:00:38):
lot of this stuff was really cool, and I realized
I had a context. And when, especially when I started
planting those cypresses on the Mendela Parkway in Oakland, that's
when I realized it had a context. These things didn't
die as long as I planted them in winter. They
took off. They did fine. I planted like thirty or
forty of these things and they did great. And that's
when it clicked. I was like, Oh, the native thing
isn't just you know, some like elitist purity badge. Like

(01:01:02):
there's actually a rhyme and a reason this makes sense.
These evolved in the climate of California, probably over millions
of years, and so it makes sense that they're doing
good here. So it makes it easier on me. I
don't need to irrigate them. I could just dump some mulch.
And so that's when it started to really click, and
I started to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
And so it just became something of pragmatism, and that's
what this is. You know, if you're living in Phoenix

(01:01:24):
where the iridity index is greater than five, and you
give what is it, six inches of rain some years,
If that then it's one hundred and fifteen degrees, why
would you try to plant crape myrtles there. You might
be able to keep them alive for a year or
two by watering the shit out of them and jacking
up your water bill, but eventually they're gonna die. There's

(01:01:44):
just there's just too much moisture being pulled out of
the leaves. And they're not able. They didn't evolve there.
They don't have any of the adaptations like hairs on
leaves and reduced leaf service area that the native plants
have to endure that climate. The native plants were literally
built the natural selection for that place. They're tied to place.
And this is something like the invasive species denialists always

(01:02:06):
don't get. It's if they're tied to place, they're literally
the same way. I could grow a thousand tomatoes and
I expose all of them to high heat and humidity,
and most of them die because tomatoes are native to
northern Chile and southern Peru, where it's not hot and humid.
It's hot and dry, right, And I could pick the
two that survive and then propagate those get into fruit

(01:02:28):
and flowering and fruit. Take those seeds, breed them again,
and maybe half those will die, only half this time,
and then I'll breed the other half, and I just
keep selecting. The environment's been doing that for millions of years.
If people can breed kale and broccoli and cauliflower from
the same fucking species right in a matter of a
few centuries, what can nature and habitat do in a

(01:02:50):
few million. And that's why you get all this wonderful variation.
This is just basic Darwinian biology, you know. And when
you make the connection to to human breeding, which is
what we've done with all our crops, and with poodles
from wolves, same species, right, it starts to connect, right,
like pugs, poodles, great danes, same fucking species. Right. So

(01:03:13):
if we can do it, why can't the land over
greatly increased amounts of time? Right, So you've got it.
You've got dry the dry West. The music East music
just means good amount of rainfall, right, not too much,
but enough, right. And so the way that affects the
nighttime temperature is important too. You get more humidity. Water's

(01:03:34):
got a high heat capacity. That's why it's so muggy.
You know, the Chicago summer, it doesn't cool off that
much at night on maybe cool off twenty degrees. But
you go to like the fucking Chihuahua or Sonoran desert,
it'll be one hundred degrees during the day and then
you get a forty degree temperature drop by six am.
Because there's no water vapor in the air, it doesn't
hold heat. Right. So this is how specific this shit gets.

(01:03:56):
This is why one plant isn't as good as the other.
As traditional horticulture has been thinking about, Oh it's a
crape murder, it'll just stick it in the ground of water,
it'll be fine. Don't war it's a Bradford paar, you know.
Put it in the ground and water the shit out
of it. It can be fine. You can have a
golf course in Scottsdale, Arizona. Who gives a fuck, it'll
be fine. Right, It's ridiculous. You got to quit pretending

(01:04:17):
you don't live where you live, right, Get some context
for where you live. So this is the species of vernonia.
This grows in central Texas. We get species of vernonia
Vernonia missourika that you could see at any of the
cool prairies that grow in the Chicago area. There's some
planted down by the Field Museum, some Vernonia species. They
give magenta flowers that relate to sunflowers. Dope fucking plant

(01:04:37):
pollinators love them, right, But this is what central Texas
did to a vernonia. This has a direct ancestor with
the vernonia that grows here that's got big, broad leaves
and doesn't have as many leaf hairs. But this thing
evolved on the thin soiled prairies and hill country of
Texas where the limestone is right at the surface. So
what did it do well the landscape over a few

(01:04:59):
th thousand generations, probably slowly bred for longer leaves, reduced
surface area, and a shit ton of hairs on that wire.
Hair is good for plants. What do they do if
you're growing in a hot and dry area? What do
they do? Let's make this a dialogue. We'll make it fun.
What the fuck the hairs do for plants? Why do
you see hairy plants? As you start going further west?

(01:05:23):
U V protections. Nice to see her by the way. Yeah,
u V protection. That's that's good. You see that. Up
with it because hairs on high elevation plants in the
tropics too, where it doesn't get hot and dry. But
u V protection. But but what do they do? Like?
This is what they teach you in botanical in botany school,
they say it he creases boundary layer of humidity. Okay,

(01:05:45):
what the fuck does that mean? Boundary layer? Human? It
doesn't mean anything, right, But start thinking about this. Say
this new puppy, I'm taking care of, not her, not you.
You knows. I got my jeans in a corner as
I'm sleeping. He peas all over him. I got am.
I put them in a washing machine. The fucking dryer
is broken. I gotta dry them in a garage. Right.
It's hot in the garage because it's summer in Chicago, right,

(01:06:08):
So they should dry quick, right, So I put them
in the garage and they'll dry eventually. But if you
really want to speed up how fast they dry, what
do you do? You put a fan on it? Right,
because that airflow pulls the moisture out of the pissed jeans, right.
It's the same thing with the plant. So so we
know that increasing the airflow across something helps pull the

(01:06:30):
moisture out of it. Right. For Still, where do the
hairs come in? Though? How do how do how do
the hairs help reduce airflow? Right? Now, Let's pretend you
live in a you know, a farmhouse in Nebraska out
there on the open planes, and the winds just come
barreling across that that that landscape that's got no topography

(01:06:50):
to it, right, high wind gusts. Right, what if farmers
do if they're they got a farmhouse and they want
to the wind is rattling the windows and keeping them
up at night, and it's fucking loud and it just sucks. Right,
it does, by the way, too, it's harsh. Winds can
really fucking you know, harsh your mellow when you're trying
to sleep. So what would they do? You plant trees,

(01:07:12):
you get like some shitty Lombardy poplars, and you plant
the wind break, right, what a hairs look like in
cross section on a leaf. They look like shitty Lombardy poplars.
They break up the airflow that moves across the leaf,
and they're gonna prevent that wind, coupled with the heat
and the one hundred and five degree Texas heat from
pulling moisture out of that. And it's crazy because I

(01:07:34):
forgot to put the fucking slant up again. I should have.
But as you go further west, As you go further west,
I mean, you go to the Mojave Desert, the driest
desert in North America, and there's plants that are so
covered in hair, so covered in hair, the leaves look
white like funeral sage, so called because it's from the
Funeral Mountains in Death Valley. It only grows out of

(01:07:54):
cracks and limestone. It's got tiny flowers because again you
gotta shrink the surface area that's losing more. Sure, but
the leaves look like fucking point the Q tips. There's
no green. You can't see any green on this plant.
It's entirely white and it's just the sun is so
intense it's still reaching the epidermal tissue in the mesa
phil cells where the chloroplasts are. But it's the mojaved

(01:08:18):
death Valley has built a plant that looks like a
fucking Q tip. You know it's crazy. And you see
this everywhere. You see the same traits in different plants
wherever you go. If it's like South Africa, similar climate
to parts of California, I see the same traits, completely
different plant families. You see the same traits. I gotta
get a better thing. No offense to the Vernonia lyndheimrit

(01:08:40):
but I need a better example. I really should have
put the feuderal stage photo of so we know it
feels good to be in nature. Here's all the fucking
peer viewed studies pulled off Google scholar that show we
don't really need these. This is just eye candy fluff filler.
But it feels good. You know, Like where would you
rather spend your time like against like a fucking Amazon warehouse,

(01:09:02):
you know wall, or like a in a prairie? What's
pretty er scenery? Right? So now we get how to
kill right how to kill a lawn, And there's a
number of different methods you could do. A sod cutter.
I don't even really advise that anymore. Cardboard and truckle
at a mold, stop watering bit by bit. This was
a friend's lawn. My couple friends of mine, their school teachers.

(01:09:22):
They don't make a lot of money. I did this
for them for free, just because I would go to
visit them and I got tired of looking at their
fucking lawns. So I said, if you rent me a
sod cutter, I will go rip that shit up. And
so that's what I did. You rent one of these things.
It's like one thirty from home, despot. It's a pain
in the ass. It's like it's harder than moving a body.
It's got to weigh like three hundred pounds, and it's
you know, you're worried it's gonna fall on you or

(01:09:44):
it's just a pain in the ass. You gotta get
in the truck. But it works overnight. This took an
hour to do. It's just like mowing a lawn and
then you flip the lawn over so that the sod
is exposed to kill the roots. And then you just
use it as mulch. It makes your yard look like
the trenches a Kent from World War One. It's nice
if you got stiff neighbors, you know, cause it's kind
of I kind of do spiteful shit like that. It's like, hey,

(01:10:05):
you fucking motherfucker, you look at I know you look
up every time you drive by my yard. It pisces
you off and and it makes me a little happy. Right.
So that's one way, But an easier way is just
that I just call it the shovel at a low
angle method, and I'll show you the shovel I used to.
It's the best. It's I got one on my truck
right now. Right. So this is after this is in Lagrange.

(01:10:26):
This is somewhere on the north side, after we filmed
Kill Your Lana had a bunch of plants left over
from the nurseries we worked with. Landscapers kind of sucked
except for one or two of them, but the nurseries
were all cool, and so I just was like, yeah,
let's go plant this shit. Like who's who's got like
a hell strip, you know, between the sidewalk and the
street and is down to let me plant and a
number of people hit me up, like five or six people,

(01:10:48):
and so there I was like a tweaker at nine
thirty pm at night on the north side and just
digging up, coming at like a low angle with this
narrow shovel. You're coming at a low angle. And this
is the This is how I know the grassroots don't
go there deep because you can just literally just pry
under like a crowbar and just start just fucking jabbing
it and then rip it up. It's a pain in
the Assid's that you're sweating like a pig. It's a

(01:11:10):
good workout, but it works. And you don't have to
rent the sod cutter, right and you can do this.
I mean this took me like twenty minutes. It's looked
like shit. It doesn't look like anything right now. Someone
sent me photos of this from two months ago and
it's like a fucking dense prairie. It looks amazing. You
just got to get the shit in there. Their natives
they'll do fine. Get the shit in there, mulch around them,

(01:11:31):
don't fucking worry about it. You know, maybe you put
a rock in front of or something so no one
comes and mows it. Later on or some you know,
dogs don't piss on whatever, but just get it in
the ground. That took me twenty thirty minutes. And uh,
you know, same thing here. I wasn't finished with this.
I actually did the whole thing. But you know, yeah,
sure it's you know, the cons are it's not instant.

(01:11:54):
It looks messy, but SODA's a fucking lawn so and
then mulch. Mulch is so important. The benefits of mulch
are threefold. Right, you can get it for free from
chip drop dot com. It's like a website they will
hook you up with. It's really good in big cities
because you know, there's more of a they work with Arborius,
and there's more of an Arborius based there for them

(01:12:14):
to work with it. Chip Drop doesn't work where I live.
It's too I'm too like back back corner of the country.
But you can also call Arborius and say, hey, you
need a dump some mulch. I got a spot for you.
A lot of cities. I know in Chicago they got
municipal yards where you can go pick up mulch. But
you know you can also go get cardboard, throw cardboard down.
It acts as like a biodegrade of a weed fabric.

(01:12:36):
I don't even do that anymore. Right, I've got different
methods now, and I'll get into them. But the mult
is important because it keeps the sun from hitting the ground.
If you've just if a lawn is a disturbed environment, right,
it's disturbed every week when they mow. It's bare ground, right,
And so that sun is just hitting it and heating
it up, and it's heating up the roots. And you
can plant stuff there. But say you're not able to

(01:12:56):
plant stuff in the cool season like here, it will
be April or May. You don't get it till till
July or August. Right, those plants are getting stressed. I
mean they'll grow, but they're gonna be stressed. Roots don't
like to be hot, and they're getting cooked in the
solar oven every day. And so what do you do.
You put mulch over it, and it prevents the sun
from hitting the ground and helps keep the ground cool. Right.

(01:13:17):
And then the other thing too, is that you have
to water less. It's there's less of apple transpiration because
the water can't can't as easily evaporate from the ground
because it's got this top dressing emotion. And the third
benefit is as this shit breaks down, and I always
recommend don't don't you know, don't be uh, don't be
shy about it. You put it thicker than you think
you'll need, because it breaks. It breaks down quick. Like

(01:13:39):
you put it eight inches of mulch, it'll break down
to four inches by the end of the season. The
microbes and the fung guy, all that shit goes quick,
and so you get this massive blossom. It's like a
compost teep oh, this massive blossom of microbial life. But
then as that microbial life dies, it releases a ton
of nutrients into the soil and it improves the soil quality.
So it's great. You just want to keep it away

(01:13:59):
from the ends of the plants because fungi will go
for the mulch, and if it's right up against the
stem of a young sapling or something, you know, those
enzymes will eventually they can start eating the sapling, they
can start eating the cambium of the sampling. This is
a beautiful lawn right here. This is just neglect, which
brings us to our third way to kill. Just stop watering,

(01:14:22):
right and this is what all the lawns look like
around me, because I mean I fly a drone over
it's still it was a fucking one hundred and three
degrees where I live today, Like I get weather updates,
you know, just hot as balls. This motherfucker. You know,
it's kind of funny. You're out there, You're like Jesus
christ Man, holy fuck. And so this is what you get,
this patchy shit and maybe there's grubs in there or

(01:14:42):
a fungus. I love it. It looks fucking terrific. It's
like a nice mosaic. It's a mosaic. It's not this monoculture.
And so with this, what I would do. I wouldn't
even rip up the lawn. I wouldn't go spray round
up on the little bits that are still alive. I
wouldn't do any of that. I just go start, Okay,
what's them? We'll plant some stuff here. And then the
two things I think about when I plant it is

(01:15:04):
where's the sun? And how big is what I'm planting
going to get? Because if you know, maybe I want,
if I want something that's going to create shade, I'll
you know, I'll think about where I plant that. I
think about that how big is it gonna get and
where's the sun? And then how is that sun going
to affect everything else? If you're doing a prairie landscape,
you don't. You're obviously not planting a lot of trees
and shit. Just start throwing it in there, fuck it,
you know, and then you create a little path or

(01:15:26):
something because you want to bring people in here to
hang out. It's not about it's not just like, you know,
plant it and hands off. If you want to get
motherfuckers in there to hang out and enjoy the things
and look at the stuff, and maybe someone's gonna go
in there and sit on a bench and smoke a doobie,
either gonna go fucking hang out and relax or have
a phone call or whatever you want to invite people
into it. Right, So this is great. So I would
just start planting shit here in all the bear spots

(01:15:47):
and then water it, mulch around it, and then as
the lawn continues to grow, I'll come in and maybe
I'll weed whack the shit out of the lawn leave
alone the stuff that I planted, Right, You just make
it easier for the off I planted to outcompete the
lawn and just keep doing that until the lawn is
so weakened because now the stuff is not letting it
get any light. It's so big the natives that I

(01:16:08):
planted that then you can just go in with a
shovel and remove it. This is great. This is near
Jerry Wilhelm's spot. It was in Glenn Ellen or glen
View or Glenn fucking whatever the fuck that one of
the Glenn suburbs on the northwest side. And we rolled
up here this is for kill your lawn. And I
was going through the neighborhood and I'm like, oh god,
these look like some fucking stiffs. This does not look good,

(01:16:29):
you know, this is like a e and and then
uh in Jerry's house is on the other on the
other side of the block. But we said, we met
this lady. Her husband's a member of the cult. Still
that's not him, that's our producer, David Back. They're really
nice guy. He's loose, but uh but but her husband's,

(01:16:50):
you know, a member of a cult. He likes the
lawn probably needs to be dosed. Maybe she'll get to
it one day. But but you know, so he wouldn't
let her kill the whole lawn. But she was really
into plants. And gardening and bees and whatever and shit.
So he said, ah, you can have this little section.
And it's like the size of a bathtub, maybe a
little bit bigger, but it was I couldn't believe. It
was covered in like, you know, there's twenty different species

(01:17:13):
of prairie plants there. It was covered in cool insects.
It was fucking alive. You could hear it. It was dope.
I was sitting there looking at'im like, oh, you got this,
and you got this, and you got this, uh this,
you know, the Sympio tricum and all these different I mean,
all these plants I know and love, you know, and
so you can do this. This probably took her maybe
a weekend. You know. You go get the plants, preferably,

(01:17:34):
I like the plant plugs, like the smaller stuff. You know,
maybe you put a temporary you know, couple sticks around
it to prevent people from stepping on or whatever, give
it some visual gravity. And then you you know, she
got the nice flagstone around it, you know, as a margin.
And so maybe as her husband slowly starts to come around,
she can start doing that bit by bit and the
rest of the fucking thing. I mean, you know, really

(01:17:57):
you got you gotta those people. I'm not against it,
you know. It's so they're a little scared at first.
You got to sit there with them, you know. But
it's work, but it's the outcome is good. So anyway,
here's some long kills we did. It's just ecological secession.
Well before you eat the longkas. So it's just ecological secession. Right,

(01:18:18):
This is just this is there's a science to this
ecological secession. Same thing like a lava flow in Hawaii,
a fucking or a human clearcut, or a wildfire. You
knock everything down, annihilate everything. It's a process. So what
do you get happening? Right? The lawn is right here?
You get a wildfire coming through. Right, what comes back
the shit that can take the full sun, the full exposure,
that can grow happy as a pig and shit in

(01:18:39):
full sun and heat and takes off right. And what
they're doing is they're breaking up the soil. They're creating
a little microclimate of humidity, they're keeping the sun from
hitting the ground. They're a thing like a living mult
It's that first step. They're prepping the land for the
ship that can't get established that easily. Maybe the seedlings
of a certain tree can't take full sun when they're little.
They can only take it when they reached you know,
a meter or too high. Those would be like the

(01:19:02):
secondary succession species. And this is what they teach you
in ecology class. This is out of a fucking ecology textbook, right,
So that's what you're doing. It's the pioneer species, the
primary secessional species, the shit that can take the full sun.
It lives fast, it dies young, and produces a shit
ton of seas. These are not long lived plants. Not surprisingly,
most of the invasive species that you get all over

(01:19:23):
the world are important pioneer species where they're native, the
same way that our pioneer species like box elders and
golden rods are invasive as hell in Europe. Right, it
makes sense. They can deal with you know, having weed,
having constantly being weed whacked or mode or you know,
they're resistant to glycysa nervous sides, and they can tolerate
growing out of cracks and sidewalks. So ecological secession, right,

(01:19:49):
nice little diagram. Upatorium serotonum is another good one. You
might have seen it, little white flower, a bunch of
tiny white flowers. It gets like this tall. See it
growing on them. You could probably find some growing in
the fucking end behind here. Right. So this is a lot.
This is in La Grange Park, Beautiful Lagrange Park, nice,
nice bedroom community. Right. And so this was a bad case.

(01:20:11):
So we had the landlord. He was one of these
fucking indoctrinated motherfucker's no offense to him. You know, he
probably needs to be dose too, but he he you
know this is for kill your lawn. And we showed up.
He showed us the plan he had and it was
that paint by number ship, like this court is gonna
be all yellow and then we'll put all the red
flowers over here and then the blues over here. We said, no, no, no,
we're not doing that. That's ridiculous. We know what the

(01:20:33):
prairie looks like. This is a show about trying to
mimic that we're going to recreate the prairie. And he
didn't even do this. Hell strip man, I dug all
this out by hand, right because we showed up, they'd
already they'd already had the guys that did the sod
cutter removal dip out the sod cutter wasn't there anymore,
and he left this whole strip and I said this,
you know what the fucking show is called, right, It's
called kill your lawn. You guys left half the lawn.

(01:20:55):
What the fuck is this? And so I asked the
guy that lives there, it's like get electrician or something.
Really nice guy. He's like, you care if we take
care to hellstrip? He's like, here, go ahead. So I
went and did that, and that's what it looks like. Now,
it's like it's lit up. This was like this is
a year after it was planted. Right. Sylphium porfoliatum. I mean,

(01:21:16):
the fucking rebeccy is milkweeds, upatoriums, Sylphium terrament and nacum
right there, you know. And I do this. I've done
this a lot. I always get messages from people or
from people that just saw, you know, they've heard me
ranting about this for the last five years, and they're
always excited, like, man, I did it. It was It's
fucking great. I get these cool insects. They're always excited. Right.

(01:21:40):
I spent like the first thirty five years of my
life as a dedicated missing throw and then now I
mean I feel more hopeful than I've ever felt when
I get individual people writing me and telling me just
the excitement. They're like little kids. Man. You know, It's
like seeing my daughter like, go, you know, excited to
tell me about some dinosaur while we're in the museum
where someone else she's like, like, it's fucking great to see.

(01:22:02):
You get like a dopamine and serotonin rush. It's what
I feel when I get people sending me letters like this.
It's crazy, man, It's crazy. I used to mean. You know,
you spend time reading the news and focusing on the news,
you're gonna think everything shit, the world is shit. You
spend time in nature, you're gonna think, you're gonna think
the world's incredible. Right, That's how it goes. I'm saying
you shouldn't read the news. You gotta get a little

(01:22:23):
bit of the salt, you know. But fucking a So
that was that was this? I mean, this fucking yard
is this is like a yard I would rubber neck
as I'm driving by. I'm a fucking horrible driver too,
by the way, just for that reason, I'm really good
at you know, if I know, I'm really good at
the whole element of surprise thing. Unless there's plants around, right,

(01:22:44):
then I'm a hazard. But I slowed down. I slowed down.
Then it pisses off the meatheads and the giant trucks
behind me, and then I go slower. So anyway, so
there's Monarda. We got coreopsis, we got we got Joe pieweed, eutropium,
all this good shit, tons of insects you can't see,

(01:23:06):
tons of cool shit, can't see. Here's someone someone's sent
this in. See. This looks nice though. I really like
the lines. I like every time I mow, I get
those lines in it. It's very uniform and it's very
pleasing to the eye. You sick. Fuck all right, so
this I don't know where this is. It looks like
it's somewhere. It's somewhere with seasons, and that's what it is.

(01:23:27):
Now fucking incredible. And they got a little path they
can walk through it and shit, and I bet it
smells amazing, man, little prairie garden. And again it's all
gone by November. It's eight inches tall in November. Just
all maybe you get some sticks sticking up still. This

(01:23:48):
is in California. This guy was really excited. I guess
it's California by these hideous camellia bushes in the background,
the topiaried camellias. But I like this guy's approach too.
We put the rock in there so if the city
comes and tries to mow it, they're gonna fuck up
all the mowers. There's for booby traps. It's great. You
could do rebar. You could get spools of thin gauge

(01:24:09):
wire and just just sprinkle it in the gray. You said,
that'll fuck up a mower. It goes around, it catches
the wire. Now that there's like looks like the John
Wayne Gacy house. And here's but now it doesn't look
like the gaycy house so much more. You know, gay
Sy was not in the native plants. I'll tell you that.

(01:24:30):
You could tell, and you could see what it did
to him, right, all these symptoms of the death cult.
So you see, you got some fucking grass left over.
But whatever, it's a process, man, it's a process, and
you get to do it. You don't need to spend
ninety k in fucking landscaping. I don't know where this was,

(01:24:51):
but I was really impressed that they had comp TONI
a pair of gree this is a rare plant. It's
related to oaks. The seeds can last for one hundred
years in the soil. That's an their fire sprout or
they grow. I tend to grow on sand. I think
there's some at. Someone told me there's some at. Who's
your state natural area in northwest Indiana, which is uh
I think like thirty minutes from from here. But great plant.

(01:25:12):
It smells really good too. But yeah, it's related to oaks.
I first saw in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I
was like, what the fuck is this. I've never seen
this before. It's amazing. And then I learned what it was,
looked it up and yeah, it was blown away the
species diversity. So yeah, we can't. We can't prevent habitat destruction.
We can't stop the tumb work from growing. We can't.

(01:25:33):
You know, we're not going to stop. We're not going
to change the culture overnight. But you don't need to
just do your bit. You know what you can do
is you can create habitat. You can if you if
you if you have respect for something, you learn about
it right, you have you like a person, you want
to know their name, right. It's the same thing with
the plants. You just go out there and you don't
got to memorize Latin names overnight. Just know what the

(01:25:55):
fuck it is. Just go out there and look at it.
Question and what is it doing? What is this flower doing?
Why is it shaped like that? What this insect doing
on it? What are these peats? What are these parts
of the flower? What do they do? Right? If you're
not asking questions about the world you live in, that
means you're probably just following rules. That's fucking bleak, you know,
It's what American schooling does follow rules. Don't critically think,
memorize stuff, don't critically think I put this in there,

(01:26:17):
because this is just the geologic time scale for you know,
humans have been a species for three hundred thousand years
about and for the vast majority of that time, we
grew up knowing the plants around us, right wherever it was,
whatever communities it was, Right and slowly that's been taken
from us, right, we grew up knowing names of the plants,
We grew up knowing what they did, or just being

(01:26:40):
around them, being actually able to like walk outside our
domiciles and seeing them growing. Right, it's only for the
last two or three hundred years that that hasn't been
the case, and much much less than that in other
parts of the world. Right, So this stuff is part
of our DNA. This is what we've been doing right
the way we're living now from it. Living thirty five

(01:27:01):
years of your life not knowing what the plants that
grow around you are is a pretty new development in
human civilization. And you can see what it's doing to us.
If you think it's not connected to the fucking mental
health of people that you see around you, your naive
as hell, you know. I just you can see the
effects of it. It's all tied together. How sick human

(01:27:24):
civilization is is tied to how far apart we've gotten
from what gave birth to us. So it is all shit.
I've said out before. This is just as if you
download a pdf. So what the plants that? What's the
alternative to the gaudy, asked, tasteless landscaping of the death culf?
What a fucking poet I am. I go outside and
learn your local force. So here's a great thing to do.
I naturalist. I tell this all the time. I used

(01:27:47):
to not use it. Alan Rockefeller, a friend of mine
who studies fun he got me into use it, and
he said, you you should upload the eye naturalists. I said, hey,
it sounds like a corny fucking thing to do. Actually,
I'm not gonna do that. And then we were in
the desert and Mexico together and he's like, you should
upload this. This is a cool plant. And I was like, yeah,
you're right, I should, And so I started doing that.
And what this has done to help me learn about

(01:28:08):
the things around me is and say it. I mean,
it's it's in so many other people, right, I mean
I read I look at her barrier specimens, I read
research papers like I like far down the Wormhole. Now.
But if you don't have time for any of that,
just look at this. There's a fucking app in a website.
This is the website, right. So you want to explore
your local floor. You go to the I naturalist dot
org and then you hit explore and it comes up
with these two field species and location. You type in

(01:28:32):
sunflower family for species. It doesn't have to be a species.
It can be a family, it can be an order,
it can be whatever. Location put in Cook County, right,
and then you get a list of everything in the
sunflower family or the p family or whatever you look
up that lives and that's been observed growing in Cook County.
You know, some of that stuff will be invasive, but

(01:28:52):
a lot of it will be native. If it's invasive,
it'll have a little pink square up here with the
with I in on it. It'll say I in or invasive.
You know, you gotta you gotta do your research a
little bit. You can. You can do that by clicking
on the the species name and then I'll take you
to the taxon page. The species page. You look at
where the map is and if there's a big fucking

(01:29:13):
splotch in Europe, you know, okay, this thing's probably invasive,
right or or it's you know, or it's invasive in
Europe or whatever. But you know, it's pretty easy to
figure out what's native, what's invasive, and then you can,
I mean, there are possibilities are endless. You can check
out the taxonomy of it, what family it's in. Anytime
you're learning a new plant, ask what family it's in.

(01:29:33):
Why is that important? Because you'll start to see traits,
shared traits as a result of ancestry, of shared inheritance
that are that are symbolic of the family. And why
is that beneficial? Because then you can be on vacation
in fucking Mexico or California and you'll see a plant
with a similar flower shape. We pay attention to flowers

(01:29:55):
when grouping plants. It's what we look at mostly, not leaves.
Flowers will tell you everything. Someone sells me a picture
of leaves and I don't know that plant yet I
always done the same thing. I gotta see flowers or fruits.
That's the dead giveaway, right. And so you can be
in California and you can if you've been paying attention
to the plants in that family back home, You'll see
that family in California and you say, I know what
that that's a fucking legume. That's a p It's a

(01:30:16):
p flower, you know, or it's a that's a sunflower. Family.
You know what family it's s in, right, Maybe it's
even the same genus, depending on how the level of similarity, right,
So always ask what family it's s in. So this
is stuff that's native to the Chicago region. These are
all photos I took. We got cardinal flower down there
on the South Side. We got this is invasive mostly

(01:30:37):
along the freeways teasel, we got some of the Dahlia's
lead plant, et cetera. But it's also when you observe
stuff on our Naturalist, you're also creating your own log
of everything you've seen. So you forget shit, you forget
what the name of something is. You can look it up.
What was that plant I saw in December of twenty
twenty three? You can search by date, you can search

(01:30:58):
by family. It's immensely helpful. I use it all the time.
I've got so many fucking plant names in my head.
What was that member at a legume family I saw
in Chile in twenty nineteen. I can type in Chile
legume family. I'll give me a list of everything I've seen. Boom,
I see it, I get, I get reminded with the
genus species. It's super helpful. Right. Illinois wildflowers is another
helpful one. I don't like the word wildflowers because it

(01:31:20):
puts the emphasis on the flower, right, And that's kind
of what got us into this whole mess. It's just
the flower, that's all that's important. Who cares about what
that thing feeds or what feeds on it? Just about
the flower? How's it? The flower? Pretty? I don't like
the word wild flowers. But either way, this is a
great fucking website and it's it's even cooler. It's organized

(01:31:40):
by habitat prairie savannah. This would be like full sun,
part shade woodland shades, like a shady, shady backyard in Chicago.
You want to know what the plant plants? Some fucking
trilliums there. You go go to woodland wildflowers and then
it'll tell you what grows in that habitat. Genus species
an uncommon name if you're not you know, a Latin

(01:32:03):
nomenclature person, But I really suggest you at least learn
the genus name because like onions, alium, there's like three
hundred species of alium. Right, if you learn what an
onion is, what makes something an onion, you'll know what
an onion is. If you see a species in California, right, Oh,
that's an alium. So anyway, here's some cool native plants,

(01:32:25):
big blues them and your Pogon gerardii, dolpe fucking grasses,
the tedstone again, feel the wildflowers that the wildflowers at
the Pizzo So doing a show there tomorrow. Solidago and
Cynthio trichum. This is just this is just weeds, right.

(01:32:47):
It's get someone from the square community. They look at
it's just weeds. It's not. It's just just a wasteland. Right.
But then a month or two later, this whole thing
lights up into that. It's just having context, right, my
geriatric dog who's taken to shitting on the floor, and
I'm not fully convinced it's not a matter of protest.

(01:33:12):
Phisostigia obedient plant, that's an easy one to remember. Mint family,
lay Ace monarda. All this shit, Pynanthemum, this thing is
mint family too. It smells like a regano. It's a
fucking great plant. Man. It smells so good. It's one
of those things like you brush up against it, you
can smell it. Bernonia that's the plant that was using

(01:33:32):
this Texas species is comparison. Look at this. You can
compare that leaf to that thin hairy leaf I showed
you on the desert species. Delia purpurea. That's a legume.
You look at the flowers, you can see when you
look up close at the flowers, it's just a bunch
of tiny flowers aggregated into a cone. Probably one hundred
flowers right there, right, Joe pieweed, that's fucking banger all

(01:33:55):
the time. These are what we're planted outside the Field Museum.
This is kind of a pioneer species. This is tears
a lot. This will show up one of the bell flowers.
Try to scant the cardinal flowers. These like it. We
they like a lot of moisture. But it's hummingbird crack,
butterfly crack. You see a red tube shaped flower and
that's hummingbird pollination. Just know it immediately. Same reason. If

(01:34:19):
you see a flower that smells like jasmine, blooms at
night and is white, what pollinates that moths? Right? That
jasmine smell. The reason it smells like jasmine is because
moths can pick that up. They got really good sensory
receptors for old factory receptors, and then they've got a
proboscis they've always got. Those white flowers always have the
same traits to a tiny hole too small for a

(01:34:40):
bee to get in in a long tube. Why because
that moth has a proboscis that can unroll and stick
right in there right. I mean, the specialization you see
is the same thing like you see that you see
a white flower that smells like jasmine, tiny hole in
southeastern China. You know it's gonna be pollinated by a moth.
You see a white flower, tiny whole, smells like jasmine.

(01:35:01):
In the Chihuahua Desert, it's pollinated by a month. Right,
There's so much you can learn from this. Red flowers, butterflies,
and hummingbirds likeatrius. That's the fucking dope one. This was
me and Al went down here. We had a bunch
of pot seeds and we were gonna we had found weed,
feral cannabis growing down here like five five years ago,
you know, because you'll still find weed in the Chicago.

(01:35:23):
There used to be a big patch of weed on
Western and eighteenth at the railroad Diamond there, and it
was psychoactive too. It wasn't like the feral hemp you
see in Kansas. I know because I took some seeds
and grew something when I lived in California, and so
we went down there. We had a bag of weed.
We're like, yeah, we're just gonna spread this seed everywhere.
And when I got down there, I saw the fucking
prairie was in such good shape. I was like, I
don't want to spread weed. That would be a you know,

(01:35:45):
sacrilege like this, right, So then we took it to
Western eighteenth and threw it all up all over there.
You know you got a trespass. It's on the west
side of the railroad embankment. There's a big North South
railroad embankment east of Western and eighteenth. Go check it out.
See if the pot is still growing there. Right. I
don't know how it got there. It was amazing. I
used to hang out there as a kid and there'd

(01:36:07):
always be a paddy wagon park there, like these cops
getting I don't know what the fuck they were doing,
like getting hammered, parked alone on the fucking hill right
there by the anyway, I'm more of a kanessence lead
plant again, Why is it so fuzzy? Because it tends
to grow in hotter, drier prairies, full sun. That's a
great fucking species too, really cool sent up poricytal anthers.

(01:36:29):
The anthers have holes in them, right, that's another example
of a pollination syndrome. If you're in Ecuador and you
see a flower that's got anthers with holes in it, right,
it's not necessarily a senna, but it is buzz pollinated.
If you were to take a tuning fork, hit it
on a rock and hold it up to this, a
bunch of pollen would come spilling out of those anthers, right,
And how does that apply to bees? Bees go up

(01:36:51):
and they vibrate their wings and all the pollen comes out.
You see a hole in the distal end of an
anther like that, That is buzz pollination. Tomatoes do the
same thing. Tomato flowers, potato flowers, blueberries, they've all got
buzz pollination. What's the benefit of that? It's like it's
you know, if you're like running like a motel six,
you're doing the free breakfast thing, right. You don't want

(01:37:12):
these fucking squirrely little kids to come out there and
empty you out of all the fruit loops or whatever.
You're gonna put those little dispensers on it, right, like
a little lever. So the cereal dispenser only lets out
a little bit at a time. That's what the plant
is doing. You know. It's preventing bees from because bees
don't just go for an nectar, they go for pollen too.
It's preventing the bee from going in and taking all
the pond. It's saying, no, take it easy. I'm gonna

(01:37:34):
ration it out so the pollen supply lasts longer and
I can pollinate more flowers and produce more seeds. So anyway, Oh,
this is a great one, arnold glossom, really cool flower
A triplisifolium. This is out of Schulenberg Prairie. Relative of
Points Setia. You for me, a corolada. This is all
over that lowie garden down on the Loop too, right

(01:37:55):
just north of the Art Institute. This is the family
of Rubber and Points set he is. It's mostly tropical.
We got it. It was a hard toilet hit out there.
Who's fucking That's when you know someone's gotta go. They're like,
I gotta fucking get out the way. Anyway. Anyway, So

(01:38:16):
mostly tropical family, but it's got a couple temperate species.
This is one of them. This thing gets like three
or four feet tall. It's a great fucking one. You'll
see it. It really intact prairies, like ones that never
got cleared in the first place, like Wolf Road prairie,
et cetera. But no, every time I see this stuff,
no one's grown it. You know. This is the thing
Chicago now compared to ten years ago. I mean, it's crazy.

(01:38:37):
It's there's actually a native plant movement here. People grow
these things like the awareness of how we view plants
in societies and just away is it medicinal or is
it pretty? Does it flower all the time? The variegated
leaf bullshit. There's less of that and there's more of this,
you know. They plants don't need to be what's seen
as conventionally showy to some fucking you know, rich housewife

(01:39:00):
from eighteen seventies Victorian England. It's not the point anymore now.
It's the point of context for ecology and just creating,
like a putting the living machine back together after it's
been disassembled by the fucking death cult, right, And that's
what's that's what we're seeing, right. So that's why you
grow things like this, And I mean you can you
can buy these plants at any number of the native

(01:39:21):
nurseries around erythroniuml bi. It I'm a member of the
lily family. Incredible fucking flowers. It's like it's like a
flower probably that big. It's a true lily. It's a
native fucking lily. Man. We have native orchids in Illinois
you know, not just the dime store ones you'd get
you know, at the fucking hospital gift shop. And so
you get like the you know, so we've got these

(01:39:42):
cool native versions of plants I maybe would call horticultural atrocities,
but there's no context for them. This thing grows. This
is what the leaves look like. They got these cool
speckled patterns on them. That's what the flower looks like.
They're called spring ephemerals, right, because here at the temperate latitudes,
the weather worms up before the leaves on the trees

(01:40:02):
and the forest preserves have fully leafed out, right, So
in that short window of time, that's when these things
take advantage of it. They get going. There's a bulb
in the ground right there. It sends up a big
leaf as soon as the weather worms up, it flowers.
By May, it's done, and then you don't see it
again till the following April. And that's the whole there's

(01:40:22):
there's like, you know, twenty different plants that do this,
and they're all fucking dope. Some of them are really cool, right,
but a lot of them are gone. Why because of
invasive species buckthorn? You know, you see, does anybody not
know what buckthorn is. It's probably the worst invasive you
get here. It was I remember, you know, when I
was a kid, i'd go I was like, I didn't
want to go to the forest reserves because they were
just they were just infested with buckthorn. And curiously enough,

(01:40:45):
buckthorn is actually kind of rare in Europe. It's like
it's like an important native plant in Europe that needs
to be conserved and grown, but here it's fucking brutal,
and it forms these impenetrable thickets and it's got spines
on it too, that's the name buckthorn, and it's shades
out all this stuff, and so there have been huge
reductions in the amount of cool spring ephemerals like Erythronium

(01:41:07):
albeiom and the forest preserves of uh of Chicago. So
that's another good thing to do is go in and
cut intreat with herbicide the buckthorn. Just spot applications, you know,
we're not talking about dumping round up on crops. We're
talking about small spot applications to remove invasive species, all right.
Cympio tricumdrumaldia another cool native. This was planted outside the

(01:41:29):
fight near millennium park. I couldn't believe it. I saw
like two hostas. I saw a whole bed full of
these things, right cool native aster I was blown away
like the fucking hostas man, like the brutal I remember
being brutalized with those, just visually assaulted as a child. Hasta,
they got the you like the hastess, they got the
they got the variegated leaves so you could eat them,

(01:41:51):
you could eat them. I don't give a fucking want
to eat that. When the fun want to eat that,
I'm wanna eat a hostas nabulist asper another great species.
You see this, you know it's a fucking good prairie.
It's never been root plowed. Rare member related to chickers
and sunflowers gets five feet tall. Cool cool. These are

(01:42:11):
flowers are a little post. You can see they're a
little whether this should be going off right now. And
Lobilia's cyphilitica. I don't know where that name comes from,
but uh, a fucking dope plant. And it's each one
of those flowers produces, you know, one hundred and two
hundred tiny seeds. And there's lobilias all over the place.
There's Lobilia's in the cloud forest of Tanzania. There's twenty

(01:42:33):
foot lobilias in Brazil and Mina Jerias. I was just
seeing them last year, you know. So it's cool. It's
you see that flower. You see this little pollen tube
with the anthers all pointing inward. You know it's a libilia.
You're in Brazil on vacation or somewhere and you see
the same fucking lobilia. Right. That's so I always recommend

(01:42:53):
they get to know the genus at least if you
really get into this stuff. If not, at least just
appreciated impatience can penses. That's a great one. This is
supposed to be a good ass rash anadoltic. You get
poison ivy, you take some leaves and you can supposedly
it's what I've heard, But that's not why I like it.
I like it because it's just a fucking dope flower,
and it's got a really cool floral structure, and it's

(01:43:14):
got this little nectar spur at the base that produces nectar.
So pollinators going there to try and get it that
and come out with pond on their head. Hit the
next flower, and then these little fruits, because the fruits
just an ovary, the ovaries inside the flower. It's unpollinated
ovaries are back there. Then the flower falls off. That's
the fruit. They explode when they're ready. They violently the hits,

(01:43:37):
they explosive the hissians. They shoot seeds everywhere. Great method
for getting your seeds out there. This is Iliam, the ramota.
This thing was a victim of fire suppression. It wasn't
seen for a couple decades down ear and Kinka Ki,
and then they started burning and then it just took off.
I mean the seeds, the seeds were probably in that

(01:43:59):
soil for god knows how long, and but nobody was burning,
and it was smothered in invasive buck thorn and honeysuckle,
and they started burning and they came back and it
does great in the fucking garden. It's I planted some
of my friend Jonathan's house on the northwest side, full sun.
They're fucking great. Like, there's no reason this shit should
be rare. It's not hard to grow. Just nobody pays attention,
nobody cares about it. There's no context for it. And

(01:44:20):
people want the fucking variegated leaves Helianthus gross to seratus.
This is just a sunflower that gets like, you know,
ten feet tall in some cases, really fun to beat
your friends with after the after the tops have died
and they got like a stick left Sylphium. This is
I mean, that is like a this is what the

(01:44:41):
really what got me into natives in Chicago? I was,
I was in California. I came back to Chicago at
age thirty five. Once I had context for what a
native plant was, and I was, you know, what is it?
What is I wonder if the natives of Chicago were right,
that's the same thing I do all over the globe.
And I wonder what the native plants of this region are,
what evolved here, what has context for the land and
although their life that grows here? And I found this

(01:45:02):
plant and that's I was fucking blown away. I was
like four foot long leaves and these flowers that get
fifteen feet tall because they got to get up above
the tall grasses of the prairies to get pollinated. And
I couldn't believe I'd never seen this plant before. You know,
three hundred years ago where my house stood, there were
probably there was probably a huge colony of them growing,

(01:45:23):
but they've all been wiped away. That's when I got
kind of pissed off. That wasn't good for my uh
my anger management when I learned that. But you know what,
I just started growing a shit ton of them and
spreading them around. So even if you don't have a yard,
there's shit you could do. This is for a different
regional biota anyway. There's plugs of little blue stem This

(01:45:44):
is epizzo. I love plugs because they just roots want
to go deep. They don't want to go out so much.
I like planting plugs. So this is my house and
we're finishing up soon. If you've got a nice you know,
you got like a bunch of ash sweat, or it's
hot in here. It is getting a little hot in
I want to take a break. We'll be done soon.
But this is my house. I moved here in July
of twenty two. First thing I did, I threw a

(01:46:06):
fouton a filthy fuuton mattress on the floor of the
living room. And then I got to work removing the lawn.
And so I didn't know what I was doing yet
because I hadn't I had just moved to South Texas,
I moved there for family, needless to say, it wasn't
for the culture, and so I I didn't know what
I was doing. You probably don't know what you're doing either.

(01:46:26):
Who gives a fuck. Just get the fuck out there
and start doing it. That's how you learn. There's no book.
I mean, sure there are books to tell you, but
the best way fuck all that though. No. No people
write me and they're like, what books should I learn
to get into plants? And I was telling the same
thing Bonnie in the day and plants systematics. But just
to get out there and start taking pictures of shit
with your little pocket device, of stuff that you're interested in,

(01:46:49):
and then ask questions. If you're not asking questions, you
can read as much as you want. If you're not
asking questions, you're not going to learn shit. Right again,
it's just memorizing. That's the American schooling. Memorize this year
you can get a job. Don't think about it, don't
ask questions why does it do? This's just memorize it
so you can pass the test and get the good
grades and get a job that you hate for the
next thirty years of your life. So this is what

(01:47:09):
I did. So I went and I removed the one
and I just started a long time of planting shit everywhere.
This is like, this is the stuff that drives the
lens scape architects crazy. They don't like it right, there's
no plant to it. I just thought about where's the sun.
The sun is that way, as you can tell by
the shade cloth and the palette I stole from Walmart
to line, you know, to shade the stuff that I planted.

(01:47:30):
I had no idea. I was just learning. I would
do it differently now because I've spent a few years
living here, But that's what I did, and that was
just what I just wanted to get all these plants
in the ground. I had already been living there for
a year. I knew a lot of the cool plants
from the Peyote gardens. I wanted to see what they
how they grew. This was a learning that was the
most That was the thing that was most excited about.
Is this was like a lab. To me, My yard

(01:47:52):
was a lab and that's what it should be for
you too. You learn so fucking much when you do this,
because when you do this, all the life comes back
and you start seeing shit that you had no idea
lived in your region. I've got four species of lizards
living here. I've got three species of amphibians. I've got oh.
I had a tarantula. They're harmless tarantula. You can let
them craw on you. They just look scary whatever. I

(01:48:14):
had a tarantula show up once. I don't know where
the fuck she came from, but I was delighted to
see her. You know, everything comes back. So that's what
it looked like when I first set it up. There's
the shovel. I used, the sharpshooters. They're like thirty bucks.
The whole thing's made out of metal. If you get
a shovel, don't. I don't like the wood because the
wood shrinks and then it starts wiggling around and shit

(01:48:35):
breaks and whatever. Get the metal ones. I use Fisker.
That's what all the weed growers use, and California Fisker brand.
Remember when the illegal weed business was still let's not
talk about that anyway. There's me looking like a tweaker
with an augur. The fucking thing broke six months later.
Don't get an auger. So that's but that was what

(01:48:55):
I was doing. You can see I just left all
the side there there's it like a like a month
after plant thing. I put the bamboo in there just
to get you know, because I like the plants small.
You put the bamboo steaks there. I would go to
an alley. I'd saw down this lady's bamboo. She actually
didn't care either. She had it grown into the alley,
and I would use those to just give it some
visual gravity so I wouldn't step on at or so,

(01:49:17):
you know, just so people and then you take them
away later as the stuff grows up, right, that's what
it looks like now, right, And this is this is
actually I took this photo a year ago. It's now
it's huge, and I've had, you know, as it grows,
I took stuff out, like I removed one of these
trees back here. I shaved this up. I get the
All I use are electric hedgers and a weed whacker,

(01:49:39):
and I cut shit back and I like how overwhelming
it is. But after a while it doesn't get to
be maybe it gets to be a little too much.
It doesn't have to be forever. You got to enjoy
that thing for that tree for two years. Take it out,
remove it, cut it the fuck down, you know. I
don't live in the prairie. I live in the thorn scrub,
so my stuff doesn't die at the end of November.
It's you know, a little bit more to think about there.

(01:50:00):
But it's amazing, and so I come out. I get
distracted walking to my truck. I see all kinds of
cool shit growing. I can tell you the genus and
species name of all these plants, A good three quarters
of them. I grew myself. Right, you don't have to
go here. You don't have to go nuts like I do,
but I recommend it. But you can. But this is

(01:50:20):
just this is what's I mean. And now it's now
it's massive, right, and it's so I mean. And if
you're a bird flying overhead through a bleak landscape of
parking lots and dying lawns, right, and then you see
this massive green oasis, and that's what my yard looks
like from above. Where are you gonna go? Right? Like

(01:50:41):
I live right on the Mexican border. All this stuff
that's coming from the Sierra Madre and going north for
the summer or going back to the Sierra Madre actually
had the monarch migration to two weeks ago. Right, this
stuff's flying up there. You're gonna go here, right, That's
where the food is. It's green, it's alive, it's where
the that is. Here's my friend Hector's house. He had

(01:51:02):
a burrow Corcus macrocarpa. They grow here. They grow in
North Texas too, on the Mexican border of South Texas.
They don't like it so much, as evidenced by the
fact that it's dying back. So he said, what what
can I do? I said, just let it die slowly
and cut it as the branches that you know you're
not going to save it. I mean, if you want,
you can spend ten fifteen grand for an arborus to
come by and you know, rip you off and take

(01:51:25):
it down. But I would just leave it. It's good habitat,
take it back six feet as at a time as
it dies, and you know, say goodbye to it, and
then let's plant the native garden in your yard, which
is what we did. This is like the two days
after planting. I need to get new photos. And then
this is like three months after planting, and now it's
fucking dope. And this dude is like he's like an

(01:51:46):
immigration attorney, right, he had no interest in plants. Before.
It's kind of an alcoholic doing nofing you. I've been
trying to get him into the program or something, but
but you know, but he was he started messaging me
like i'd be out out of the country. So I mean,
I get a like, man, look at what I saw
in my yard. Holy shit, it's so cool, you know.
I was like, oh fuck, yeah, man, it's great. Keep
coming back, you know. And so now all this stuff

(01:52:09):
is you know, and then you just you go in.
You're you're the disturbance that enables the diversity. You head
shit up, you cut stuff. Maybe this thing got too big.
I planted these things. I like to plant the dense, right.
I like it. And if I got a knowing full well,
I might have to remove something in two years, big
big deal. I got to enjoy it. When it was
growing there. It was acted as a nice screen. It
served the purpose. It kept the sun off the ground,

(01:52:29):
vital cool insects to the yard. Whatever. So I'll remove it,
say goodbye to it. Thanks nice knowing you remove it
and then let other stuff grow so that, I mean,
this whole thing now is just filled up. This is
my friends that we're teachers. This is yard it's only
like one year of growth too. They put a path
in there. That's it. Now. They're really big on the

(01:52:51):
Halloween decorations too. Yeah, I gotta get new photos because
these trees are much taller now and we've had to
remove some stuff. And you know, some of these landscape
architects and people, you know, the American ideas about horticulture
and landscaping are fucked up. You know, it's kind of
been the if you haven't grasped that yet from this
this this presentation, you know. But the thing is to

(01:53:14):
just get your ass out there, you know, get your
ass out to think about it. Oh, should I remove it?
You'll just get you outside. I mean, it's the fucking
dopamine that comes from interacting with the life around you.
You know. It's it's not unique to certain people. It's
pretty widespread. I have found a lot of people experience this.
This is just some West Texas stuff. Tetraonus kaposa Stemodia lenati.

(01:53:36):
You can't find those plants and nurseries unfortunately. You know,
it's the same thing I encounter everywhere. Why the fuck
is nobody growing this? Man? It does so well? Then
you plant it in a yard, and it does even
better because it's it's a less stressful environment than the
native Chihuahua desert. Right, Why is nobody growing this? Because
American horticultures wanted this same bullshit, this fluffy pulp bullshit,

(01:53:56):
for the last one hundred and fifty years. And that's
why the living the world is fucking dying. Part of
the reason, you know, all these great planets, this is
right here. It's in Chicago. Man. I almost fell in
the river getting chased by crackheads twenty years ago. Right,
I have an intimate relationship with the Chicago River. I
know this smell very well, but it doesn't smell like
that anymore. It's amazing. Me and Al were kayaking down

(01:54:19):
this one day just for shits and giggles, and we
saw this dock of all these floating native plants and
I was like, these are fucking natives, Man, who did this?
This is amazing, you know? And then of course, yeah,
it's urban rivers. And you know, then we saw the
giant fucking snapping turtle. And now they got beavers and
coyotes and all this shit, and they're expanding, and you know,

(01:54:41):
I mean, and this is something I mean, I'm waiting
for the day that someone just gorilla starts doing this.
You know, someone on the south side is like, I'm
just gonna build a floating mat and start planting natives
on it. This is Christy Weber's nursery on the west side.
This is up in Evanston. This is great. Like, I
see shit like this and I'm like, that's fucking great.

(01:55:02):
But again, you know, a lot of has and cities
would see that and it's methy. It's methy. I hate it.
It's messy the fuck out of here. You're a fucking poodle,
You're a guinea pig. Do you stay inside where it's safe.
Don't go into nature, right, stay inside drinking, drinking the
fucking doctor pepper and hitting the vape pen and playing
call of duty. Don't go outside, right. You know, this

(01:55:24):
is a native garden in Maryland. Homeowner moved out after
planting this, and the lady that moved in it was
so fucking great. She's like, I'm gonna keep it covered.
In life, all these plays are all the same. You
can smell them, you can hear them. They're alive. We
already went through that and the tools I use this

(01:55:45):
hedge clippers. I like the electrics because the gas, you
don't use it for a month to fucking filter clogs
up and you're there pulling the goddamn then cursing to
yourself like the gas. Just get a weed whack or
a sharp shooter and hedgecutters. I do mainance in my
yard like once a month if that, if it hasn't
been raining, I don't have to do anything. I'm not
out there mowing it like a sap every week. And

(01:56:08):
then you get one of these. I made signs of these.
I put PDFs of this up on uh. I'll put
them on the website too, so you can, you know,
you you can. There's places that do custom signs. You
just you know. This is just if you live in
a city where you know your neighbors are kind of
staff or you know, you got you living next to
some fucking Becky. You SnO of fence to anybody named Becky,

(01:56:29):
you know, and and and the city hall is going
to breathe down your neck. It's just an explanation, you know.
It's like, hey man, this is intentional, right. My city
tried fucking with me. You see that yard. You could
bet your ass they were fucking with me, you know,
and what was my What was my response? The same
thing again, another thing I lived from Alan Rockefeller. Just
fucking be really polite and kind and just talk and
just keep talking and talking and talking until you're driving

(01:56:53):
them away. It's the same thing he did when he
got stopped by the cops in Tennessee for having a
bunch of mushrooms on his dashboard. I just told them,
I just you don't plead the fifth, I'll fucking tell
you everything you want to know about mushrooms or fucking
native plants. No, please, come come check out my fucking yard.
You know, city administrators that smell like farts in cologne

(01:57:13):
and fucking botox or whatever, you know it. Come let
me tell you about about these plants. And they fucked
me for like a month, and then they said they
were gonna come check out my yard. And then one
morning I got a call and they said, just don't
worry about it. You fucking take get the fuck out
of it's right, yeah, right, So anyway, that's it. So

(01:57:33):
if we could do a Q and A, if anyone
still has the energy, how long was that? It was
a two hours? Jesus Christ you know, I'm sorry two
hours two hours. You guys all did really well. You know,
we're very proud of you. More more attention span than
I have. Oh yeah, yeah to his soul man. I

(01:58:00):
think he's like a veteran or something. And and his
daughter and it's just them too. And you know they
had like a baron They had like a barren lot,
and you know they have like a lawn service come by. God,
I had to think what they were charging them. You know,
they'd come by because they're not loaded, and so they
would come by and they'd fucking hear the lawnmowers and

(01:58:21):
the leaf blowers and all this shit going around. Then
finally I just I caught her outside one day and
I was like, I got this A gave you know,
can I do you want this? And she's like, oh yeah, sure, okay,
And so I put it in the ground. And then
I got a text a week later and she's like,
my dad really likes that. You know, do you have
any more? And I was like, yeah, got a bunch more. Yeah,

(01:58:41):
I'll be there tomorrow, you know. Fucking so now like
I've already I've planted up a bunch of cool shit,
like cool columnar cacti, and you know more a gave
species and a tepawaii really fast growing native legume we
get in South Texas. And so now their yard is
in the gaves grow fast on there because it's so
fucking hot. They're in full sun. So yeah, man, I

(01:59:02):
mean that's and and it's you know, they're like thank you,
They're like, thank you for doing this. I'm like like, meanwhile,
I'm like, this is entirely selfish. Like I I got
tired of seeing the you know, the bleakness and the
fucking lawnmowers, and like, ill, I'm stoked cause I get
to live next to this now and and you know,
it's I can see you guys are happy. And then
you know, now there's like cool fucking woodpeckers hanging out

(01:59:24):
in the tepewahe and stuff. And so it's entirely selfish.
I mean it's you can see my work around town. Yeah,
you know, and that's part of that's part of the
fun of it. I mean, I think like planting shit.
This is what I tell people who don't have a yard.
It's like, you know, you can't draw, you can't make art,
you don't you know, whatever, you don't you don't, you
say you can't draw whatever. It's the same urge that's fulfilled,

(01:59:45):
the same dopamine receptors are fulfilled by planting. Shit. You
know you don't have a yard, Go get some fucking seeds.
I got seeds right now in my pocket. You know,
my dryer lint trap every time I do laundry is
just fucking exploding. It's a it's a fire hazard. Right,
get some seeds, right, just interact with it, touch it,
feel it, look at them. Okay, this is what alatrac

(02:00:06):
seed looks like. And then you go stuff them in
the fence line. They cant lie near your house, railroad embankment.
You know, you start learning where it's gonna get mote
or sprayed and what won't and where. I mean, just
you know, you're acting as a dispersal mechanism for the plants,
human assisted dispersal. Right, there's always something to do, is
just get out there and interact with it. So, you know,

(02:00:26):
I mean it, Chicago's really cool. I mean, the stuff
I've been seeing here is wild, and it wasn't even
like this ten years ago. There were little bits. I
think Lurry Garden has been there a long time. But
like you know, in front of Field Museum. I remember
seeing native plants there when I was a kid. I
don't remember, you know. I mean it's yeah, it's it's pretty.
Uh it's it's a fucking blank canvas, you know, so

(02:00:49):
anybody else, yeah, uh, mastications than the next beec's thing.
So that just means chewing it up, like that's what
they did at a forest preserved near my mom's house.
They need to burn because the ticks are bad. But
you know, those suburbanites get a little they don't. They
don't like the and I understand why, you know, I mean,

(02:01:09):
you know, so they don't so grazing maybe it's better
than nothing. But they went in and they masticated all.
I think they had a brushog or something like a
big machine that chews stuff up, but just something, you know,
I mean, and I'm sure that's why native people burned.
I mean, as humans, we don't like these like dense
you know, under stories that you can't walk through like

(02:01:31):
the best. We like, you know, we evolved in the savannah.
We like spending time in open habitats like canopy of shade.
And then I'm sure the ticks and sugars were a
huge reason why people burned as well, because those get
out of control if you don't burn. You know, that's
why the ticks in the northeast are so bad. Two
hundred and fifty years of fire suppression. So yeah, mo Or,
you can take That's This fucking tool is great because

(02:01:55):
I mean, I'll take it, you know. It's I use
it to like basically when stuff is growing into the path,
I'll shave it up. But you can also it can
get thick material too, you know, if it's not like
I mean, if it's a pinky finger is kind of
like the size at which the blade stop cutting if
it's hard wood. But if it's just like old cellulose
or like old sunflower stock or something, you can take
that and just for prairie, for herbacious perennials and the prairie,

(02:02:18):
just take it and just cut. You know, I would say,
leave shit up till December so the birds can get
some seed and maybe some insects over winter, and then
you can just go and just you know, I'm sure
there's more efficient machines that can do it if you
want to, if you've got a huge area. But for
just the front yard, Like that's that's a great fucking tool.
It's like one hundred and twenty bucks and it comes
to the big ass battery or something. But there's other

(02:02:40):
ways to do it too, you know, Like you go
to Mexico, you see the guys on the side of
the road using those handheld like it looks like a
scythe basically cut it. You just cut it down, you know,
just cut it down. But yeah, but burning is really
the best. So anyway, anybody else, no, you guys, just like,

(02:03:00):
let me the fuck out of here. Start growing pauty
in your apartment, you know, or any scene, get like
some spider farmer really d lights and a heat matt
and humid. No, you could start a bunch of you could.
I wouldn't start any of the natives here till like February.

(02:03:21):
And also, like Chicago, apartments are so dry because the
outside air is so cold. Cold air doesn't hold any moisture.
You bring the cold air inside, you heat it up,
it just sucks all the moisture out of everything. But
you can just you gotta get humidity, you know, either
a large bag or humidity them or something. But you know,
you can grow stuff yeah, I mean, you know, under

(02:03:41):
lights it's easy too. I remember a friend of mine
had he he he was he always complained about his
seasonal effective disorder. So he would get one of those
like mood lights. You know, he'd like sit in front
of it every winter. It looked like a fucking goof.
But but yeah, I would grow. I would grow stuff,
you know, I would just experiment and and you know,

(02:04:01):
maybe you'll kill a bunch of shit at first, but
you'll learn. I mean, you're not gonna learn if you're
not trying. That's like the main the main thing. Or
just yeah, just collect seeds and just scatter them around.
You know, you got someone else's backyard or a park
you like to go to find an area and it's
neglected and just clear some clear some of the dirt
away and throw the seeds down. Whatever. So anyway, yeah,

(02:04:24):
do you like stems and gold clubs? Stems or this
percentage of moment that you're growing is patch in New
York called till like marsh. So those type of insight Yeah,
I think that's what they do in the Lowry garden.
Someone I know who's yeah, I mean, people just gotta
get used to that. Man you know, that's the thing,

(02:04:46):
and just be nice about it and just be no,
this is like, this is what's here, and you tell them, no,
this is feeding insects and birds and there's probably some
bumblebees living in the stems, and that's just what it is.
I mean again, it's it's this whole, this whole world.
And it's not just the United States too. I go
to Brazil to you know, the second most bio diverse
place I've ever been to, and like I try to

(02:05:07):
find anything about the native plants and the dominant culture.
There's nothing there. They don't even have guide books, you know,
and they're planting booga and v's and crape myrtles and
the dumb shit that you see in areas here. It's
just it's just disconnection. It's that disconnection, you know, fostered
by you know, the last few hundred years of civilizations.
So that's what you gotta kind of ract. So anyway,

(02:05:28):
all right, well you guys can go, Thanks a lot.
I'll be selling merch and uh shit, we got shirts
and mugs and all that bullshit. Or if you just
want to come shoot the ship, that's fine too. So yeah,
thanks a lot for coming. Out. I can't believe you
guys all stayed, so you know

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}KYL LIVE @ the Hideout

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

Crime Junkie

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

KYL LIVE @ the Hideout

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist