84: Tree Talk & Trading Card Art

Can trees talk to each other? And how does that personifying metaphor square with the actual science behind it? And what can we learn from the stories of art on trading cards throughout history?

Images we Talk About:  
Trade Cards
3 Modern Trading Cards
Yuka Morii's Cards
Terror
Hyalopterus Lemure
Preposterous Proportions

Timestamps:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:02:08) Tree Talk
(00:52:16) Trading Card Art
(01:33:47) Outro

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The answer is yes maybe sometimes and no, talking tree folklore, communication as transferring information, The Secret Life of Trees, Caroline WAS vegan, plants feel pain - GOOD, tree self defense, secondary metabollites, you got me AND Ella to write that down, tannin defense mechanism, volatile organic compounds, giraffes avoiding nearby leaves after eating, maybe trees are eavesdropping, mycorrhizal networks, could it be diffusion or a baby tree suckling on its mother, do a stanford prisoner experiment for trees, that tree is giving mother, mother trees - altruistic fungi - and the perils of plant personification, literally talking to trees, your first priority shouldn’t be to not be boring - maybe second, respect for the organisms that are fundamentally unlike us - their unfathomable lives, the modern boom of trading cards, trade cards, mass produced color images were cool and novel, how many credits for that chromo?  absurd advertising from the 1800s, anthropomorphic fruits and veggies were all the rage, trade cards were a microcosm of marketing-invention-and collecting, Ella’s baseball impression, looking at a mainstream sport through the nerdiest lens imaginable, cigarette baseball cards, Doug McWilliams photographed 8% of all major league baseball players, oh right photography is an art, and so is building relationships with players, cards began to stand on their own, Richard Garfield wanted baseball cards for nerds, Magic and Pokemon credit their artists - but YuGiOh does not, Yuka Morii’s sculpture cards, Adam Rex’s Terror, Richard Thomas’ Hyalopterous Lemure, Julie Baroh flipping off her classmates, companies screwing over artists, it’s still art in spite of being a piece of cardboard.

Sources:
2010 Paper: Explaining evolution of plant communication by airborne signals
New York Times: The Social Life of Forests
Book: The Secret Life Of Plants
National Geographic: Plants can talk. Yes, really. Here’s how.
2025 Pape: Shrub anti-herbivore defenses exhibit non-linear and varied responses to increased herbivore density
1990 Paper: Acacia Tree Kills Antelope
Book: Ethylene in Plant Biology
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