This conversation will make you want to buy a microscope and will make you rethink the way you envision the Tree of Life, where animals, plants and fungi are just a tiny speck on the overall tree of life. Dr. Julia Van Etten (of the @Couch Microscopy Instagram page) talks about what the hell a Protist is and where you can find them (everywhere). We reveal how Protists are the fine particles that weave within and throughout our world."The Tree of Life is Really a Web ..read more

In this episode we take a break from botany-related content to talk with my friend and fellow former locomotive engineer and railroader Lance Jenkins about railroading, sobriety, sad male archetypes in the US, stealing overtime, precision scheduled railroading and how it's responsible for the wreck in East Palestine Ohio,  "The Sun Train", and a whole lot more ..read more

South Texas Sandsheet, Uvalde County Botany, Using a Leafblower & Diatomaceous Earth to rid yourself of crabs, what the sh*t is a Heterokont aka Stramenophile, Texas Men Will Be Able to Admit Having Feelings in 2028, and more  ..read more

In this episode we talk with Hunter Martinez of the Cactus Quest YouTube Channel about how he got into growing cacti from seed and lurking on them in habitat. We discuss the spirituality of loving plants and deserts, the pros and cons of the collector habit common among this family of plants, why so many cacti grow on limestone geology, and the benefits of growing from seed over purchasing full-grown plants ..read more

A series of extended rants about "F*ck the Honeybees", trying to settle beefs between friends, Male Primate Rivalry, Riding Trains in Mexico in 2005 & Brakemen with gold fronts, spreading the cult of native plant gardening via demonstration by example and killing lawns ..read more

A long-winded rant about the social media phenomenon known as Instagram Drug Bros™️ and trying to encourage them to seek spiritual refuge (como se dice nice) in education about plant ecology and evolution rather than just the hoarding and collecting of plants that may have been sourced through somewhat unethical means. Why is plant habitat just as, if not more important than the plant itself? How is the ecological context in which a plant evolves inseparable from the plant itself? Can we get Instagram Drug Bros ™️  to start studying and collecting data on things like native solitary bees ..read more

This is a science-heavy episode with Dr. Michael Windham, specialist in Cheilanthoid Ferns curator at Duke Herbarium. Even if you're not interested in this group, they're a great case study in numerous fascinating phenomena including convergent evolution, biogeography (dispersal vs. vicariance), why DNA sequencing is important to taxonomy, self-cloning to escape the limitations of being a fern in a desert, etc.  "Cheilanthoid Ferns" are a remarkable group of ferns - they grow in habitats where ferns seemingly shouldn't be able to grow - out of cracks in rocks and cliff faces in regions ..read more

This episode consists of a rant about code-switching and friendship/cordiality through friction and being a pain in the ass, along with why dissecting flowers (and not just taking them at face value) with a razorblade or knife is important for understanding evolution, plant breeding systems and pollination ecology, what being "protogynous" is and why so many early-braching angiosperms do it, trying to offend advertisers, helping cacti bang in order to produce seed, and how an undescribed Gymnopilus species found growing on a shrubby Ambrosia species in the Baja California Desert  (thumbna ..read more

A conversation with Tony Figueroa, Senior Manager for the Invasive Plant Program at the Tucson Audubon Society (no affiliation with the National Org) about preventing Buffelgrass and Stinknet from smothering fragile Desert Ecosystems in Arizona. We also discuss why some in the "online permaculture community" (oh gahd) have such an aversion to any and all glyphosate use due to a misunderstanding about how it's used. Other topics include using an electric chainsaw to vandalizeCallery Pears and Crepe Myrtles and other hotricultural atrocity street trees, Why Texas is so uptight, how an invasive a ..read more

A conversation with Dr. Kathleen Pryer (Director, Duke University Herbarium) and Dr. Michael Windham, (Curator of Vascular Plants, Duke University Herbarium) about the University's Decision to cut costs by closing the herbarium as well as the general trend in modern US Academia of failing to recognize the importance of Botany in society as a whole as well as other attempts to defund it. We also touch on the cheilanthoid fern genus Gaga, named after both Lady Gaga and a section of the roughly 1500 base-pair-long MatK plastid gene region and why cheilanthoid ferns (aka desert ferns) are so damn ..read more