Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

Anthony Basil Rodriguez is an ethnobotanist from the Bronx, New York that has traveled the world studying wild bananas. In this episode we talked about his travels all over the world and other notable and incredible plants he has encountered, as well as the people that utilize them.

Marianna Wright is the director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, which provides critical habitat for wildlife in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The National Butterfly Center was targeted by extreme right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists in 2019/2020, including two of the now-convicted fraudsters behind the private border wall project.

This episode consists of a 90 minute rant about the wonders of Cornell University Herbarium (1 million specimens you schmuck), how a cactus came to grow in Brooklyn, Botanizing a filthy industrial creek in Queens New York, the enigmatic Appalachian shale buckwheat (Eriogonum allenii) of Virginia, giving a talk on plant evolution in lower Manhattan, and more.

In this episode with Dr. Rob Rugoso from Cornell University we discuss the chemistry of floral scents, how scent evolves (ie Clarkia breweri), night pollination, flowers that trap their pollinators, floral mimicry & more.

A rant about how prairie soils get built, what exactly a "herbaceous perennial" is and why this habit is so relevant and important to remember when talking about the prairie, how important prairie grasses like big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) and indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) are to building rich top soil (hunt: it's the roots), etc.Other included rant subjects are cigars, killing 16 lawns during the month of September including 4 for a revision series, issuing a fatwa against Midwestern Landscaping and horticultural atrocities, and more

Gerould Wilhelm is one of the two authors of Flora of the Chicago Region - A Floristic & Ecological Synthesis. In this episode we talk about a number of topics, from prairie hydrology, native American belief systems, civilizational ethos and how he sets fire to his suburban yard every year in order to facilitate the diversity of prairie plant communities.Please check out his long list of essays, research articles, and publications at www.conservationresearchinstitute.com

Fabiany Herrera is a paleobotanist specializing on a diverse array of time periods and paleofloras, including the Mazon Creek Flora from the Carboniferous when Lycopods were friggin' trees, as well as the utterly bizarre Jurassic and early Cretaceous Bennettitales & Corystospermaceae from the excellently preserved Mesozoic lignite of Mongolia.Many of the plants we talk about in this episode HAVE NO LIVING OR EXTANT RELATIVES - they represent fantastical lineages of plants whose base branches that simply got clipped off the tree of life either during mass extinctions events or gradually during climatic changes. Umaltolepis - a ginkgo relative - is an exception to this, but still an equally bizarre plant.This was a really fun conversation and it could've gone on much longer but we ran outta time. Hope you enjoy.

A one hour rant about Glacial Till, Kankakee Mallow, Sand Prairies, Stiff Designs for Native Plant Landscapes, Emulating the "Beautiful Chaos" of the prairie, etc.

Keeper Trout is one of the founding members of Cactus Conservation Institute and a research scientist who - along with Dr. Martin Terry - has studied a number of the cactus species in South Texas for 3 decades in an understudied and underappreciated habitat known as Tamaulipan Thornscrub.In this episode we talk about a broad range of subjects from the history of laws regarding Native American use of Peyote, the impact that melting glaciers in New Mexico may have had on the soils of South Texas, how the history of religion has dictated plant-based religions for centuries, and how fungal and bacterial organisms in the soil and in the plant itself might enable various cactus species to tolerate extreme conditions such as freezes and extreme heat spells.

In this episode we talk about the botany of the Philippines (influenced by a remarkable tectonic setting), volcanic activity, ultramafic soil, "ant-plants" like Myrmecodia (Rubiaceae), Dipterocarpaceae, cloud forests and lowland rainforest) , the psychedelic lichen #Dictyonema , as well as Yucca Pollination on the other side of the globe in East Texas with Adam Black, a botanist and researcher with Bartlett Arboretum.