Please watch the latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0. It's an interview with an old botanist, who shares his wisdom and philosophy, remains engaged after decades of witnessing first hand America's nature getting destroyed.
2 main points:
- destroyed old-growth forests, grassland, remnant prairies takes millennia to be back to what they were, not decades. Insects and other pollinators don't just reappear
- water availability for plants comes in many forms, all of which disappear with tillage.
Joey is an acquired taste, but if you look past the strong and odd personality (the persona?), his channel is a gold mine. But this time he was (rightfully) impressed by Gerry (Gerould) Wilhelm's wealth of knowledge.
I love this guy, also my favourite Youtube channel and one of my favourite podcasts, he also guests on In Defence of Plants from time to time, I have the impression he's friends with the host.
Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?
Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.
I think nature and plants always interested me since I was a kid. For example I loved to plant from seeds, see them grow, learn and explore a bit with curiosity my mum or aunt plants and when being out in the forest, but not a lot more than that.
Later, while growing up, I noticed my brain noticing plants or tree details, auto mapping them to possible genre, trying to find out, trying to memorize... but not always voluntarily, meaning that i felt like I was much more attracted and focused on plants and tree details and recognition after a certain age.
Something similar happened with birds, my brain started recording and recognizing the different birds sounds, and I started recognizing birds types more. Like something that before was a random signal or a bunch of sounds suddenly with age started having patterns and clear distinctions that attracted my brain and memory, and I simply started being able to distinguish birds by just hearing them.
I love it, I observe, I listen, I learn. I use the plant apps and birdnet for the bird soiunds (from CornellLab and Technical university of Chemnitz). Cool projects, lovely apps and interesting tech usage.
I'm planning to upgrade terrace with constant camera feed for auto-detection.
But the main point is, does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age? is it something known and defined? it kinda feels like part of a biological evolution related to age, but no idea.
does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age?
I do, and I've seen it in others, but from the limited data points I've seen there's no causal relationship with age. I.e. what I've seen is people largely oblivious of nature/ecosystems/flora/fauna sudenly becoming very invested in it, for various reasons, but this doesn't happen at or only beyond a certain age. For me it was around 30 but that's simply because of a series of coincidences (new house, large garden, needed solution for mowing, happened to see a 2nd hand scythe, looked into grassland ecology, etc). But I know people whos obsession started at 16 and at 60 and like everything in between.
I think it's one of those things that for whichever reason you happen to get switched on to, and once you're attentive to it, you'll constantly be noticing and learning more - once that positive feedback loop of rewarded attention is going, you're off to the races.
It's deeply rewarding to find the world around becoming deeper and more intricately connected. And you get to see more of it every day!
Feedback loop is right. I think there are parallels to the Blank Check podcast playing "The Box Office Game", where those cinephiles try to determine the Box Office Top 5 on the week a particular film was released (even though the players may have been in diapers or not even born on that particular week).
I have also seen this obsessive focus in sports fans: What was the half-season where Pat Maroon played on the New Jersey Devils as a rental? Well they made the playoffs that year which must have been Taylor Hall's MVP Award Season and ah yes! that had to be 2017-18!
if you guys like this kinda stuff i can recommend the latest dump of buckminster fuller institute on his life work (series of transcribed lectures). The guy is fascinated by similar things and has potentially a lot of interesting insights about this if you are unfamiliar.
cool! thanks for sharing, that's my usual fallback reason too.
meaning that i feel it was a change also triggered by other factors and life conditions, or even a reaction to those, but at the same time I realize that my brain started receiving and analyzing and appreciating those signal, not me completely voluntary.
one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact, like a story of a friend stopping the car just to touch grass with the feet.
I relate to an approximate after 30 thing too. But in my case nature contact was reduced compare to initial life part, and I got a garden after that.
But again, it feels like an over semplifcation or easy shortcut, and I believe there is maybe just something innate that blooms at a certain point.
how can we get more datapoints for this? I was trying to crowdsource here :)
one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact
I'm sure that's a thing for some people. And there's research to back that up IIRC. Even seemingly silly things like the smell of a wet forest being beneficial.
One aspect which stood out for me is 'awareness'. I find it deeply fascinating how many people, as I used to be one, can just stroll through everyday locations without even knowing the names of the most common plants let alone think about their connection to the surroundings. Once I started to realize how unaware I was of this I started forzing myself to be more aware and it's fascinating how much there can be going on in like even 1 square meter of nature. And of which I only know a fraction.
And for me this is really meditative - even though it's somewhat counterintuitive. Meditation is usually about clearing the mind, but for me being in nature and filling my mind with thoughts about the whole interconnection of individuals in ecosystems can bring peace and relaxation. Well, as long as I do not think about how we're collectively destroying a lot of it.
I've experienced that with trees over the last 5 years. I've been working on forest restoration on some land as a hobby and everywhere I travel I try to identify the trees I see.
For me, it's really just trees though. Birds and other wildlife are nice, but they don't draw my interest in the same way.
> does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age
I have a similar interest but mine is about passively assimilating foreign languages while watching movies. Every time I grok a new expression it feels like a rush of dopamine.
yeah ok, now that you put languages in the pot, I felt the same when absorbing other foreign languages too, and I totally understand your feeling. I was grokking successfully foreign language phrases or expression with the help of IT terminology and latin roots on the fly, was very interesting. It was like unknown input but with some clues and the brain auto decoding and mapping in that case.
maybe is just how our brain is wired and predisposed to such things that let us notice and enjoy this evolution or process?
It is clearly a very useful skill to have as it helps us find food we know is safe. I think in the modern world this tends to be something most kids don't have an oppurtunity to develop. When in a more natural environment it would be expressed much earlier.
I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.
Hort. Science degree from A&M in '80, employers offered to pay me $800 a month a water their greenhouses. Indeed, Botany was one of the more boring courses required. Scrapped by after the university as a landscaper-irrigator, then discovered too many years later the uber wealthy living on certain Texas Lakes would pay enormous sums to have me dive to service-install their pumps to feed raw water to their landscapes. Customers would call me in exasperation explaining they just got a water bill for like $900 to $1,000. Raw lake water was available at about $150 to $175 per 325,000 gallons with a permit. A lady I knew convinced me that horticulture, and especially botany, are "labors of love", not particularly a way to become financially successful.
I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it
I use iNaturalist for plants and animals, mostly insects (and Merlin for birdsong recognition).
No ads, non-profit, contribute to research, etc. It also allows you to find out what others have spotted in your area. I like the range maps, the images across seasons, and other seasonal information.
The actual ML-based recognition is somewhat hidden, I think that part of the UI needs some work; it seems like it was made for researchers first then hacked for non-experts to use.
Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)
It is a pity that, while their focus is on openness and accessiblity, neither Flora Incognita, nor iNaturalist or PlantNet can be installed from the F-Droid appstore. I unfortunately don't use Google Play, so can't testdrive them.
Flora Incognita and PlantNet are not open source, so they cannot be published to F-Droid. However, iNaturalist is and the apk can be directly installed from the GitHub releases page.
I live next to a botanical garden which has climate-regulated glass domes with all sorts of non-native plants from around the world and it gets 90%+ of them right, but sometime you have to feed it different parts of the plant. PlantNet does look great too, I’ll have to check it out!
That's a nice anecdote, but I didn't just make up this fact. According to their paper [1], Flora has 4851 supported species, while PlantNet covered 30,261 at the time. Flora also tends to mix up cultivated/ornamental plants with wild counterparts, so your perceived accuracy may be deceptive if you're not a botanist. So yes, it's a cute app if you are a walking outside in central Europe, but it's nowhere near PlantNet.
He's great, I love his concrete botany videos about weeds thriving in harsh human environments. His tour of the Chicago River is great, and an NYC parking lot that has been taken back over by nature is fascinating.
Aggregates 780k plants and fungi from many canonical sources (IPNI, Wikidata, GBIF, iNaturalist etc) and tries to present the data in an intuitive and engaging way, lets you search by common names in 300+ languages etc.
Feedback from especially botany nerds very welcome!
Very nice! Really incredible amount of sources you’re pulling from.
I actually vibecoded a personal app just last week to handle my personal collection of rare succulents and cactus I grow, primarily from seed. I wanted to create something for my young daughter that showed the mature plant along with information about its habitat, growing conditions, how to cultivate (I grow indoors due to my climate), etc.
I’m actually really interested in the devices you have coming soon as I grow indoors and am always looking for improvements on lighting, monitoring, etc.
I have a real hodgepodge of lights and gadgets.
Still thinking about how to fold in eFloras and the expanded CoL XR data, and add the immediate habitat/surroundings beyond the climate/geo/pics we already have in a compelling way. If you have any examples of someone who does that really well (sites, apps, books etc) that she likes that'd be great.
Taking the scenic route with devices, really want to nail comparing sensor readings with species' natural habitats and make that intuitive. What are your favorites so far in terms of vendors/items?
A friend from my youth always had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, could identify them effortlessly just as we were walking around. I always envied him, but despite a love of plants, gardening, et cetera, I never went beyond a surface level until I started casually following Joey and CPBBD during COVID times. A big theme of what I've learned from him is how deeply geology is intertwined with plant evolution. Seems obvious once you hear it, but I genuinely never considered it until then.
At some point he taught an online course called "Blue Collar Botany" that went through plant ecology, evolution, identification, and other topics. It was fantastic, and finally got me into learning about the plants around me more rigorously. Years later, I still hear his voice in my head when I see certain parts of a plant like a laminar stamen. His affect is so unique that it actually helped me remember the content easier.
I don't know if he still teaches it or sells the videos from those sessions, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the natural world around them.
imagine a world with no plants, how sad it would be. i try to fill my house with as many plants i can, a constant cloning of plants, i have started collecting rocks. its m new daily habit. collect a few rocks. it makes my plants happy.
and you know what, my plants like to be happy, if the plants are happy i am happy. are you happy ? there is a android application on github that identifys
plants on device using local ai plant net or something www.github.com/jegly/box
Watch this guy's YT channel - have been for years now. I think what originally caught my attention on his channel was a video specifically about the flora around run-down Oakland urban-industrial areas.
I think I also first found him from his "guerrilla gardening" work in Oakland. I think it was in a median, planting native species on a barren strip of dirt. Something of that nature.
His backstory is really one-of-a-kind. If I recall correctly, he got really into botany because he worked for Union Pacific railroad, and while stopping in a city, would go to the library and checkout different botany books.
Great article with elements of "how to draw an owl" about it.
To be really good at botany is simple. Just learn how to be really good at {list of requirements which are themselves recursively complex and challenging, despite being written as one word like "learn"}
I am lost they have training videos, they have a reading list, they have tutorials... everything you need to get started. How else would you acquire skills? There is no upload function yet.
I think there is a common belief if you make a lot of information available, acquiring skills is "easy". It's certainly easier than without, but the thing is, drawing the owl just takes a fucking long time to learn. There are no shortage of online tutes to learn how to draw, the genre is ancient.
Plants mimic each other for advantage facing herbivores. Isn't that fantastic!.
Learning Latin is the least burden here, the problem is that a profusion of morphological features defines set membership and professionals assign a significant role for DNA analysis. We have a hodgepodge, taxonomy has warfare inside.
Botany is great. Being good at it takes time. Being good at anything takes time.
From mobile it's a bit unclear that there's a whole website beside this article. I, for one, noticed the hamburger menu only after I read your comment. I suppose GP had the same problem.
His interview with the old railworker and grease-pen graffiti artist Colossus of Roads was fascinating. Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube anymore with a quick search, otherwise I'd put the link here.
> "at the time, he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”, and while we can acknowledge how backwards and fucking goofy this is now, we can still admit that Linnaeus’ ideology was simply flawed like his time and NOT throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water"
In the 18th century someone living in Europe making science books would definitely be using Latin, maybe French if you were a modernist, as that was the language of science publication and communication. I don't see how this is either backwards or goofy?
It's similar to use English on an internet blog post nowadays (as the author does), since there's many more Chinese or Spanish native speakers than English, but English IS the language of international communication.
Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.
But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).
Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).
Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.
It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?
Sorry, please correct me if I'm wrong but with this follow up he's not contradicting the quote I put, but saying that despite of tha, the science is valid? Which means the bits I quoted are still stated as a matter of fact WITHOUT attacking the science of taxonomy itself. So he's still saying that using Latin in science was "backwards and goofy".
The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.
Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.
For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!
Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.
>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.
Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.
However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.
If in 17 hundreds you wanted to choose a language that could be deciphered, say, also in China, Latin was a much better choice than any native language in various vicinity.
Latin was the language for education and science waaaay beyond ex Roman Empire. Pretty much whole christian europe used Latin in medieval age and beyond.
Absolutely check out his multi part series "it doesn't have to suck" about turning Tucson AZ into a living greenspace city. It's hopeful and inspiring what they are doing there!
One of my favorite channels of all time on youtube. You get to see new places, learn amazing botany facts, local history, and experience interjected spicy opinions.
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.
1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.
2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!
To quote Richard Feynman:
> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)
Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.
This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!
> Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?
> nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something
Almost everywhere that white Europeans went and named things, they did so with native guides that had names for things.
Many of the Australian plants and animals named with European taxonomies still have common native names and aboriginals alive, kicking, and somewhat traditional that still use older native namings.
Congratulations! Add a water feature ... it will attract birds. And next to that some smaller shrubs. Then once the trees grow you can put climbers and ferns in them. And throw down some rocks for good measure. It encourages variant microclimates which encourages biodiversity.
Also throw down some Psylocybe Allenii spores (family Hymenogastraceae) for even better measure!
It thrives in otherwise hideous and tacky Home Depot woodchip landscaping beds in front of luxury yuppie condos, banks, and other nondescript, bleak looking buildings.
They'll lift the veil on your own bullshit, and make you deal with whatever's harming you, like four weeks of therapy in four hours.
Putting a seed into the ground then waiting a long time and hoping (praying?) that something will come out that you will like is a lot like ... training deep learning models. The latter will pay more of course :)
The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants cultivated for illegal purposes. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)
There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.
> at the time, he [Linneaus] was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”
How boring this is, makes me want to close the page immediately.
The guy, Linneaus, lived in the 1700s and “white European cultures” were all there was to him. Us wasn’t even a whole nation yet and there wasn’t much scientific cooperation with other civilisations.
Also, at the time latin was the lingua franca for the scientific world.
Stop judging people by the customs of their time, it’s a moronic endeavour.
If you read a bit further, they author then explains why they put that in:
> The fucker [Linneaus] created a beautiful system, and it works. And that’s why we still use it. I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).
I think its in there to head of compliants from people who would otherwise say that latin scientific names are bad. The author goes on to illustrate why thats bad
> It is my firm belief that any of the authors listed below (unless they’re dicks) would not want anyone to be prohibited from reading their work <links to book sharing websites follows>
Hot take - any book authors who want to chime in and share what you guys feel about a statement like that?
Neither I, nor any author I know has published something with the intention of it going unread. Publishing something just to ne upset that it's being read seems rather dickish to me... The very act of publishing is a declaration of desire for others to read it.
I listened to his book, Concrete Botany[1], while doing my gardening last month. I really enjoyed it even as a long time watcher of his YouTube channel. I don't know if I could have read it because it does seem to drag on a bit but it was worth it for his narration.
I find it a real shame that botany doesn't receive a larger share of the curriculum in school. Plants are ubiquitous (obviously), they've been here well before we have and will remain here well after we've gone extinct. Despite that, in my experience, the average person knows very little about how and why they are organized into taxonomies and what characteristics that gives them.
Seed pod? Square stems and opposite leaves? Five petaled flowers? All simple things to identify and dramatically narrow to a small set of families, if not one. And then the morphology between plants in those families becomes interesting to observe. And so it goes on.
Then again, a great number of people live in areas totally absent of any plants that aren't from a Home Depot, so that knowledge can scarcely be used. This is something Joey (the author) loves to rant about in his videos.
(I know botany is a science but STEM has a inherent bias towards white collar job acquisition and nearly every jobs requiring plant knowlege are not that)
move you to Caniba and grow you some extra special weed, and sell it all legal like, fuck you could get a job as a "weed inspector", of "canibis quality inspector" here, but the whole industry was built on crime, which has been semi ish, legalised.
the Dutch have growing canibis down to a science, but there is a lot of room left, and as prices were set durring prohibition, profits remain very high.
Now this, this is the bargain, this is the bargain section.
Now shit gets a little hectic here, 'cause you get people, you get a bunch of hippies clubbing each other with the cucumbers, throwing shit, fighting to get, you know, the cheapest avocados.
But you get, like dollar thirty-nine for eight of these. They're about to go bad but, they're not bad yet. Still good, all kinds of good stuff.
You got little papayas and shit. Maybe a little soft, but still edible.
Okay but you get, again, sometimes you gotta wear a helmet when you come in there. Because it does, it gets hot.
There's people, just, it gets, I mean, you've seen, you know, on the outside they're soft, and they seems like they got nice soft liberal values.
But then they just start attacking each other, the claws come out, you know. I've seen a couple knifings in that room before, it's absolutely...
Oh look the berries! Physalis species. All right, who doesn't like solanaceae right there.
Golden gooseberries. I don't know what the fuck a gooseberry is, but that's a physalis. There you go, $3.25 for a basket.
[Watch the looks he's getting from people:]
Ok, so overall this is a wonderful spot to get talked down to, condescendingly lectured by a college student with a septum ring who can explain to you how you should think and behave and uh, and uh, you know, police your language.
Very uh, there's a lotta, there's a lotta lessons you can learn here, ok? You know. And if it wasn't for this spot, I don't know what I would do.
Now they, the got some guavas, they got some, I don't know where they hid the guavas at, but...
Now this is my favorite section, aka the hippie snake oil section, ok. Absolutely wonderful spot. [...]
Pro-tip: knock off the vulgarity and avoid making ignorant remarks that pander to presently fashionable sentiments. It doesn't "spice up" your text or make it more "fun" or "real", unless you mean "really bad". It makes it obnoxious, likely phony (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here), and base.
My favorite Youtube channel.
Please watch the latest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVcfSYcxc0. It's an interview with an old botanist, who shares his wisdom and philosophy, remains engaged after decades of witnessing first hand America's nature getting destroyed. 2 main points: - destroyed old-growth forests, grassland, remnant prairies takes millennia to be back to what they were, not decades. Insects and other pollinators don't just reappear - water availability for plants comes in many forms, all of which disappear with tillage.
Joey is an acquired taste, but if you look past the strong and odd personality (the persona?), his channel is a gold mine. But this time he was (rightfully) impressed by Gerry (Gerould) Wilhelm's wealth of knowledge.
I love this guy, also my favourite Youtube channel and one of my favourite podcasts, he also guests on In Defence of Plants from time to time, I have the impression he's friends with the host.
Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?
Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.
I think nature and plants always interested me since I was a kid. For example I loved to plant from seeds, see them grow, learn and explore a bit with curiosity my mum or aunt plants and when being out in the forest, but not a lot more than that.
Later, while growing up, I noticed my brain noticing plants or tree details, auto mapping them to possible genre, trying to find out, trying to memorize... but not always voluntarily, meaning that i felt like I was much more attracted and focused on plants and tree details and recognition after a certain age.
Something similar happened with birds, my brain started recording and recognizing the different birds sounds, and I started recognizing birds types more. Like something that before was a random signal or a bunch of sounds suddenly with age started having patterns and clear distinctions that attracted my brain and memory, and I simply started being able to distinguish birds by just hearing them.
I love it, I observe, I listen, I learn. I use the plant apps and birdnet for the bird soiunds (from CornellLab and Technical university of Chemnitz). Cool projects, lovely apps and interesting tech usage. I'm planning to upgrade terrace with constant camera feed for auto-detection.
But the main point is, does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age? is it something known and defined? it kinda feels like part of a biological evolution related to age, but no idea.
does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age?
I do, and I've seen it in others, but from the limited data points I've seen there's no causal relationship with age. I.e. what I've seen is people largely oblivious of nature/ecosystems/flora/fauna sudenly becoming very invested in it, for various reasons, but this doesn't happen at or only beyond a certain age. For me it was around 30 but that's simply because of a series of coincidences (new house, large garden, needed solution for mowing, happened to see a 2nd hand scythe, looked into grassland ecology, etc). But I know people whos obsession started at 16 and at 60 and like everything in between.
I think it's one of those things that for whichever reason you happen to get switched on to, and once you're attentive to it, you'll constantly be noticing and learning more - once that positive feedback loop of rewarded attention is going, you're off to the races.
It's deeply rewarding to find the world around becoming deeper and more intricately connected. And you get to see more of it every day!
Feedback loop is right. I think there are parallels to the Blank Check podcast playing "The Box Office Game", where those cinephiles try to determine the Box Office Top 5 on the week a particular film was released (even though the players may have been in diapers or not even born on that particular week).
I have also seen this obsessive focus in sports fans: What was the half-season where Pat Maroon played on the New Jersey Devils as a rental? Well they made the playoffs that year which must have been Taylor Hall's MVP Award Season and ah yes! that had to be 2017-18!
if you guys like this kinda stuff i can recommend the latest dump of buckminster fuller institute on his life work (series of transcribed lectures). The guy is fascinated by similar things and has potentially a lot of interesting insights about this if you are unfamiliar.
cool! thanks for sharing, that's my usual fallback reason too.
meaning that i feel it was a change also triggered by other factors and life conditions, or even a reaction to those, but at the same time I realize that my brain started receiving and analyzing and appreciating those signal, not me completely voluntary.
one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact, like a story of a friend stopping the car just to touch grass with the feet.
I relate to an approximate after 30 thing too. But in my case nature contact was reduced compare to initial life part, and I got a garden after that.
But again, it feels like an over semplifcation or easy shortcut, and I believe there is maybe just something innate that blooms at a certain point.
how can we get more datapoints for this? I was trying to crowdsource here :)
one thing that comes always to my mind is the possible reason of reaction to shitty work and work related stress that makes us crave for nature and nature contact
I'm sure that's a thing for some people. And there's research to back that up IIRC. Even seemingly silly things like the smell of a wet forest being beneficial.
One aspect which stood out for me is 'awareness'. I find it deeply fascinating how many people, as I used to be one, can just stroll through everyday locations without even knowing the names of the most common plants let alone think about their connection to the surroundings. Once I started to realize how unaware I was of this I started forzing myself to be more aware and it's fascinating how much there can be going on in like even 1 square meter of nature. And of which I only know a fraction.
And for me this is really meditative - even though it's somewhat counterintuitive. Meditation is usually about clearing the mind, but for me being in nature and filling my mind with thoughts about the whole interconnection of individuals in ecosystems can bring peace and relaxation. Well, as long as I do not think about how we're collectively destroying a lot of it.
I've experienced that with trees over the last 5 years. I've been working on forest restoration on some land as a hobby and everywhere I travel I try to identify the trees I see.
For me, it's really just trees though. Birds and other wildlife are nice, but they don't draw my interest in the same way.
I got very much into biology when I started growing weed at 24.
Now I can’t not have a little garden(currently growing chilli’s and a citrus tree, from seeds)
weed was also my gateway drug for gardening
> does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age
I have a similar interest but mine is about passively assimilating foreign languages while watching movies. Every time I grok a new expression it feels like a rush of dopamine.
yeah ok, now that you put languages in the pot, I felt the same when absorbing other foreign languages too, and I totally understand your feeling. I was grokking successfully foreign language phrases or expression with the help of IT terminology and latin roots on the fly, was very interesting. It was like unknown input but with some clues and the brain auto decoding and mapping in that case.
maybe is just how our brain is wired and predisposed to such things that let us notice and enjoy this evolution or process?
It is clearly a very useful skill to have as it helps us find food we know is safe. I think in the modern world this tends to be something most kids don't have an oppurtunity to develop. When in a more natural environment it would be expressed much earlier.
I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.
Hort. Science degree from A&M in '80, employers offered to pay me $800 a month a water their greenhouses. Indeed, Botany was one of the more boring courses required. Scrapped by after the university as a landscaper-irrigator, then discovered too many years later the uber wealthy living on certain Texas Lakes would pay enormous sums to have me dive to service-install their pumps to feed raw water to their landscapes. Customers would call me in exasperation explaining they just got a water bill for like $900 to $1,000. Raw lake water was available at about $150 to $175 per 325,000 gallons with a permit. A lady I knew convinced me that horticulture, and especially botany, are "labors of love", not particularly a way to become financially successful.
I can strongly recommend the mobile app Flora Incognita for quickly identifying plants. It’s made by one of the German universities so it’s free, don’t have ads, and don’t collect your personal data. I even showed it to my mum and she loves it
I use iNaturalist for plants and animals, mostly insects (and Merlin for birdsong recognition).
No ads, non-profit, contribute to research, etc. It also allows you to find out what others have spotted in your area. I like the range maps, the images across seasons, and other seasonal information.
The actual ML-based recognition is somewhat hidden, I think that part of the UI needs some work; it seems like it was made for researchers first then hacked for non-experts to use.
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about
Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)
It is a pity that, while their focus is on openness and accessiblity, neither Flora Incognita, nor iNaturalist or PlantNet can be installed from the F-Droid appstore. I unfortunately don't use Google Play, so can't testdrive them.
Flora Incognita and PlantNet are not open source, so they cannot be published to F-Droid. However, iNaturalist is and the apk can be directly installed from the GitHub releases page.
https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases
I find it very weird that a free app coming from a university would not be open source...
Better than PlantNet?
PlantNet covers everything, Flora is more central Europe focused and has a hard time with non-native plants.
I live next to a botanical garden which has climate-regulated glass domes with all sorts of non-native plants from around the world and it gets 90%+ of them right, but sometime you have to feed it different parts of the plant. PlantNet does look great too, I’ll have to check it out!
That's a nice anecdote, but I didn't just make up this fact. According to their paper [1], Flora has 4851 supported species, while PlantNet covered 30,261 at the time. Flora also tends to mix up cultivated/ornamental plants with wild counterparts, so your perceived accuracy may be deceptive if you're not a botanist. So yes, it's a cute app if you are a walking outside in central Europe, but it's nowhere near PlantNet.
[1] https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/2041...
PlantNet seems pretty open as well right? Looks like is from several public institutions so it should be ads and trackers free, can you confirm?
I don't recall running into ads, don't know about trackers. PlantNet hasn't triggered any red flags for myself.
How does it compare to iNaturalist or observation.org which are like the 'standard' ones?
+1 for Flora Incognita. This is what apps should be.
He's great, I love his concrete botany videos about weeds thriving in harsh human environments. His tour of the Chicago River is great, and an NYC parking lot that has been taken back over by nature is fascinating.
https://youtu.be/SRRbspvheRc
https://youtu.be/AVPkBv-QQ6U
Launching a thing soon to make it more accessible, without sacrificing scientific depth, eg:
https://www.meso.cloud/plants/tracheophyta/magnoliopsida/gen...
Aggregates 780k plants and fungi from many canonical sources (IPNI, Wikidata, GBIF, iNaturalist etc) and tries to present the data in an intuitive and engaging way, lets you search by common names in 300+ languages etc.
Feedback from especially botany nerds very welcome!
Very nice! Really incredible amount of sources you’re pulling from.
I actually vibecoded a personal app just last week to handle my personal collection of rare succulents and cactus I grow, primarily from seed. I wanted to create something for my young daughter that showed the mature plant along with information about its habitat, growing conditions, how to cultivate (I grow indoors due to my climate), etc.
I’m actually really interested in the devices you have coming soon as I grow indoors and am always looking for improvements on lighting, monitoring, etc. I have a real hodgepodge of lights and gadgets.
Much appreciated!
Still thinking about how to fold in eFloras and the expanded CoL XR data, and add the immediate habitat/surroundings beyond the climate/geo/pics we already have in a compelling way. If you have any examples of someone who does that really well (sites, apps, books etc) that she likes that'd be great.
Taking the scenic route with devices, really want to nail comparing sensor readings with species' natural habitats and make that intuitive. What are your favorites so far in terms of vendors/items?
A friend from my youth always had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, could identify them effortlessly just as we were walking around. I always envied him, but despite a love of plants, gardening, et cetera, I never went beyond a surface level until I started casually following Joey and CPBBD during COVID times. A big theme of what I've learned from him is how deeply geology is intertwined with plant evolution. Seems obvious once you hear it, but I genuinely never considered it until then.
At some point he taught an online course called "Blue Collar Botany" that went through plant ecology, evolution, identification, and other topics. It was fantastic, and finally got me into learning about the plants around me more rigorously. Years later, I still hear his voice in my head when I see certain parts of a plant like a laminar stamen. His affect is so unique that it actually helped me remember the content easier.
I don't know if he still teaches it or sells the videos from those sessions, but I would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the natural world around them.
imagine a world with no plants, how sad it would be. i try to fill my house with as many plants i can, a constant cloning of plants, i have started collecting rocks. its m new daily habit. collect a few rocks. it makes my plants happy. and you know what, my plants like to be happy, if the plants are happy i am happy. are you happy ? there is a android application on github that identifys plants on device using local ai plant net or something www.github.com/jegly/box
Watch this guy's YT channel - have been for years now. I think what originally caught my attention on his channel was a video specifically about the flora around run-down Oakland urban-industrial areas.
I think I also first found him from his "guerrilla gardening" work in Oakland. I think it was in a median, planting native species on a barren strip of dirt. Something of that nature.
His backstory is really one-of-a-kind. If I recall correctly, he got really into botany because he worked for Union Pacific railroad, and while stopping in a city, would go to the library and checkout different botany books.
I discovered it recently, and I find it quite funny
I'm not really into botany itself, but I enjoy their rants about how people manage "green" spaces
Great article with elements of "how to draw an owl" about it.
I am lost they have training videos, they have a reading list, they have tutorials... everything you need to get started. How else would you acquire skills? There is no upload function yet.
I think there is a common belief if you make a lot of information available, acquiring skills is "easy". It's certainly easier than without, but the thing is, drawing the owl just takes a fucking long time to learn. There are no shortage of online tutes to learn how to draw, the genre is ancient.
Plants mimic each other for advantage facing herbivores. Isn't that fantastic!.
Learning Latin is the least burden here, the problem is that a profusion of morphological features defines set membership and professionals assign a significant role for DNA analysis. We have a hodgepodge, taxonomy has warfare inside.
Botany is great. Being good at it takes time. Being good at anything takes time.
There is just not shortcut to acquire a skill worth having. I don't understand your argument.
From mobile it's a bit unclear that there's a whole website beside this article. I, for one, noticed the hamburger menu only after I read your comment. I suppose GP had the same problem.
Joey is also an amazing fine and graffiti artist (ALONE)
https://www.publiclandstore.com/blogs/gallery/joey-alone-exh...
His interview with the old railworker and grease-pen graffiti artist Colossus of Roads was fascinating. Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube anymore with a quick search, otherwise I'd put the link here.
Railroad guy was Russell Butler. He was relatively prolific and had an insta account.
https://www.instagram.com/buzblurr/
Is this it? https://youtu.be/-Eo4WuhpiJg?t=1085
I enjoyed his rant videos about soul sucking landscaping and the ways it could be better with lower maintenance native plants.
> "at the time, he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”, and while we can acknowledge how backwards and fucking goofy this is now, we can still admit that Linnaeus’ ideology was simply flawed like his time and NOT throw out the baby with the proverbial bath water"
In the 18th century someone living in Europe making science books would definitely be using Latin, maybe French if you were a modernist, as that was the language of science publication and communication. I don't see how this is either backwards or goofy?
It's similar to use English on an internet blog post nowadays (as the author does), since there's many more Chinese or Spanish native speakers than English, but English IS the language of international communication.
Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.
But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).
Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).
For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...
Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.
It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?
They just use any name can be spelled by Latin characters.
Oh, and use your oppressive, colonial numbering system? /s
Luckily the author continues with
> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).
Sorry, please correct me if I'm wrong but with this follow up he's not contradicting the quote I put, but saying that despite of tha, the science is valid? Which means the bits I quoted are still stated as a matter of fact WITHOUT attacking the science of taxonomy itself. So he's still saying that using Latin in science was "backwards and goofy".
Why? What is he referencing? I can't find anything as controversial as this with an online search.
By now, such things are so prevalent that I don't think it would even make the news anywhere.
The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.
More scientific lectures should be delivered with a blue collar Chicago dialect and accent.
Not Chicago, but I always liked listening to Feynman lecture in his working-class NYC accent.
Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish
For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!
Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Laganaphyllis_simnovorii
>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.
A proposed technical lexicon:
Plant: floragerb. Flora: floragerbia. Vegetation: verdigerbium. Fruit: pomofroob. Vegetable: olerinoob. Root: radixgerb. Stem: caulob. Leaf: folinurb. Flower: anthofleeb. Seed: seminib. Pollen: pollinoob. Spore: sporib. Cell: cellubo. Cell wall: muracellum. Chlorophyll: chlorofleebin. Photosynthesis: photofroobulation. Cellular respiration: respiragerbation. Germination: germinoobulation. Pollination: pollifleebation. Fertilization: gametogerbination. Transpiration: evapofleebulation. Xylem: xyloob. Phloem: phleebum. Stoma: stomabo. Phylogeny: ancestragerbics. Morphology: formagerbology. Binomial nomenclature: duonominoobulation.
Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.
However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.
If in 17 hundreds you wanted to choose a language that could be deciphered, say, also in China, Latin was a much better choice than any native language in various vicinity.
In XVIII there was no language that could be universal was my point and latin was known mainly through its derivatives.
> english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places
Why do you think Latin was popular?
Well, it wasn't universally popular is my point.
Latin was the language for education and science waaaay beyond ex Roman Empire. Pretty much whole christian europe used Latin in medieval age and beyond.
Christian Europe waited until the XIII-XIV to get most of its latin inheritance in latin. Before that it was either greek or arabic.
If you watch only one video make it the Berkeley Bowl one
https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8
Oh hey it's the Chonkasaurus guy!
https://wgntv.com/video/giant-snapping-turtle-nicknamed-chon...
Instead of trying to make the plants healthy, make the dirt healthy. It seems like the same thing but it is a different mindset.
What is healthy dirt, if not dirt that grows healthy plants. Which will of course depend on the plant.
I loved botany and going outside before, but I loved it even more when he became popular(reference).
I haven't watched him for years because I don't want to miss any of the botany.
Absolutely check out his multi part series "it doesn't have to suck" about turning Tucson AZ into a living greenspace city. It's hopeful and inspiring what they are doing there!
One of my favorite channels of all time on youtube. You get to see new places, learn amazing botany facts, local history, and experience interjected spicy opinions.
They spent a whole section glazing the Linnaeus system like it's a perfect thing, but as someone who has delved into taxonomy a lot (due to playing Metazooa and Metaflora), there are quite a few glaring issues with it.
1. political tussle. australian botanists managed to hijack the "acacia" name from the original African Acacia, to the totally unrelated australian plants that were also called acacia. I noticed that japanese botanists also have a habit of insular naming.
2. western bias. Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
3. the eight rank taxonomy that only accidentally kinda work, but not really. The original ranks were domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Modern taxonomy only pays a glancing homage to this system, because the actual evolutionary path that we found out there doesn't care about this neat categorization system, and so we had to shoehorn in hacks in the form of sub-phylums, sub-classes, sub-sub-sub-families, and sub-species. We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.
But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!
To quote Richard Feynman:
> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)
Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.
This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
What specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?
> Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.
I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?
> nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something
Almost everywhere that white Europeans went and named things, they did so with native guides that had names for things.
Many of the Australian plants and animals named with European taxonomies still have common native names and aboriginals alive, kicking, and somewhat traditional that still use older native namings.
eg: (IIRC) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7h9V4aKlJw
>We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.
I'd suggest having ones that count from origin, and other that count from present, so the current extant species would be +1, LUCA would be -1.
Eukaryot? count from origin, Beagle? Count from present.
Slowly killing my lawn. Red bud trees will soon forest my property.
Congratulations! Add a water feature ... it will attract birds. And next to that some smaller shrubs. Then once the trees grow you can put climbers and ferns in them. And throw down some rocks for good measure. It encourages variant microclimates which encourages biodiversity.
Also throw down some Psylocybe Allenii spores (family Hymenogastraceae) for even better measure!
It thrives in otherwise hideous and tacky Home Depot woodchip landscaping beds in front of luxury yuppie condos, banks, and other nondescript, bleak looking buildings.
They'll lift the veil on your own bullshit, and make you deal with whatever's harming you, like four weeks of therapy in four hours.
The Ethnomycology of Ugly Landscaping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHRgY8fZNv4
ROFL. Banned in Australia. "Requires age verification." Next up: Ethnomycology of nanny state....
Every page on this website ends with the How to make a herbarium pressing tutorial.
I crave for some photos of the author's herbarium.
Putting a seed into the ground then waiting a long time and hoping (praying?) that something will come out that you will like is a lot like ... training deep learning models. The latter will pay more of course :)
I know nothing about Botany, but I must compliment a good website and writing style when I see one.
The article actually is about botany, but the title reminded me there is a whole area that could be called "criminal botany". As in, there are specific plants cultivated for illegal purposes. And on the other side, forensic botany (things like analysing pollen traces)
There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.
I thought you'd mention plant poaching. Which is just evil.
Most plant–related crimes are pie–on–the–windowsill–on–Sunday tier.
There's also guerilla gardening, where you plant stuff where you're not supposed to, typically municipal soil
I read through the site, but can’t find the crime pays part.
That's a great title & look for the website, I'm tired of generic looks we see everyday, something like this excites me as I remember the old web.
The title is misleading. There was nothing in the article comparing/contrasting/linking botany and crime.
You’ll have to start with S1E1
Man you must be really fun at parties
I was gonna say botany will pay too
> at the time, he [Linneaus] was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”
How boring this is, makes me want to close the page immediately.
The guy, Linneaus, lived in the 1700s and “white European cultures” were all there was to him. Us wasn’t even a whole nation yet and there wasn’t much scientific cooperation with other civilisations.
Also, at the time latin was the lingua franca for the scientific world.
Stop judging people by the customs of their time, it’s a moronic endeavour.
If you read a bit further, they author then explains why they put that in:
> The fucker [Linneaus] created a beautiful system, and it works. And that’s why we still use it. I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).
I think its in there to head of compliants from people who would otherwise say that latin scientific names are bad. The author goes on to illustrate why thats bad
That is an S tier domain name/title
Neither I, nor any author I know has published something with the intention of it going unread. Publishing something just to ne upset that it's being read seems rather dickish to me... The very act of publishing is a declaration of desire for others to read it.
The ones listed? You might want to get in contact with them because they are unlikely to be reading this thread
Can I get this, but for geology?
I listened to his book, Concrete Botany[1], while doing my gardening last month. I really enjoyed it even as a long time watcher of his YouTube channel. I don't know if I could have read it because it does seem to drag on a bit but it was worth it for his narration.
[1]: https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9798317900410-concrete-botany
I find it a real shame that botany doesn't receive a larger share of the curriculum in school. Plants are ubiquitous (obviously), they've been here well before we have and will remain here well after we've gone extinct. Despite that, in my experience, the average person knows very little about how and why they are organized into taxonomies and what characteristics that gives them.
Seed pod? Square stems and opposite leaves? Five petaled flowers? All simple things to identify and dramatically narrow to a small set of families, if not one. And then the morphology between plants in those families becomes interesting to observe. And so it goes on.
Then again, a great number of people live in areas totally absent of any plants that aren't from a Home Depot, so that knowledge can scarcely be used. This is something Joey (the author) loves to rant about in his videos.
Too busy focusing on STEM to talk about stems.
(I know botany is a science but STEM has a inherent bias towards white collar job acquisition and nearly every jobs requiring plant knowlege are not that)
Love this guy!!
I'm aware of this guy but the presentation is a bit full on for me. My buddy who is in to botany says apparently his podcasts are really good: https://open.spotify.com/show/2zJDjluBz6qVCGrF1I8JhP
move you to Caniba and grow you some extra special weed, and sell it all legal like, fuck you could get a job as a "weed inspector", of "canibis quality inspector" here, but the whole industry was built on crime, which has been semi ish, legalised. the Dutch have growing canibis down to a science, but there is a lot of room left, and as prices were set durring prohibition, profits remain very high.
Woke Grocery Store (Whole Foods in Berkeley)
https://youtu.be/PUFQouwqbe8?t=180
Now this, this is the bargain, this is the bargain section.
Now shit gets a little hectic here, 'cause you get people, you get a bunch of hippies clubbing each other with the cucumbers, throwing shit, fighting to get, you know, the cheapest avocados.
But you get, like dollar thirty-nine for eight of these. They're about to go bad but, they're not bad yet. Still good, all kinds of good stuff.
You got little papayas and shit. Maybe a little soft, but still edible.
Okay but you get, again, sometimes you gotta wear a helmet when you come in there. Because it does, it gets hot.
There's people, just, it gets, I mean, you've seen, you know, on the outside they're soft, and they seems like they got nice soft liberal values.
But then they just start attacking each other, the claws come out, you know. I've seen a couple knifings in that room before, it's absolutely...
Oh look the berries! Physalis species. All right, who doesn't like solanaceae right there.
Golden gooseberries. I don't know what the fuck a gooseberry is, but that's a physalis. There you go, $3.25 for a basket.
[Watch the looks he's getting from people:]
Ok, so overall this is a wonderful spot to get talked down to, condescendingly lectured by a college student with a septum ring who can explain to you how you should think and behave and uh, and uh, you know, police your language.
Very uh, there's a lotta, there's a lotta lessons you can learn here, ok? You know. And if it wasn't for this spot, I don't know what I would do.
Now they, the got some guavas, they got some, I don't know where they hid the guavas at, but...
Now this is my favorite section, aka the hippie snake oil section, ok. Absolutely wonderful spot. [...]
What an obnoxious post.
Pro-tip: knock off the vulgarity and avoid making ignorant remarks that pander to presently fashionable sentiments. It doesn't "spice up" your text or make it more "fun" or "real", unless you mean "really bad". It makes it obnoxious, likely phony (I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here), and base.