In December I flew to San Luis Potosi and spent 12 days doing vigorous field botany throughout the states of San Luis Potosi, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Mexico, Puebla, and Oaxaca. This consisted of meeting up with two different friends that live there, going out every day and photographing, documenting and filming every wild plant species that I came into contact with. Photographs were uploaded to the…
Visit bplant.org and follow the link below. After arriving on the main page, click on “REGIONS”. You will arrive at a page with a map on it. Click on your region. You will then arrive at a map of your region with a diagram of subregions. Click on your subregion, then at the bottom of the page click on “list native plants”, and you will arrive at a page listing the genus and species and common name…
I found myself explaining the Urban Heat Island to a cop a few nights ago after a lady in the neighborhood called the cops on me for planting trees on city property next to her house. This is the second time this has happened to me in the town I live in, a region inhabited by a populace that I (only half-jokingly) frequently refer to as “ hating trees ”. For many, this is hard to understand : why…
In South Texas and many other tropical areas the cotton,mallow and hibiscus family - Malvaceae - is dominant. Members of this family are marked by a number of key unifying factors - known as *synapomorphies* - that distinguish them as evolutionarily related. Look at the base of the flowers in this series of photographs - You can literally see nectar glistening at the base of many of them. This…
Helietta parvifolia , also known as Beretta, is a hyper-drought tolerant member of the Citrus Family (Rutaceae) that grows in rocky areas of South Texas and Northern Mexico. The leaves turn yellow when drought-stressed, but don't fall off. When the leaves turn yellow it's because as the plant is entering a state of water stress it js breaking down the chlorophyll molecules and reabsorbing the…
I've seen plenty of people move to the Mojave - especially during the Airbnb boom between 2017-2022 - and try to plant shitty oleander or other horticultural atrocities, and fail miserably. It is just too dry here (average rainfall 4-5", sometimes not even that). There are dead non-native trees everywhere out here, anywhere there is human development. When you look at the landscape here it begins…
Just finished a week of daily botanizing in central Florida, starting at the Southern end of the Lake Wales Ridge, a 115 mile “spine” of bleached-white “sugar sand” that was one of the only portions of land not inundated under the Atlantic ocean 2 million years ago. It is an extremely rich habitat full of endemic plants that occur nowhere else on Earth. The entire ridge consists of fire-dependent…
With every passing shitty social media post, deniers of invasion biology continue to become the ideological equivalent of creationists, with skulls too thick to be able to make their empathetic and compassionate versions of the world mesh with the reality of both evolution, natural selection, ecology and the native distribution of living things prior to human trans-oceanic travel. I don’t…
Since moving to Deep South Texas 4 years ago I've come to realize that many plants I used to love growing in the cool mild maritime climate of the SF bay area are impossible to grow where I live. This is not just because of the high daytime heat. It's not as simple as that. Specifically, it is the high heat during the night (and those warm nights are a direct result of the humidity) that causes…
One of the biggest tragedies of the American education system is that it teaches memorization rather than critical thinking . “Critical thinking” as a phrase is almost a cliche. It gets repeated all the time in the popular lexicon, sometimes by people who don’t really seem to understand what it means. What does “critical thinking” mean? Teaching someone to think critically is basically giving them…
Some of the only times that I feel hopeful about humanity is when I see individuals venerating and forming relationships with plants, and with specific plant species. It is when I see them coming to form relationships with specific plant species as if they were old friends. The dopamine hits I get from sharing things that I love and respect with people, and watching them learn to love and respect…
I was at the conservation property recently with a friend, telling her my views on marriage and how I repeatedly state, only half-joking, that marriage should be banned. “Why get the government involved in a personal relationship?”, I said. “Why needlessly complicate a relationship you have with someone should you ever fall out of love with them or have a falling out? I love my friend Javier, he’s…
I’m excited to tend to Thornscrub like I would my own yard (I hesitate to use the word “garden”, it sounds vanilla as hell and too safe, manicured and wholesome). Thornscrub will have elements of the living world that I could never have in my own little yard, which still has to exist on a grid of city blocks where it stands as a lonely oasis surrounded by a desert of lawn and asphalt, a stark…
Peyote has the misfortune of growing in an area of the country where an infinitesimally small portion of the dominant culture have any respect, awareness or reverence for the native plants and native plant habitat. Peyote grows in a place where the dominant culture puts a higher value on cleared land than land with "brush" on it. Every year here countless acres of peyote habitat with hundreds of…
Ice cream bean (Inga edulis) volunteers all over disturbed areas in the neotropics. It's a common snack, ready-to-wear and sold in markets, but the seeds are not tasty, only the pulp around them is, so they are discarded on road sides, where they germinate and then become trees. A very adaptive strategy for a plant, using humans to disperse its seeds. It can be a hard one to grow in the wrong…
This Orchid species depends on a single species of pollinator for its pollination. What's more, it doesn't actually offer the pollinator any reward, but instead deceives the pollinator into visiting the flower by pretending to be the pollinators prey. Phragmipedium pearcei tricks female hover flies (in the species Ocyptanthes antiphales) into visiting the flowers by producing spots on the inside…
The amount of Radiata Pine and Eucalyptus Plantation that was planted in the 1970s and 80s due to a law that subsidized and encouraged private companies to destroy native forest and plant exotics is mind-boggling here in Chile. While driving in between the few crumbs of protected habitat we have seen oceans, mile after mile, of planted non-native forest where there once was Nothofagus (the…
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii (syn. Mostacillastrum vaseyi) is a rare annual mustard that's seemingly much more rare than previously thought, most likely due to the same old culprits of habitat destruction and invasive grasses. It was put on my radar by a friend who spotted it growing in Harlingen, Texas and couldn't figure out what it was. I don't know of many native Brassicas in the region either,…
As if this species didn't already have enough threats facing it, now Peyote (Lophophora williamsii) can add feral hogs to the list of immediate threats to its existence. It seems the threat from hogs is much more extensive than thought. Peyote, of course, is sacred to Native Americans who use it as a religious sacrament during all-night teepee ceremonies. It has been an important part of resisting…
This was exciting to see, and illustrates how the epicuticular wax that reflects ultraviolet light and prevents "sunburn", especially at high temperatures when ultraviolet is the most damaging, can be regenerated directly by the epidermal tissue itself, and DOESN'T require new growth of epidermal tissue directly from the apical meristem itself. The apical meristem is the point in the center and…