Appreciation for the Mallows...
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 nectar is secreted by specialized hairs at the base of the sepals (the layer of floral parts below the petals) termed *trichomatous nectaries*, which is one of the distinguishing factors of the family Malvaceae.
Synapomorphies for a family or genus are a wonderful thing to be aware of, because it shows you how two plant species may be related. Knowing which synapomorphies belong to which family enable you to encounter a plant species that you have never seen before and automatically recognize that it is a member of a certain family or genus, thus helping you further place it and identify it.
Another synapomorphy for this family is the structure in the center of the flower, known as a *staminal column*. You can very clearly see the structure and most members of the genus Hibiscus. It consists of all of the male parts fused together in a hollow tube, while the female part (the style, topped by 5 stigma lobes) rises up through the center of this hollow tube to emerge at the top. If you see this structure in a flower you know it is a member of the Malvaceae.
This is a very important family of plants, not only ecologically to the landscapes they grow on, but economically to humans as well. Chocolate, cotton, balsa, hibiscus, okra and many more food and fiber crops are members of this family.
South Texas Fall Color (Not Really)
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 nutrients they contain, like nitrogen. This "unmasks" the yellow pigments, which are always there but unable to be seen because they are overshadowed by the greener chlorophyll. This is the same thing that plants in colder climates do, except unlike plants in cold climates Helietta doesn't drop its leaves. Abcising a set of leaves and then having to grow them again is calorically very expensive. Much easier to just turn off photosynthesis temporarily but keep the machinery.
When the chlorophyll is reabsorbed, this effectively shuts down photosynthesis, And the plant basically enters a state similar to torpor in animals - a means of conserving resources until the rains come again.
I have a Helietta in my yard and it stays a glistening green all year, as my yard is a much milder and more music environment than these rocky hills and lomas of the South Texas borderla
nds.
The thing is : it's not just Helietta that does this. Plenty of plants from tropical areas with extended dry seasons do this as well. Well there are many plants from the same climate that are drought deciduous, there are also evergreen plants that never drop their leaves but shut down photosynthesis by reabsorbing the chlorophyll and turning yellow.
Mohave Horticultural Failures
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 to make sense : miles of an open ocean of Creosote and the occasional Krameria, maybe a Jojoba or some Desert Lavender (Condea emoryi). Your stupid oleanders never stood a chance. Why should they? They evolved 7,000 miles away.
Luckily there is a large list of really cool plants available that have been built (evolved) to survive the specifically harsh conditions of this desert and the list below is only a fraction of some of them:
Ambrosia salsola - broom-lime shrub that provides good habitat for wildlife.
Asclepias erosa - robust native milkweed to 4-5 ft tall
Ambrosia dumosa - leaves smell incredible
Psorothamnus spinosus - unique shrub that resembles puffs of smoke due to the leafless blue stems
Senna armata - straw-like green shoots that bloom profusely in late fall
Datura wrightii - white trumpet flowers the size of grapefruits that smell incredible and are pollinated by hawk moths
Senegalia greggii - catclaw shrub with flowers that smell like perfume
Peritome arborea - blue leaves and golfball-sized yellow flowers
Condea emoryi - a native lavender with purple flowers that can reach heights of 8'
Pectis papposa - a small annual marigold relative with fragrant leaves
Encelia frutescens - a desert bush "daisy" covered in native bees when it blooms.
Chilopsis linearis (Bignoniaceaw)
Bebbia juncea - (Asteraceae)
But of course - as is too often the case - there is no place for the average schmuck to buy them because none of these plants are viewed as conventionally "attractive" by the bizarre and deranged standards of conventional horticulture, which values things like plants that flower all the time, have varieqated leaves, or can be hedged into neurotic rectangles.
So what is the answer?
We need to change those standards because they make no sense and are discordant with reality. They are rooted in archaic and obsolete 19th century ideas about what plants should look like. We do this not by shaming people but by hyping and embracing all the cool things about these plants : they're sturdy as hell in the extreme conditions they grow in, they support the beneficial insect life that evolved here. That insect life in turn supports the cool animal life that people like having around them, like desert tortoises and birds. These plants resemble the 'nature" and natural areas that attracts people to these regions, they are the living skin of this land - they are the plants that are best-equipped to handle this desert and these extreme conditions. It is illogical to try to plant anything else unless it's a food crop or of some direct and immediate usefulness. You can drive as much irrigation tubing to any of it as you want, it will die because it lacks the drought-tolerance and heat-tolerance strategies that the native plants have evolved, whether it is hairy leaves, waxy leaves, ephemeral roots, storage roots, or controlled leaf drop during drought. This is just about using plants as infrastructure. It is just what makes sense.
Once you start thinking this way, you can take this same outlook and apply it to anywhere, even less extreme, non-desert areas.
The Lovely Florida Scrub & the Brutality of Florida Culture Slums
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 scrub that has historically been subjected to wildfires every 2-5 years - the average annual rainfall is around 60”, but with a pronounced dry season between November thru May. One of the reasons that the area is full of endemics is because of the uniquely stressful and somewhat isolated conditions presented by this spine of sand : the climate is subtropical and the sand is so nutrient-poor that plants are “bred” (via natural selection) by the region itself for adaptability for a suite of stressful conditions not encountered in many other places in the region. Even in mid-October, temperatures at mid-day soared into the low nineties, and the substrate of bright white sand reflected UV radiation and heat back up in our faces as we walked through the scrub communities that were filled with plants such as Serenoa repens (dominant, keystone species), Carya floridana, Pinus densa, Pinus palustris, Pinus clausa, Garberia heterophylla (Asteraceae), numerous species of Polygonella (gracilis, robusta, myriophila, polygama, basiramia), numerous species of Quercus (chapmanii, geminata, minima, elliotii, inopina, pumila, laurifolia), numerous Liatris species (gracilis, chapmanii, tenuifolia, ohlingerae, laevigata, quadriflora) , numerous Andropogon species (cabanisii, capillipes, brachystachyum, tenuispatheum,hirsutius, floridanum), Sorghastrum secundum, Paronychia (herniarioides, patula, chartacea, americana), Balduina angustifolia (Asteraceae), Xymenia americana (Olacaceae) and more. We even saw a presumably naturalized (150 miles North of its Anthropocene-era native range) population of Zamia integrifolia at Archbald Biological Research station.
We also saw a litany of invasives, most notably the dreaded Melinis repens (Poaceae) and Heteropogon contortus (Poaceae). Some of the rarest plants we encountered were Chionanthus pygmaeus, Cyrilla arida, Dicerandra modesta, Dicerandra frutescens, Cartrema floridana.
Numerous ectomychorrizal and saprotrophic mushrooms were present, such as a white Amanita species in section Vaginatae (lacking an annulus and possessing a striate margin to the cap), numerous Boletaceae species, and Ganoderma curtisii, a stalked reishi mushroom that was frequently encountered and mostly-submerged stumps of Quercus geminata and other scrub oak species.
The fire-dependence is visible everywhere, and the ease with which almost all of the plants resprout following a fire (or their seeds germinate post-fire, such as the fire-dependent Ceratiola ericoides) is testament to the long history of fire in this region. Many of the plants in this region produce Xylopodia - underground storage lignotubers that enable them to immediately respond to fire with bursts of new growth, taking advantage of the “cleansing” the fire has afforded the habitat and the lack of competition.
It feels incredible to spend a week getting to know a landscape so well, spending upwards of 8 hours a day sweating in the sun taking photographs and memorizing the names of new plants, studying the ecology firsthand, looking for clues in the landscape that allude to the behaviors of the plants and the organisms that exist with them.
The human culture of the region is some of the most vile and repulsive that I have experienced anywhere in the US : money-worshipping buffoons happy to destroy museums of evolutionary masterpieces and intricate living machines of ecosystems for the sake of erecting some of the most repugnant and idiotic infrastructure known to modern humanity. It is the equivalent of demolishing the Louvre or the Smithosonian in order to build a stripmall housing a dollar general, a payday loan store and a pawn shop. After spending fifteen minutes in Orlando traffic in some of the most hideous scenery that man has created, I understood - for the first time in my life - how some people (mostly males) are driven to commit mass shootings. Of course, this is not to say I condone such behavior or empathize with it, but I can see how years of living in such a condition could make someone so short-sighted and oblivious to the scale of suffering they were inflicting on others, and how such a lifestyle to lower a human being into such a depraved state so as to feel motivated to commit such an\ terrible act. The “communities” (they are anything but) that exist that so much of the wonderful habitat that I just spent a week diving into consist of long traffic jams of alienated, miserable people who all hate each other and have no connection to the living world around them - apes that evolved (as we all did) to spend time interacting with living things and moving through a living green skin that are not instead locked inside soulless concrete and carpeted storage containers that seem like nothing more than pampered versions of prisons. Nowhere is walking or biking permitted without the threat of death, and one must be trapped in a car at all times if transport of any kind is required.
INVASION BIOLOGY DENIALIST TAKE-DOWN #376
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 necessarily fault them for it - to understand why some things are invasive and others not requires a much broader perspective on the world that an 80-year human lifespan does not innately afford us.
This topic encompasses the very broad fields of biogeography and speciation itself. There are textbooks on both biogeography and evolution. Carl Zimmer's textbook on evolution is a great place to start. Species evolve as members of ecosystems, each species has its own series of checks and balances. For plant species those checks and balances come in the form of fungi and insects. Millions of years of an evolutionary arms race exist between a plant species and any antagonistic fungal or insect species. If the plant species doesn't go extinct altogether it eventually evolves resistance, as happened with Chinese chestnuts and the chestnut blight. The adaptation of Chinese chestnuts to chestnut blight took millions of years and many intermediate steps of pathogenicity and resistance.
The result of those millions of years of an evolutionary arms race was that Chestnut blight is only a mild pathogen to Chinese chestnuts. When that flight was brought across an ocean that it could never have crossed on its own, and that a spore could never have been blown across because the oceans are fucking 3,000 miles wide, It found a new host that had no resistance because it had not spent millions of years evolving in the same ecosystem. So what happened? American chestnuts became functionally extinct within 50 years.
The same case has repeated itself, although maybe not to the same degree, hundreds of times in the last century or two due to human assisted dispersal across oceans of plant, vertebrate, insect and fungus species
Kudzu is not invasive in Japan because there are numerous insects and fungi that prevent it from becoming so. As a result it is a very important plant species there, and helps keep the biosphere intact. Bring that kudzu to a new continent where the checks and balances don't exist however, and it smothers entire ecosystems. Will something eventually evolve in North America to keep kudzu in check? Absolutely, but in the 5,000 to 50,000 years that might take how many plants species will go extinct and how many habitats will be smothered and at what point will the entire ecosystem collapse, and will that happen before something evolves to control kudzu? Maybe.
The worst invasive species tend to be very important pioneer (the fact that this word is italicized and highlighted in bold should imply to you how important an understanding of it is) on other continents - and indeed some of our most valuable native pioneer species like Verbesina encelioides, Acer negundo, Robinia and Solidago sp. are highly invasive on other continents. The entire process of ecological succession is immensely important towards understanding not only why some plants are invasive but how eosystems on planet Earth heal from disturbance events such as landslides, floods, wildfires, or most commonly - bulldozing and land clearance by humans. Pioneer species are primary successional plants that are the first to move in after disturbance. They re-colonize barren ground very quickly, tend to grow fast, produce a shit-ton of seeds, and are generally short lived. Along the way, they provide cirtical services to the ecosystem, such as shading the ground and creating a microclimate of humidity and cooler temperatures, their roots infiltrating the soil and providing vital scofflding for beneficial microbes. They basically “prep” the land for the slower-growing, longer-lived species that can only get established once conditions on the ground have improved enough after a disturbance event.
Pioneer species are immensely important to ecosystems where they are native - where they spent millions of years evolving relationships with other plant, insect, fungal and vertebrate species that they grow sympatrically with. No species is an autonomous entity, existing by itself in a vacuum, but a critical member of a much larger functioning system full of a multitude of other species with which it has spent exponentially long amounts of time evolving relationships with. Those relationships can be mutualistic or antagonistic. Each species is a “gear in the machine” - the living machine - that is the biosphere. Likewise, humans can be mutualists for many species, rather than antagonists - as we so often are when clear massive swaths of land for agriculture or because we think plants look “messy”, or when unthinkingly establish plant species from other continents without considering the ecological behavior of those species and whether or not they might behave invasively and aggressively in their new habitats.
Why do some people think invasion biology is nonsense? Most likely it is because they have a perspective that has not "zoomed out" far enough, not only spatially but temporally, And also because the field of ecology and evolution are only a century and a half old, and it is something that most of us are not taught nor do we encounter in our very brief and short human lives.
FURTHER READING : Any Biogeography textbook. THE ECOLOGY OF PLANTS (3rd edition) by Gurevitch (it was once available on libgen, which has now shutdown, but might be available on Anna’s Archive. EVOLUTION : MAKING SENSE OF LIFE by Carl Zimmer. RAVEN BIOLOGY OF PLANTS (8th edition).
Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates
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 cool-climate and cool-season plants to eventually die here. That's a bummer for somebody who loves plants from places like cloud forests of Central America, the Páramo of Ecuador, Alpine plants from the Rockies or Southern Andes, etc. This phenomenon is also quite fascinating however, and goes far to explain why growing certain plant species or even entire clades (evolutionary groups) of plants is so impossible outdoors in certain climates. It all has to do with metabolism and something called compensation point.
Like animals, plants respire. This means they burn sugars to create new tissue as well as the chemical compounds they use to defend themselves against fungi & insects, as well as simply to conduct daily metabolic processes required for survival.
“Compensation Point” refers to the light intensity or CO₂ concentration at which the rate of photosynthesis exactly equals the rate of respiration in a plant. At this point, there is no net gain or loss of carbon—the CO₂ absorbed during photosynthesis is equal to the CO₂ released during respiration, and the oxygen produced matches the oxygen consumed.
For a plant to grow (not just survive), it must operate above its compensation point. It must produce more than it consumes. That is, photosynthesis must exceed respiration enough to generate a net gain of carbon to -create new tissues
- put some energy in storage reserves in the form of starch and sugar
-produce defense chemicals (alkaloids, toxins, etc) and mechanical defense (spines, thorns, hairs, wax)
- produce reproductive tissues like pollen, nectar, flowers and fruits/seeds
Below the compensation point, and operating at a carbon deficit, the plant burns stored energy reserves and eventually dies. Along the way it will decline in health and will gradually become weaker and more prone to insect infestations and fungi.
What do warm nights do to cool season plants and why?
Respiration (which burns sugars for energy) increases exponentially with temperature (roughly doubling every 10°C rise). Essentially what this means is that plant metabolism is dependent on temperature, something I've repeated many times in videos. In areas where the nights remain warm (because the air is humid and contains water vapor…which is slow to let go of heat), the plant’s metabolism will run at an accelerated rate at night.
So essentially, warm nights mean the plant burns more stored carbohydrates (sugars, starch) just to maintain basic metabolism. This leads to a reduced net carbon gain in a cool-season or cool-climate plant that has spent the past few million years evolving in a place like the Páramo of Central America, or the high Andes, or the rocky mountains. As we stated before, the plant eventually dies, and it is probably a long protracted death along the way, where the plant might be infected by scale and mealy bugs and not have the metabolic energy to produce defenses against them.
A similar case exists with Tomatoes : Hot nights (>75°F / 24°C) cause excessive respiration, burning through the day’s limited photosynthetic gains. Even worse, high humidity reduces transpirational cooling, since the air is not as readily pulling moisture out of leaf stomata. This only raises leaf temps further. Why do tomatoes have this limitations and why do they behave this way? When we look at where the wild ancestors of tomatoes evolved, it starts to make sense.
The wild ancestors of tomatoes - a number of species such as Solanum pennellii, Solanum peruvianum, Solanum chilense, and Solanum pimpinellifolium - are native to very high elevations above 8,000’ in the Northern Andes, near the Peru-Chile Border. They grow in a climate unlike any that can be found in North America - namely high, dry elevations at low latitudes (18° South) - this means they are exposed to cooler temperatures (because of the elevation) than one might think they would tolerate at such a low latitude, while still being hit with a very intense amount of solar radiation and light (which they not only tolerate, but need. Tomatoes are full-sun plants, as most people know). I encountered Solanum pennellii growing in a drainage sandwiched between rocky, almost barren slopes that were dotted with massive Browningia candelaris cacti at 8,000’ (2440 meters) in Northern Chile. It was remarkable to see these little herbs - their leaves were covered in glandular trichomes (sticky hairs) that looked and smelled just like those of modern tomatoes. The ancestry was obvious.
But it is not just warm nights that cause certain plants to decline. If some plants do not get enough light, this also affects the compensation point. They are not able to produce enough carbohydrates via photosynthesis to create the defensive compounds they need nor the reproductive structures (which are highly metabolically costly) they need to reproduce and produce fruits and seeds.
This reminds me of a question I got a month ago from someone who had a cactus for 4 years that they were growing on a partially shaded window sill. They moved apartments and when they arrived at their new place, they put the plant in a sunny south-facing bay window which got light from above as well as from the side. Within a week or two the cactus bloomed. When the plant was placed in a location where it got more light, it exceeded its compensation point and since the plant was now producing an abundant amount of carbohydrates compared to the paucity of them that it was producing before, it was now able to devote some of that energy to the production of flowers.
The case with compensation point and the struggle of trying to grow cool climate plants in very hot humid environments is exactly the opposite for tropical plants and warm-climate cacti (Note that many high Andean cacti from South America operate at cooler temperatures than most Mexican cacti)... When hot-climate plants are attempted to be grown in temperatures that only reach the high 70s at most, their metabolism drastically slows down and they are not able to produce chemicals to defend themselves nor especially to produce new tissue and new growth.
Further, different plants have evolved their own variations of the photosynthetic process in order to cope with some of the extremes in the regions where they are native. Specifically, CAM photosynthetis, C3 photosynthesis and C4 photosynthesis are issues at play here.
In cacti from warm climates especially, CAM photosynthesis does not operate very efficiently below 85° f. CAM photosynthesis is a process whereby plants open their stomata and take in CO2 at night - when temperatures are much cooler - to avoid releasing too much H20 through those same stomata. CAM plants absorb CO2 at night and store it in the form of malic acid to be used for photosynthesis during the day when the sun is out and light can power the photosynthetic process.
Also playing a role in all of this are C3 and C4 photosynthesis. We won’t get into this now, except to say that C4 photosynthesis is far more efficient at hot temperatures (thus why many plants - especially hot-season grasses - from warm climates use it. They do this with the help of something they evolved called “Kranz Anatomy”, and Kranz Anatomy has evolved independently in plants many different times throughout history) and C3 photosynthesis is more efficient at cooler, milder temperatures. Whether C3 or C4 photosynthesis is more efficient - and why it evolved in the first place - has to do with a negative phenomenon called photorespiration. In short, photorespiration is the process whereby an essential photosynthetic enzyme called Rubisco. Rubisco is the most abundant enzyme on Earth and is supposed to fix CO₂ into sugars. At high temperatures, however, Rubisco bonds with oxygen, instead, which produces a toxic byproduct (phosphoglycolate) instead of sugars. Rubisco’s affinity for oxygen at high temperatures is its flaw, and some think that since Rubisco evolved 3 billion years ago, when O2 levels were low and CO2 levels were high, its affinity for oxygen wasn’t a flaw until “recently” (speaking in terms of the geologic time scale, of course.
Overall, compensation point and a plant’s ability to grow in a given climate is a balance between the light available, the carbon dioxide available, and the temperature (and how it corresponds to the plant’s metabolism, which is dependent primarily on what kind of climate it evolved in over the past few million years.
Being Taught to Think
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 the tools for self-learning, which is part of why it is so empowering. Rather than accepting things at face value and simply memorize them, learning critical thinking teaches you to ask “what the shit does this mean exactly” and “you might say a given idea is the case, but why?”- questions like this are as fundamental to science as they are to philosophy. Learning to think this way is what helped me teach myself botany, geology, grasp a semi-coherent understanding of natural selection and evolutionary biology, as well as how to screenprint efficiently, change my goddamned oil, and install light fixtures.
The American education system in most regions - not surprisingly - does not teach critical thinking. Teaching people not only to question but what questions to ask dangerously empowers them, threatening the power structures that enable those at the top to continue sociopathically hoarding wealth, convinced of their own superiority. Memorization isn’t learning - memorization for the sake of passing a test and getting a grade is not a metric of an intelligent mind nor a metric of a healthy education system.
As a kid with horrible ADHD, boredom and an inability to focus unless I was receiving some kind of dopamine drip from the subject material, I hated school. Emphasis was put on passing tests, rather than finding passion or inspiration in the material. The emphasis was never on broadening one’s perspective, or on “zooming out” and connecting the dots between cause-and-effect, or a chain of reactions between different entities. I suspect little has improved in the education system, especially with the advent of attention-sucking, distractive smart phones which must fuck up a child’s psychology greater than anything else.
I mention this because people will often write me asking for books to read to learn botany. I always repeat the same thing : Plant Systematics by Michael Simpson, Raven’s Biology of Plants, and Evolution: Making Sense of Life by Carl Zimmer, but then I follow up with : Books are not the way to learn botany, or any science really. A person can have a library full of books and memorize all of it and still be a shitty botanist. Reading books alone is not the method to learn botany nor should emphasis be placed on it, as if information simply transfers from the page to the human brain via osmosis. ASKING QUESTIONS is the key to learning anything. Going out into the field, having the subject material (plants, or rocks, or bugs, or soil) in front of you and actively thinking about it, asking questions and then trying to answer those questions is the way to learn anything. Figuring out what questions to ask requires thinking, and there in lies the exercise which makes the mind stronger.
With one’s own children, it is standard fare to teach memorization and obedience, not critical thought. I disagree with this method. Obedience is not a virtue, if anything it can be a hazard. Teaching a child to question, to think, to ask why a rule might exist and what its purpose might be - that is what builds strong, intelligent and capable adult humans. Some rules exist for good reasons, some are bullshit, some are not based in ethics, morality or the avoidance of hazards at all and are merely only the wishes of the person who declared the rule to be a rule in the first place. If the rule is not unreasonable and following it would not offer any risk of harm, it should be followed just as a matter of common decency and respect every human being is deserving of, no more and no less.
I didn’t learn to question things ideologically or philosophically until I turned 13. I didn’t learn to question things scientifically until I was twice that age or older. I only wish I had been taught both in grade school.
Like putting a pill inside a hot dog in order to give a dog life-saving medicine…
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 them, too, is addictive. Social media is generally a toilet, a place for the lonely, isolated and miserable (and aren’t most of us) to go to escape what is for most of us a very unfulfilling, depressing reality. If one or two good things can come from it, let it be the awareness of “the real world” - the world outside of human society and our make-believe world of human meaning and anthropocentrism, which is wholly disconnected from the biological and ecological reality of life on Earth.
If the act of bringing people to plants - of recruiting them to the causes of plants - means initially showing people how a plant species may be edible or useful, I only do it in hopes of it one day opening the door to them later coming to see the bigger picture, learning to zoom out, taking a more long-term and broader perspective of humanity’s place in the context of the web of life, geologic time, respect for the living machine that sustains us. It is my hope that eventually that respect turns into active cultivation and stewardship, whether it’s killing lawns, collecting and spreading seeds, planting native plant gardens, illegally planting native plants, creating habitat for life, sustaining the living machine, the living organism of life on Earth. Humans do not need to be a destructive species, that is only our unthinking, uncultivated self - the chimp running mindlessly through the forest tearing up anything that it comes into contact with and fighting with other groups of chimps intent on doing the same thing. We can be so much more than that, but it takes intellectual cultivation, self-awareness and active participation in the living world around us. It requires stepping outside of ourselves and our own psyches, it requires self-examination, and more importantly it requires examination of the living world around us.
Plants Vs. Marriage
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 like a friggin’ brother to me, but I don’t feel the need to make our friendship official or recognized by law. That would be the worst possible thing we could do, if it were even possible. It’d be like turning our friendship into a contract, a work obligation. Should either one of us grow apart for whatever reason decades down the line, then we’d have to get a bunch of sleazebag family law attorneys, pay them up the ass, worry about one person ripping the other off for half their worth, etc. Further, it’d be entirely unnecessary. For this reason, I also know that my friendship with Javier will far outlast most marriages.”. Similarly, I have friends that are in romantic relationships with each other that have been together for decades and never got married. They hate marriage. Their relationship seems more durable, impervious to strife and born outta genuine love simply because of the fact that they’re not married : both are free to leave at any time. Neither is nailed – down by law – to something that they’re not otherwise fully committed to.
My friend told me that she realized she didn’t want to be married anymore when she was talking to her shrink. She had “fallen outta love” – whatever romantic “love” even means to most people in the first place is beyond me, I’m highly suspicious of their definition of it to begin with – with the guy a year before but wasn’t sure yet if it was real or what it meant. Her therapist asked her what scared her the most, what prevented her from ending it. She replied “being 65 and alone” (sounds like a dream to me, tbh). “Ok, let’s go there” her therapist replied.
So my friend closed her eyes, she told me, and imagined herself at age 65, alone, and what it would be like. She immediately thought of herself sitting down outside, on the ground, surrounded by plants that she was interacting with, either observing them or planting them or collecting seeds or something, she didn’t really know, it was just a daydream. At that moment, however, she realized that in the image she had of herself at that age that she was not, in fact, alone. She was surrounded by the plants, and the plants had a spirit. They are alive and respiring and photosynthesizing and she could feel them. “You felt surrounded and embedded into the living world.” I told her. She started crying as she told me this. She looked at the peyotes in the ground and told me how the peyote, more than anything – perhaps because of all the spirit and love that native people put towards it – embodied this connection with the living world for her. The peyote had a spirit, she said, and it made her feel held and cared for, nurtured, loved. In return, she reciprocated that love to it, and to every other element of the living world that she interacted with.
That, to me, is a genuine love far more enduring and lasting than the love you might find in most marriages.
High hopes for the thornscrub
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 visual portrayal especially when seen above from a drone). I’m excited to make rounds around Thornscrub the same way that I do my own yard and garden, noticing individual plants and saying hello to them like they’re friends, noticing where the orb weavers are setting up, how populations of various insects are doing, where the tortoises live, when the cicadas come out, where the indigo snakes like to lurk. I’m excited to have good friends to do this with, to make these rounds with, to talk about the biological going-ons that occur there. I’m excited to provide a refuge for all the things that I love, safe from the rampant destruction going on in the human world outside, where acres of habitat continue to be cleared without any respect or awareness for the living world that exists there.
Making the rounds to check on the life that we are protecting, observing and noting changes in the seasonality and habits of the plants and animals that live there…these are the kinds of things that I enjoy doing in my own little 1/8th of an acre at home. I enjoy checking on the leafcutter ants and the spiny lizard that’s as fat as a hamburger. I always hope I run into a gulf coast toad hiding amongst my plant pots and soil bins. I softly chuckle watching the anoles wake up and bail from the potted plants that they’re resting in when I move them. I like knowing that the chirping frogs are still hanging around. I was ecstatic when a tarantula showed up near my front stoop one day. Thinking about these things makes me wonder what it will feel like to be the same way not just about 1/8 of an acre, but about 145 acres. The same way that I am able to tend to and create places that foster life around my own yard, I will tend to and foster life around our 145 acres of intact peyote gardens and Thornscrub habitat, doing everything that I can to enable it to thrive : shooting pigs, monitoring habitat, fencing around soil crusts, putting water out for wildlife.
Misguided Efforts By some Native AMerican Groups to “Protect” Peyote will only further endanger it.
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 plants on them in Starr, Webb, Zapata and Jim Hogg County get bulldozed and cleared for agriculture, suburban housing, and cattle pasture (y’know, to graze cattle in what is effectively a desert). Meanwhile many native groups are claiming that it's poaching by non-natives that's driving peyote populations down, a notion which is completely absurd. Even more absurd is that some of these native groups want to weaponize racist drug laws that were created to persecute the native groups themselves in order to “protect” Lophophora williamsii - Peyote. They are asking the government to prosecute anybody growing or possessing peyote that doesn't have a tribal card. They want to prevent peyote from being decriminalized. Meanwhile, if peyote were decriminalized, it would be significantly easier to ease poaching pressures as well as restore Peyote populations by any conservation groups hoping to re-planting thousands of them into protected parcels of habitat. The fact that anyone would be against decriminalizing what is essentially a harmless plant that is on the verge of being wiped out from over 50% of its former habitat is insane.
Yet many native groups that value peyote as medicine and sacrament are still wasting valuable time and energy chasing a bogeyman that barely exists : psychedelic “entrepreneurs” and anglo peyote users that are supposedly jumping at the gills, lying in wait for peyote to be decriminalized so they can illegally trespass on private property in a state where nearly everyone who lives in rural areas is armed — just to be able to try eating a plant that causes severe stomach discomfort and potential vomitting in order to experience a high. Many native groups are wasting time chasing new age “honky shamans” (which yes, do exist, and are as ridiculous as they sound), while the real villain of habitat destruction, invasive species, a culture that has no respect for the native habitat whatsoever, and feral pigs (yes, they uproot and partially eat peyote) are destroying peyote plants on an exponential scale.
Crying bloody murder about non-natives supposedly demanding access to Peyote (a phenomenon I rarely see) while tens of thousands of plants and their habitat are lost every year to the kind of things pictured in the photographs below is a tragic and wasteful misplacing of grievance and culpability. Further, these native groups waste ample time begging the DEA to enforce existing drugs laws - drug laws that were themselves products of a racist culture war — demanding that a huge segment of the population not have access just to grow a plant that is legal in Canada and most of Europe. In both of those countries where peyote is legal to grow but illegal to ingest, there is not now nor ever has been a huge demand for this cactus in the drug trade or in psychedelic culture. Most people just don’t care or have the time to play psychonaut, not surprisingly. Further, anglo use of peyote can easily be discouraged via cultural encouragement alone without weaponizing absurd, failed drug laws. Salvia apiana, a plant held sacred by many Native Americans of the American Southwest, was at one point experiencing poaching pressures in California and Arizona from anglos due to the aromatic smell it produces when burned or smudged, but through cultural education and awareness, its poaching was discouraged, mostly through social media. Poaching pressures on this plant have now eased. Like peyote, Salvia apiana can be grown from seed, and dried bundles of leaves sold in overpriced health food stores now often come only from sources that have guaranteed that the leaves they sell come from plants that were grown sustainably, on farms. Further, the mere use of the plant by anglos has in many places been discouraged as a form of cultural appropriation. The same could easily be done with peyote. Poaching pressures and inappropriate use could be easily controlled for were Peyote ever legalized for horticultural production.
Instead of petitioning lawmakers to throw old ladies in jail for growing cacti that contain bitter but harmless alkaloids, these Native groups might be better off spending their energy lobbying to protect habitat, or for the right to grow it themselves and plant it out into "the gardens" of South Texas where it (and the dozen other rare cactus species it grows with) are currently being destroyed on an almost daily basis. Native groups could instead be buying up parcels of land with Peyote on it and learning to protect and steward the Thornscrub habitat that it grows on instead of fixating so hard on identity politics, and using archaic draconian drug laws that were originally created to persecute natives themselves. Peyote will also grow well in the ground in places like Southern Arizona. I have seen firsthand large colonies planted on O’odham reservations 30 years ago that today are thriving, an excellent form of in-situ conservation. Yet few people, if any, are doing this. Why?
I understand that as humans, the herd mentality among us is strong and it's easy to just go along with what others are doing. I also understand that finger-pointing is a much easier temptation than actually working hard to find a solution to a complex and tragic problem. I implore some of the native groups that today stand against decriminalizing or legalizing peyote cultivation to either begin to focus on restoration work, ex-situ conservation (conserving species outside of their native habitat) and habitat protection, or to start advocating for conservation groups to legally be able to work with this plant species in order to protect it, conserve it, and partially restore what has been lost. For too long native groups have said “the peyote will take care of itself”. As somebody who lives in the peyote gardens and is familiar with the habitat and all the species that grow here, I have seen firsthand that that is simply not true.
“Chaining” is a method by which a large ship-chain is dragged between two bulldozers to clear huge swaths of land of shrub and small-tree cover at once. It is commonly employed in the great basin, namely in Nevada and Idaho, but I saw it being done here in South Texas in the peyote gardens in March of 2023.
A Brilliant Strategy exemplified by a Neotropical Legume
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 climate. It requires temps between 65-85° F (18-29 C) and ample humidity. I tried to grow it in South Texas, and it struggled for a year before dying, either from arid heat or prolonged chill during the month or two of temps below 50° F
A Strange Pollination Syndrome in Ecuador...
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 of the flower's "pouch" that mimic aphids. This species of hover fly lays eggs in aphid colonies, and later the emerging larvae eat the aphids as they grow.
It's also quite likely that this flower produces pheromones that mimic the alert pheromones of aphids in order to help attract the hover flies - quite a few other orchid genera do this is as well, such as #Epipactis.
The hover fly flies into the "pouch" formed by the labellum petal and is temporarily trapped. When it finally escapes the flower, it is forced to exit through the top of the flower by the "moustache" structure on the staminode, where it then comes into contact with the stigma (the female part of the flower) and later the anther.
This "trap-and-release" pollination method is also used by plants such as the pipevines (genus Aristolochia), with which it seems to work pretty well.
The genus Phragmipedium is 1 of 5 genera in the orchid subfamily Cypripedioideae, known for producing two anthers instead of the standard one as well as the "slipper" or "pouch" shaped labellum (see last photo for picture of Orchid phylogeny and subfamilies).
Screenshot of pollinator taken from "Pollination of slipper orchids (cypripedioideae): A review" (Pemberton, 2013).
A Plantation Is Not a Forest
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 Southern beeches), Myrtle and Araucaria forest. The amount of destruction is excessive, and what has been lost is discouraging.
What leaves me hopeful, however, is seeing a burgeoning enthusiasm and reverence for native plants in Chilean culture and among young people here. Art featuring natives is common, and many here seem to embrace the rare plants which compose these special Southern Hemisphere forests and plant communities.
Ode to a rare Mustard
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, and the ones I do know certainly were not this. I looked on SEINET and found only a few herbarium specimens, and when I got to the area - A disturbed patch of vegetation with Borrichia frutescens on the edge of an Ebony woodland I searched the area and couldn't find more than 20 plants.
Though I was pretty sure of the ID I still decided to consult Brassicaceae Expert Dr. Ihsan Al-Shabahz for ID confirmation, which came back positive. Nursery owner Mike Heep was familiar with the species, of course, and knew of a roadside patch North of Harlingen around here : 26.194051,-97.611724 but I found the place overgrown with the same invasive grasses and wasn't able to locate any individuals.
Regardless, it's a cool species with glaucous blue sessile leaves with an auriculate base and tiny white flowers, and it likely doesn't go too far inland as it doesn't seem adapted for drought, preferring instead to stick near Arroyos and waterways.
Feral Hogs Represent An Immediate Threat to Peyote
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 the effects of colonization and genocide for indigenous people in North America, but it is curr facing some pretty severe threats, the most of which seems to be land clearance and an innate societal disrespect for the kind of habitat that Peyote grows in in South Texas: Tamaulipan Thornscrub.
When licensed Peyote dealers known as "Peyoteros" harvest Peyote, they merely cut it above its underground stem, leaving the stem intact so that dormant buds can re-sprout new "heads" (stems). When feral pigs eat Peyote, exploiting its water stores but apparently unbothered by the bitter alkaloids, they dig up the plants and leave them half-eaten to die slowly on the soil surface. The pigs also damage Peyote's nurse plants like Guajillo (Senegalia berlandieri) by chewing on the roots, causing it to die. These nurse plants are of immense importance not just to Peyote but to the entire ecosystem, since they mitigate the effects of the brutal summer heat and dry season, while also fixing nitrogen through their roots and making it available to other plants in the soil. Remove the nurse plants, and many of the cacti in this habitat will not have the shade necessary to make it through the summer.
What's really tragic to think about is the effects feral hogs will have on the long-term health of the habitat here. I'm hopeful we can eventually use PigBrig corral traps to get our problem under control, but what about the hundreds of other properties where habitat is being destroyed but the landowners are not paying attention and don't even care? This is how a species slowly gets wiped out from an area, which is something I've seen happen firsthand with other cactus species in South Texas. Suddenly, they're just not there anymore, and few seem to notice or remember.
How Peyote Recovers from SunBurn
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 top of any cactus stem where new growth is generated. Cacti also have the potential of producing secondary growth in their cambium, but these lateral meristems (which eudicots have but monocots lack) can't generate new epidermis, they can only produce cork cells, a kind of protective secondary growth which is dead at maturity.
These plants originally got sunburned because we removed the invasive buffelgrass which was shading them out. Had we not done so, they would have eventually etiolated and effectively died of starvation. Since they had already been growing in shade for so long, they did not possess the "epicuticular wax" that gives peyote its blue color. Lacking this wax, they burned quickly within a day of exposure to the hot sun, but owing to peyote's excessive amount of storage tissue located in its underground stem, they recovered in only a few months. This illustrates how quickly Peyote - and many other cacti - can heal itself, and this underground stem is what makes the cutting of Peyote by members of the Native American church completely sustainable *when done correctly* and at appropriately spaced intervals. It's also what makes poaching and digging this plant such an unnecessary *completely DICK* move, as this is equivalent to stealing from the other life forms that depend on this plant and looting habitat of its biological richness.
My only regret is that we did not come back to check on these plants sooner so that we could accurately measure how quick they recovered.
South Texas' Rarest Brassica
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii was a plant that I'd never heard of until a couple weeks ago, when I read somewhere that it was a little-known mustard that only occurs in a few places in South Texas near Harlingen. There are reportedly a few populations in Tamaulipas, too. Anytime a plant is rare or in this case, imperiled, it warrants attention as to why. In the case of this tiny annual brassica, the reason is probably an inability to compete with the massive amount of invasive weeds that have taken up space in its former habitat, among other factors.
The plant habitat of South Texas is among some of the most disrespected and unappreciated of anywhere I've been, and the dominant culture here is immediately hostile to the native landscape, usually unable to see the beauty or wonder in the dense scrub of cacti and multi-stemmed shrubs that compose the thorn scrub and thorn forest. It's not surprising to me to see plants like this one that are on the verge of extinction.
Thelypodiopsis shinnersii, or Mostacillastrum vaseyi, as Al-Shabahz (the brassica expert) re-named it, doesn't grow in thorn forest. Instead, it grows on the margins of wet areas, where I saw it growing with another plant that's find of wet, salty areas : Borrichia frutescens.
The population here was so tiny that I didn't feel it right to take an herbarium voucher, especially since it wasn't even in flower (it flowers in March). I briefly surveyed up and down the trail next to the arroyo, but most all of the surrounding land was covered in invasive Guinea grass.
It's easy to distinguish from other plants due to its sessile, auriculate leaf bases, and when in flower, small white 4-petaled flowers
Live Laugh Love, or "Holden Caulfield with a Touch of Vandalism"
Why do we plant things? Why do we grope plants, collect seeds, take so many pictures of flowers? Why do we study botany? Because it gives us dopamine, keeps us from committing acts that would probably put us in jail. Helps keep the puke down. Money doesn't give me dopamine. I like having enough to be comfortable but if I'm not creating or growing something than I'm just consuming something like a miserable sap. I don't want fancy cars and expensive clothes and anybody who would be impressed by that kind of shit is the kind of person I don't want within six degrees of separation of me because their values are poisoned and they're probably a boring fucking sucker.
People who worship money bore me. Buying "stuff" bores me. Consuming is the opposite of creating. Fixation on frivolous status symbols and luxury items is the opposite of mental exercise or learning. That "shiny shit" rots our primate brains. None of us are immune. I look down on people who want it as if they're an even more semi-conscious animal than the rest of us monkeys. Unenlightened half-wits with little else to offer. I know that makes me sound like an elitist cunt and I'm fine with that. I also usually wear the same pants three days in a row. I find these fools with plucked eyebrows, shit-eating grins and waxed faces on the billboards utterly revolting. No blood in those veins. Lowest common denominator motives. Maybe they could have more to offer if they tried to, if they read a book or dropped some acid or hiked a hundred miles into the mountains, or even just sat around a fire in the middle of nowhere beneath a starry sky laughing their asses off and lighting their farts on fire but right now they're a boring unimaginative money-worshipping twat and I have no use for them. Finance and business, investment portfolios, helping clients win big settlements. Phony smiles, small talk, constant salespeople. They're part of the reason the world is dying, scram. I swallow my tragedy with a tall glass of dark humor, and these days it's all tragic.
Why You Can't Easily "Move" Woody Plants: It's in the Roots
So often I hear people making the assumption that small trees and shrubs and other woody plants can easily be "moved", but in most cases this is a pipe dream and destined to fail.
Why digging up and moving trees and shrubs often doesn't work :
The only parts of the roots that are engaged in absorption of water and nutrients are the distal few inches of the root, where the root hairs are (the part of the illustration circled in red), but root hairs are somewhat short-lived and don't last long as they are continuously replaced as the root grows.
As the roots continue to grow and elongate, root hairs die and are not replaced at the same site the way that branches are, which may resprout from dormant buds on the stem or shoot. Root hairs are only produced at the root apical meristems on tap roots and lateral roots, the rest of the root above that is only plumbing and transport, not absorption, though lateral roots and secondary roots can also have growing tips which produce root hairs.
When you dig up a plant, you are mostly severing those distal (as opposed to proximal) root segments that contain the root hairs, which mean that the plant now has no way of absorbing water and must regrow new roots. This is the main reason why "moving" plants so often fails. The only way to ensure that you do not sever the parts of the root that contain the root hair when moving something like a small tree is to make sure that you basically remove the entire crater of soil that the tree is growing in, which usually necessitates the use of a tree spade mounted on a small dozer.
If you ARE able to get a decent amount of roots with root hairs when digging a plant, be aware that sometimes the best way to ensure success is to sever some of the shoot up top, maintaining an adequate root-to-shoot ratio and preventing evapotranspiration of moisture from leaves.
