In this episode we rant about DC / Baltimore area botany, filming kill your lawn season 2, the glory of Texas leaf cutter ants, the seeds of ghost plant and the whole friggin' phylogeny really, invasion biology and why it's stupid to say "humans are invasive" and more.
Very little botany-related content in this session with Al Scorch during an interim during the shooting of Kill Your Lawn Season 2 in College Park, Maryland
Sam Droege is a scientist who studies bees and bee behavior based out of Maryland. In this episode we talk bee ecology, how to attract them to your yard, their nesting and habitat requirements, why the honey bees are the least of our concerns, what are the kinds of bees that pollinate Peyote, and why our solitary native bees deserve the most attention. Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eesc/science/native-bee-inventory-and-monitoring-lab
This episode is an interview with Jeff & Janet Crouch, who sued their Maryland HOA in 2019 and ended up changing state law. Legislation that was enacted in 2021 now makes it illegal for HOAs in the state of Maryland to force people to have lawns or remove native plant and pollinator gardens in their front yard.
Anthony Basil Rodriguez is an ethnobotanist from the Bronx, New York that has traveled the world studying wild bananas. In this episode we talked about his travels all over the world and other notable and incredible plants he has encountered, as well as the people that utilize them.
Marianna Wright is the director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, which provides critical habitat for wildlife in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. The National Butterfly Center was targeted by extreme right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists in 2019/2020, including two of the now-convicted fraudsters behind the private border wall project.
This episode consists of a 90 minute rant about the wonders of Cornell University Herbarium (1 million specimens you schmuck), how a cactus came to grow in Brooklyn, Botanizing a filthy industrial creek in Queens New York, the enigmatic Appalachian shale buckwheat (Eriogonum allenii) of Virginia, giving a talk on plant evolution in lower Manhattan, and more.
In this episode with Dr. Rob Rugoso from Cornell University we discuss the chemistry of floral scents, how scent evolves (ie Clarkia breweri), night pollination, flowers that trap their pollinators, floral mimicry & more.
A rant about how prairie soils get built, what exactly a "herbaceous perennial" is and why this habit is so relevant and important to remember when talking about the prairie, how important prairie grasses like big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) and indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) are to building rich top soil (hunt: it's the roots), etc. Other included rant subjects are cigars, killing 16 lawns during the month of September including 4 for a revision series, issuing a fatwa against Midwestern ...
Gerould Wilhelm is one of the two authors of Flora of the Chicago Region - A Floristic & Ecological Synthesis. In this episode we talk about a number of topics, from prairie hydrology, native American belief systems, civilizational ethos and how he sets fire to his suburban yard every year in order to facilitate the diversity of prairie plant communities. Please check out his long list of essays, research articles, and publications at www.conservationresearchinstitute.com
Fabiany Herrera is a paleobotanist specializing on a diverse array of time periods and paleofloras, including the Mazon Creek Flora from the Carboniferous when Lycopods were friggin' trees, as well as the utterly bizarre Jurassic and early Cretaceous Bennettitales & Corystospermaceae from the excellently preserved Mesozoic lignite of Mongolia. Many of the plants we talk about in this episode HAVE NO LIVING OR EXTANT RELATIVES - they represent fantastical lineages of plants whose base branche...
A one hour rant about Glacial Till, Kankakee Mallow, Sand Prairies, Stiff Designs for Native Plant Landscapes, Emulating the "Beautiful Chaos" of the prairie, etc.
Keeper Trout is one of the founding members of Cactus Conservation Institute and a research scientist who - along with Dr. Martin Terry - has studied a number of the cactus species in South Texas for 3 decades in an understudied and underappreciated habitat known as Tamaulipan Thornscrub. In this episode we talk about a broad range of subjects from the history of laws regarding Native American use of Peyote, the impact that melting glaciers in New Mexico may have had on the soils of South Texas,...
In this episode we talk about the botany of the Philippines (influenced by a remarkable tectonic setting), volcanic activity, ultramafic soil, "ant-plants" like Myrmecodia (Rubiaceae), Dipterocarpaceae, cloud forests and lowland rainforest) , the psychedelic lichen #Dictyonema , as well as Yucca Pollination on the other side of the globe in East Texas with Adam Black, a botanist and researcher with Bartlett Arboretum.
Rants about Fighting with City Hall over Native Plant Gardens & Tree Planting, Creepy New Age "Healers", mortality in Star Cactus (Astrophytum asterias) from the recent drought and heat, Loving-Kindness-Meditations-and-what-the-sh*t, Nasally Belched Vowels in the Chicago Dialect and much more.
Rants about New Age Massage Parlors, Philosophically coping with "the human tumor" & habitat destruction, acid abstinence & 40 year old virgins, black nectar in the genus Melianthus, etc.
Listen to this podcast ad-free on the Patreon at : https://www.patreon.com/CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt Jared Margulies is the author of the upcoming book "The Cactus Hunters", a book focusing on cactus and succulent poaching around the world using a number of case studies from different regions and species. His book is available for pre-order in September, 2023.
In this episode we catch up with Kyle Lybarger of the wildly popular Native Habitat Project and talk about seed-collecting, lawn-killing, burn regimes, the benefits and necessity of hunting and much more.
Intro ends at 8:00. Reminder all episodes can be listened to ad-free by subscribing to the Crime Pays Patreon at : https://www.patreon.com/CrimePaysButBotanyDoesnt This 1 hour and 40 minute episode covers the ethnobotany, pharmacology, & phylogeny of this psychoactive, potentially-therapeutic member of the Apocynaceae which has recently gained attention for its efficacy treating addiction & PTSD.
First 30 minutes occur on a winded, 900 meter elevation-gain hike. A more thorough, less distracted rant starts at 30:00. Rants about Brazilian Atlantic Forests and Cerrado (Seh-Haddo) vegetation, seasonal dryness caused by the ITCZ and Earth's Axis of rotation, converge traits of sclerophyll leaves among unrelated plants families, bizarre members of Asteraceae, Tree Vernonias, Xeric Aroids and Bromeliads, and much more.
Intro ends at 6:30 Nick Zentner is a professor of geology at Central Washington University and host of a in-the-field geology YouTube Channel. He has numerous lectures available online at www.NickZentner.com and is based out of Ellensberg Washington.
This episode is basically a 90 minute rambling rant about New Zealand plants & plant ecology, where by a repeated fascination and fixation is expressed with the evolutionary selection pressures produced by a flora that co-evolved with 9 species of giant, flightless now-extinct birds called Moas. We also touch on new Zealand's tectonic forces, the predominant habitat type (Podocarp - Broadleaf Temperate Rainforest) as well as a bit of the volcanic alpine plants like Raoulia. We talk about Psi...
A conversation with my mycologist friend Alan Rockefeller about fungal diversity in New Zealand/Aotearoa, fungi with caps that don't open (which may be an adaptation to bird dispersal) and some of the weird complexity in the genus Psilocybe.
In this episode we have a 3 person conversation about the Flora of New Zealand, touching on such notable ecological and evolutionary characteristics among the plants here like leaf heteroblasty, leaf divarication, co-evolution with the now-extinct Moas, plate tectonics and vulcanism, how tropical plants have evolved for a chilly temperate rainforest, Jurassic lineages of conifers, the genus Pseudopanax, and all kind of other wild, cool sh*t. An interesting paper to read about heteroblasty and di...
Intro ends at 15:03 In this episode we interview Benny Villareal about his work with Peyote Conservation in South Texas and his history with the Native American Church, touching on the topics of Peyoteros, Land Clearance, Habitat Destruction as a result of sprawl, and obstacles conserving what is becoming a rapidly diminishing cactus species in the only place in the United States where it grows - the state of Texas.
Rants about Chonkosaurus, the Chicago River getting cleaned up, the bio-swales that UrbanRivers.org created along the river, Rooftop Graffiti Appreciation Committee, Redundant Praise for the Field Museum and the Plant Systematics Dungeon/Welwitschia mirabilis, How the smell of Cigarettes replaced the smell of piss in the Jackson St. CTA tunnel, etc. To purchase Chonkosaurus shirts go to www.crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt.myshopify.com...
In this episode we talk with Tom Croat of Missouri Botanical Garden, a world expert on Aroids and the family Araceae. Tom has been to over 130 countries studying this family and the immense amount of diversity in it, including their evolution, ecology, and pollination. We talk on all things Aroids, especially in the neotropics. The video accompanying this is available on the Patreon, www.Patreon.com/crimepaysbutbotanydoesnt
Rants about overpriced museums, crook county, kill your lawn release, Missouri Botanical Garden Aroid Dungeon, getting banned from places of prestige, sweat ceremony, sand endemics of Florida, pissing off prestigious turds in academia, etc.
Lillium Byrd is a Botanist with the Florida Native Plant Society. This conversation took place in a Longleaf Pine Forest while watching fireflies light up the canopy of the trees.
Margaret Behan is an Arapahoe/Cheyenne member of the Native American Church, as well as one of the "13 Indigenous Grandmothers". In this episode we talk about Peyote Religion, people wanting a connection to plants and to the land they live on, hope for the young generations & the future of Lophophora williamsii and its connection to the Native people of North America.
