What should you Plant in your Poisonous Garden?

but it's only about twenty years old. A duchess inherited the gardens and she wanted to do something super fun with them, and she thought what could get kids more interested than a garden where you're expressly forbidden from stopping and smelling the flowers. So is it actually dangerous? Yeah? It really is. So when I saw a picture of some of the gardeners tending it, they were basically head

to toe and hazmat suits. They wear gloves to protect their hands from boiling up, and they covered their bodies. It's crazy, But hearing about the castle, which by the way, actually served as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies, and this whole poison garden, it made me realize I know nothing about the secret world of dangerous and deceptive plants, and so that's what today's show is all about. Why don't we dive in? Hey there, podcast listeners, Welcome to

Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man Guestot Ticketers, and today we're talking about some of the weirdest, funniest, most dangerous plants out there. Kind of a field guide to plants your mother wouldn't approve of. Now I go, are you actually into plants? I mean not really? So I know your wife knows a ton about nature and plants, and she has an environmental science degree. And my grandfather was a botanist and Forrester, so my mom knows a ton

about plants. But I know virtually nothing. It's like I've tuned out everything they've been talking about all my life. But you were the one that wanted to do this episode so bad? What what? What was it that got too intrigued? That's right. So our pal Austin helped me research a bunch of plants for the episode. But I think there are two things that really got me interested. So the first was I read a little about Liz Christie story. Do you know Liz Christie? Yeah, So in

the early seventies. Christie was this landscape painter in New York City who saw these rundown neighborhoods supposedly as canvases that she could play with. So she'd go into these really rough areas with seed bombs. She'd like take a water balloon and fill it with a mixture of seeds and water and compost, and then she'd throw it into these barren places in like the Bowery or whatever. And it was kind of the first guerrilla gardening. I love

these sea grenades. I mean today they actually make them with wildflowers. You can toss them into fields and watch them attract honey bees or whatever. Yeah, it's funny. So my dad's friend actually had a patent on sad that you could roll out with wildflowers for the same purpose, but it never caught on, unfortunately. But Liz Christie was amazing.

She did other things too, Like she'd sneak into these rough areas with composts and tomato and cucumber plants and wood and whatever, and she just build vegetable gardens where she couldn't end. Slowly, the community started pitching in and harvesting the vegetables. But when the authorities got wind of it, they tried to stop it, but you know, Christie was super savvy and she took her story to the press,

and eventually the city got on board. Like they started leasing all these abandoned plots to community gardeners for a dollar garden and offering seeds and tools for cheap and the movement really took off. Like in the late eighties, there were supposedly eight hundred community gardens in the city. Eight hundred. I mean, that is an awesome story. So alright, so, so what does this have to do with dangerous plants? I know? So I'm off to tangents immediately. And it

didn't take long ago. But I read a little about Christie and her seed bombs and started thinking does nature do this at all? And then I stumbled into a book called Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart, which is so good and I'm gonna be referencing it throughout the show. But there's a chapter in it called Duck and Cover. Duck and cover, Yeah, And the chapter is filled with dangerous explosive plants like get this. So here's what Stewart writes about the gorse bush quote on a hot day

sitting near a gors can be hazardous. The pods explode without warning, ejecting seeds into the air with a noise that sounds like a gunshot. This is basically a plant that lures you in with flowers that smell like scented coconuts or custard, but then it takes pot shots that you when the weather is right. And there are others like this too, like like the seeds of a dynamite tree can shoot up to like three feet away, or or there's a dwarf mistletoe, which is actually related to

the plant from Christmas time, the one everybody kisses under. Yeah, so it can actually shoot seeds out at sixty miles per hour. These plants are no joke. But the most disgusting exploding plant I heard about the squirting cucumbers. Just by its name, that sounds so gross. Is it shootout cucumbers? It rapid fire or what what happens here? Yeah? What's insane is that most of these plants are pretty closely related to some normal plants. So the squirting cucumber is

actually related to cucumbers and gourds and squashes. It's like in that general family. But it's so much grosser. And at first I thought the squirting was about the wetness shooting out, and it is. As Stewart writes, the plants two inch long fruits are famous for bursting when right, squirting a slimy mucus like use and seeds almost twenty feet away. You've said, squirting too much, just starting to gross me. And it sounds like a vegetable from like

Nickelodeon or something. I mean, the fact that it's slimy makes it so much more gross, I know, But but it's dangerous too. Apparently that veggie mucus will sting your skin if it touches it, and it'll make you vomit if you ingest it. But the worst thing about the squirting cucumber if you accidentally ingested in a drink, like if that mucus shoots twenty ft into your beer glass or whatever, the squirting cucumber will give you the squirts. I think we've talked enough about this one. I think

it's definitely worth avoiding. But honestly, I can see why you're fascinated by this stuff. And when you told me about this episode and the field guide idea, I was thinking it'd be really fun to organize some of these plants and the categories of kids you might want to avoid on the playground. You know, there's those explosive types definitely sound like the emotionally volatile kids you'd want to tiptoe around. But why don't we start I don't know,

why don't we start with the pig pens. I mean, I want some of that stinky stuff you can't help but avoid. Yeah, the pig pens. I love it. So let me just look through my notes because I know what I wanted to talk about here. So I started listing off a few favorites just because the smells are so amazing, just in case you're like looking for a new cologne or whatever. So the Stinky Gord smells like armpits.

That even has stinky in its name. Yeah, it's actually called the Missouri Gord or the fetid Cord, but it smells pretty bad. Then you've got the calorie pair, which is this tree that smells like rotten fish and the box would and when it gets too much sunshine, it actually smells like cat pe Wow, which is kind of funny, right. I Mean, I feel like so many of the facts that you and I remember are about things that smell good, you know, like the bent a wrong. Is this half bear,

half cat looking thing that actually smells like buttered popcorn? Yeah, I love that, But this shrub actually feels like it belongs in a litter box. But to me, the greatest pig pen of them all, the plant that most needs a bath has to be the corpse flower. All right, So I take that bent a wrong fact back, because I know we have discussed the corpse flower in the past that it's it's kind of like the rock star

plant for smelling so bad. I know, people travel, we'll see it bloom, not just because of how bad it smells, but also because it doesn't bloom that often. I think. I remember, it's huge, right, is it like seven ft tall or something. Yeah, it's kind of magnificently large and also really putrid. And apparently when it blooms, the spadix, which is this giant fleshy stem, heats up to about ninety degrees to help cook up and spread that aroma.

And actually I wrote down some of the things the corse flower supposedly smells like according to observers, So the most common description is quote smells like death, which which feels a little on the nose for something called the corse flower. But if you've got a more discerning palette, it might smell like well, rotting flesh, hot garbage, diapers, rotten fish, cheese, smelly socks, and also cabbage cabbage, which actually might be the worst smelling of all of those things.

And I love that humans are so curious about how bad something smells. I mean, they immediately want to smell it too. It kind of reminds me. You remember that old Tom Hank sketch from S and All. He drinks that sip of old milk and he's like, oh, this is so terrible, we have to try it. The next person comes over and tries it, says the same thing, and they just keep smelling and eating these terrible things because they just have to try it for themselves. But

we kind of do this naturally as humans for some reason. Yeah, And to be clear, I have no interest in traveling out of my way to smell a corpse flower. But it also feels to me like the Harry Potter jelly beans, you know, where they It could be delightful or disgusting, and either way, people are happy to have tried to. You know, my kids love those things. Oh mine too. Some of them are so gross. There were a couple

I honestly could not eat. Speaking of Harry Potter, Actually do want to talk about the man breaks and some of the other stuff from the books that exist in real life. But before we do that, can we do a quick section on I don't know, let's call the Eddie Haskell plants. Why Eddie Haskell? Well, these are the plants that seem totally harmless and kind of like goody two shoes, but can actually be bad influences. Yeah, there there are a lot of plants. I didn't realize we're dangerous.

Like there's the Laurel hedges, which always seems so running the mill to me. They're actually in that point is in garden we talked about at the top. Apparently when people trimmed the hedges and take the clippings to the dump, they've fallen asleep behind the wheel from the fumes. Oh wow, All right, do you have anything that's maybe a little more common than that though, Yeah, I've got a couple.

So rhubarb believes are apparently toxic. There's this terrific story from a Great Britain in nineteen seventeen when a cook used a recipe she found in the newspaper. It was in this wartime tips column, and the combination of adding baking soda to the rhubarb actually killed the minister she was cooking for. It was super tragic. But apparently the leaves can cause weakness and difficulty breathing on their own

and uh. And then there are things like cashews, you know, but which I know you and I have talked about before. But cashews, while they're totally delicious, the plant actually comes from the same family as poison oak and ivy and you actually have to steam them open to get to the tasty truths. So even though you're getting them supposedly row,

they're actually coming to you a little cooked. But you know, Amy Stewart tells this horrible story of a little league game in Pennsylvania where they sold some cashews that had pieces of a shell in them, and this law huge percentage of the little league parents ended up with rashes on their arms and armpits and buttocks for the fruit. I don't know. I don't know why buttocks these people put in their cashews. But my favorite deceptively nice plant

that's actually not worth hanging out with. Celery. What's what's so bad about celery? Well, nothing in small doses. But if you eat a pound of it and then go to a tanning salt, the celery will actually make you extremely sensitive to UV light and it can pigment your skin color and give you blisters. I mean, if you're going tanning, go light on the cellery. It's really good advice. I'm glad we're here for our listeners, but that does

sound awful. All right, So we've done a few unhinged plants that will pop off at you, some stinky plants you'll probably know to avoid, and then those sneaky, silent ones that are hiding a dark side. So how about we save some of the liars, cheats and Harry Potter plants for after a break. So at the top of the show, we were talking about this incredib about Poisoned Garden, and we're lucky today because we actually have the head gardener at the Poisoned Garden. But Trevor Jones welcomed to

part time genius. Hello. All right, so one of our favorite things is just the sign to the entrance that says, these plants can kill and it's so ominous. What's the philocity behind the garden and how do you choose what plants go in there? The Duchess of Northumberland, who created the hold of the garden, was fascinated with poisonous plants. She felt that children these days tend to sit in front of computer screens and look at them of our phones, but never get out into the big wide world and

experience the environment that they're growing up in. So she was aware that many children these days don't know the harmful effects of plants, especially native plants that grow here in the UK, but also some exotic ones, and so part of the reasoning for the Poison Garden was to capture the imagination of a child and teach them about the harmful effects of plants and how they would all

kill you. So we have storytellers that build up a huge drama before anybody actually enters, and you're warned not to touch the plants, stand too close to them, smell them, will definitely not taste them, because they all have the ability to kill you. Well, speaking of children, I'm guessing these plants are kind of like children, and that you can't pick a favorite, but we're still going to ask you anyway, do you have a favorite plant? There? I like to tell the story of acrono item. It's a

cottage garden plant. It's her basis. It dives down the winter, shoots up again in the spring, and it has fantastic, deep blue flowers. It's often called monkshood because the flower looks like an old fashioned monkshood. Now, the whole of that plant is poisonous, but we relate it to an up to date murder story because in two thousands and ten, a woman called lack Finder Singh who had fallen out

with her lover. He had kicked her out of the home that they shared, so to get revenge on him, she found some aconite the police seed, and she crushed it up and then went back into the house and third into his curry which was in the fridge. He then returned home from work with his new girlfriend and ad to curry, and he died within thirty six hours.

And when toxicology reports came back, they said that it was all down to aconite and poisoning, and they chased it back to luck Finder and she's now in prison. So when did it occur to you that being a

poison gardener could be a real job. Well, I came to Annick ten years ago and I've never heard about a collection of poisonous plants, although I've been in gardening all my days until I got to Annek and then the fascination that is all about the Poison Garden started to infect me as well, and so I was very keen on poisonous plants. And I'm curious, how did the Harry Potter movies filming there change admissions to the garden.

We've had a spinoff from how He Potter film because in how He pos talked about Man Drake, and so we grow Man Drake in the Poison Garden because there's a lot of superstition around Man Drake. At one time that was more prized than gold for its magical properties, and even today people will buy mandrake roots and chop them up. It's supposed to be a very good affle dizzy act, but I can't guarantee you now. But there's

a lot of superstition about the plant. And the plant has a very strong, thick cap roots very much like a carrot, but it forks, so it's often have two stems to it, so when it gets dug up, it can often look like a little man with two legs and two arms, and they say that it's the devil himself. And if you dig a mandrake up, you can actually hear it's screaming as it comes up out of the ground. And then when you see it, it does look like a little like a little man. And so if you

do that, you're cursed. So the stories goes. If you want to get rid of your man drake used to have to tie a rope around the manre it itself and then around donkey or a dog. Kick the donkey or the dog and they would run off and they would pull an and rake up and as it screamed, so they heard the screaming, they were the culprit because they pulled it up. The donkey or the dog was cursed and you survived to tell the tale. What's the best thing you overhear the gardens? Like, what's the most

satisfying part of the job in the poison garden. It's relating the stories that we tell to everyday occurrences we grow in the poison garden. We grow just common laurel and a lot of our visitors will grow low as a hedge. It's very very common evergreen plant, but it has the ability to kill you, believe it or not,

because the laurel leaves um produce cyanide. So when you cut your laurel hedge, if you accept up the clippings and put them into your car to take them to the dump, as you sit in your car, so the cyanide will start to build up in the car. That then affects your nervous system and it's starts the brain

of oxygen. And so many people don't be like that, and lots of our visitors have told us that they have start exactly that they's driven to the dump with these cuttings in the back of their car and they've got very light headed and one gentleman he is admitted to crashing into a lamp post. It was all down to cyanide poisoning. What's Trevor, I can't wait to get over to the gardens. This has been fascinating and thanks so much for joining us on Part Time Genius. Well pleasure,

welcome back to Part Time Genius. Today we've been thumbing our way through a field guide of plants. Your mother wouldn't approve of I knew all this talk of plants and poisons has reminded me of that Debora Bloom story and the roots of c s I. You know, that's actually one of my favorite stories. But would you mind telling it to our listeners. So Debora Blooms, this wonderful journalist who wrote The Poisoner's Handbook. But in it she tells this great story from Belgium. It's about poisoning by

nicotine in the eighteen fifties. So basically at the time no one knew how to detect plant alkaloids from dead bodies. And the way she tells that, there's a French prosecutor and a famous death by morphine case, and he confirms this in the trial and in the courtroom he said, let us tell would be poisoners, use plant poisons, fear nothing. Your crime will go unpunished. There's no physical evidence, it cannot be found. I mean he was talking from a

point of frustration. But at least one person took his advice. It was the Count of Boucarmi. So this is one of those classic cases of people killing their relative for inheritance, and the Count and Countess lived extravagantly. They were basically like the FitzGeralds of their time, throwing outrageous parties and

living beyond their means. So they needed more cash, and they knew that when the count as sickly brother passed away, they'd inherit his loot, But it turns out he wasn't dying fast enough, so they decided to speed up the process. So the count started experience ending with nicotine poisoning. He had this converted laundry shaw that he turned into a lab and claimed he was using it to mix up perfumes.

But when his servants peek in, he's extracting things from plants and has vials and burners set up in there, and suddenly tiny dead animals starts showing up left outside the lab. I mean, they saw dead birds, rabbits and several other animals, which was of course suspicious to them, and so they take note of this. And then the couple had their in law over for dinner, and there's more suspicious stuff that happens. Then they send the kids away for dinner to eat elsewhere, which is pretty unusual

for them. The Countess insists on ladling out the food herself and distributing the plates herself and the servants are pointedly sent away, and then during the course of the meal,

her brother passes out with a thud. The count and countess claim it's a stroke, but something fishy has clearly happened, and they rinse his throat with vinegar and burned the dead man's clothes and basically get rid of all the evidence, which sounds so shady, right, I know, But here's the genius of it and why plant poisoning used to work so well. The nicotine is made up of super simple

organic materials. It's just carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and you know, all the stuff that's in the air and in our bodies. But it's also a super effective poison that works astonishingly well and at high speeds when it's in high doses. And so the servants report the case, and the police knew who did it, but have zero proof.

Then Belgian's most famous chemist, Jeane sarves Stas, who spends three months figuring out how to pull alkaloids from preserved tissues, and he finally uses the proof to convince a judge of their guilt, and the justice is swift, but The crazy part is that while Stas's process has been updated, according to Bloom, it's still used in toxicology labs today. Crazy. It really is kind of the rut of CSID. But

what's the moral of all this? I guess the moral would be, you know, don't use plants to murder your friends and family. And maybe more than that, don't murder. That would be that the moral don't murder does like smart words to live by, and uh, you know what's funny. Amy Stewart makes this point in the book that poisons are all around us, like a lot of common house plants are poisonous. The peace lily, the philodendron. I mean, we had both of those in our home growing up.

And the truth is you probably wouldn't eat much of either because they'd make your mouth burned before you'd scarf down too much. Well, what's interesting is that most house plants were never chosen for their safety. They were chosen because they thrive year round in a fifty to seventy degree climate, you know, the same temperature as our homes, which is why many of them are actually tropical plants from South American and African jungles. I mean that's something

I never considered. Yeah, me either. But I think we've gotten a little off topic here, so let's let's get back to some of those plants your mom doesn't want you playing with. I have to be I love that squirting cucumber plant. You got any more like that? Yeah? So there are two other plants I flagged. The first one is called the African milk tree, and it's disgusting because if you don't prune it carefully, it can squirt. The African milk sapp at get big with the squirts.

I guess you took that requests the most terrifying. And there's this one scientist who's pruning his tree and he got it right in the eye and he used to have like vision in the eye, and then he went legally blind and that sounds terrible. But after a rigorous course of sailing that he gave himself for ten days, his eye went back to being, which I thought was crazy. That it causes this temporary blindness that you can come

back from. Wow, that's wild, all right. And and the other one, Yeah, so this one's totally amazing and also temporarily takes away from one of your abilities. But it's called the dumb cane. As Amy Stewart puts a quote, this tropical South American plant is well known for its ability to temporarily inflame vocal cords, leaving people completely unable

to speak. And that does sound like something out of Harry Potter, and we did promise to talk about her, definitely, So it's like straight out of the Charms and Potions books or any of Professor Sprouts lessons. But before we get into that, the plant diffian Bakia has one more unusual side effect. In the Caribbean, men used to chew it as a male contraceptive, really because they ust their ability to smooth talk women or something. No, it actually

has nothing to do with them losing their voice. There's some sort of historical preparation that we don't know about that people used to use to make sure they didn't have kids, and it was kind of like an early version of the male pill. It supposedly lasted forty eight hours. But what's weirder is that the Nazis actually started playing with the plant in the hopes that they could make certain populations sterile, and luckily they could never get enough

of the plant to really experiment on. That's really creepy, but I do love the idea of plants with superpowers. All right, what other Harry Potter type plants. Well, there's also the Man Drake, which Trevor talked about earlier on at Hogwarts. Mandrakes are one of those plants that are always wailing and whining. Would they get pulled out of the soil and they shriek at these high pitched volumes.

But I had no idea. That was like a myth from medieval times, And in fact, Austin told me that the preferred method for uprooting Man Drake was to use a rope and tie it to a dog and then just leave, and when the dog finally pulled away, the man Drake would get uprooted. But there was this idea that even the dog might die from doing the uprooting, which I just think that's the worst possible way. Yeah,

let's not do it that way. So um any Stewart actually has another story about the plant, and that's that Hannibal used to leave Mandrake confused wines for his enemies, which would intoxicate them and give them hallucinations, and then you'd come back to easily defeat them when they were drunk and drugged. Of course, the fact that he used to ride and on giant elephants probably only made those

hallucinations were so I'm guessing. Yeah. So there's some other plants that get shout outs in Harry Potter, like monks Hood, which is actually a toxic plant that gardeners need gloves to handle. But I kind of love the plants that cure things. And one I found completely fascinating is the ordeal beans. Oh I know about these? Aren't these the

truth telling beans? Like I think I read that if you swallow the beans and vomited, you were considered innocent, but if you ate the beans and died, then you were guilty. Yes, this perverse logic, and it was kind of like at the Salem witch trials, where if you're thrown in a river and drown, you were innocent, but if you floated you were definitely a witch. But doesn't.

What's fascinating about these beans to me. What's crazy is that the beans are actually an antidote or a cure for mandrake poisoning, Like if you've been poisoned by man drake in an emergency room, they can actually use these beans to restore heartbeats and snap people back into consciousness. That is incredible. All right. So, so we've covered the Eddie Haskell's the stink weeds, and now we've covered some of the plants your mom might worry or two into

fantasy or something. I guess those are the uh let's call those the comic concept. But I think it's time to get to talk about one we've been waiting for. And these are the bad boys of plant life, the liars and the cheats and the overseex plants that are a little too salacious for their own good until I'm ready for this, right all right, So before we get to those, how but we take a little break, all right, man.

This is a special treat today because usually our quiz takers join us by phone, but today our guests are here in studio with us. We have the hosts of one of my favorite shows called Food Stuff here at How Stuff Works, Annie Reese and Lauren Vogelbaum. Welcome to part time Genius. Thanks for having yeah, thank you so much.

All right, So, again, like I mentioned, this is one of my favorite shows and it's so fun because it's not just history and science it's like all of this combined in a way that I haven't heard many food shows doing. And I was curious to hear from you guys. You know what gave you the idea to start the show? Well, first of all, all hush and and second of all, Um, I don't know. We love food. Yeah, we're kind of

super nerds about it. Yeah. Annie in particular, I think the day that I realized that I wanted her on the show, Um, I came to her, it was like, please, we had the show. I need a co host. And it's so terrific. Was we were out in in Austin at south By Southwest and she had planned months in advance, like and like put in orders for barbecue places and like had this entire map of everywhere that we needed to go to eat in the sea and I was like this one, Like this is I call it maximizing.

I like to maximize my experience when I visited city, and uh, we had such a good time. We tried so much good food. Yeah. We get so excited about all the research because every episode has a fact that I just would never have never have guests. Yea, it's so interesting through food science. I feel a little bit less like a you know, mad scientist in training. Right, how do you guys come up with the topics? Obviously there are a lot of foods out there, but how

do you decide which ones to focus on? We do get a lot of requests in from listeners and those are tremendously helpful, like stuff that we wouldn't necessarily have thought to do. But also it's just like we'll run across stuff. You know, what was it this week? Aspects? Aspects? Oh, I went on such a rabbit hole about as it's a meat gelatine. Um, these were really big in like

the nineteen sixties or so. It's a jelly mold that's savory, made of usually like bone broth a k A stock as they call it in the industry, and that that'll set up into a good solid mold and it's usually got like bits of meat and egg and vegetable and off in it. It's they look they look like they're from a hell dimension. Yeah, I mean, I mean they're supposedly delicious. They made me laugh alout just looking at

the picture. Highly recommends to go down a similar rabbit hole. Well, for our listeners, there have been great episodes on Bloody Mary's Fried Chicken, Honey, the Weird History of the Graham Cracker, which is I expected it to be a great episode and it was so so it's always a lot of fun. Part of the reason we wanted to have you on today though, as you did uh an episode recently about the tomato and you know we're doing this episode on

dangerous and poisonous plans. You guys have talked about how Europeans for for a long time thought that tomatoes were poisonous. I thought it gets you guys to explain why that

was certainly wealthy Europeans. I think that the poorer folks were just like, it's a food, you should eat it, right, Well, wealthier Europeans like to eat off of these fancy pewter plates, especially at the time this was around the f fifteen or sixteen hundreds m h. And tomatoes have a lot of acid, and so the acid would cause um, lead to leak out of the pewter plates and could lead to lead poisoning, which can lead to death. Yeah, a legitimate reason for being afraid. Also, um, they were kind

of tomatoes were kind of poorly classified or unfortunately classified. Yeah, correctly classified but as a night shade, which is a type of poisonous plant in some cases. Yes. Uh. And from that, yes, um, they were called um lego persicons. That's how they were classified, which translates the Greek word is wolf peach. Right. And part of the reason they were called that is because they were in the night shaded family and related to wolf spane, which people thought

at the time could summon were wolves. Oh nice, So you got to talk about were wolves. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that's so exciting. Yeah, as a love of the title of episode, right, it was you say, Tomato, I say, and wolf spaine in nightshade do have hallucinogenic qualities. So so it's easy to see where people might think that where wolves are involved, if they're hanging out around too

much wolf spain. Right. But that is really interesting to imagine that that those that had much less money wouldn't have thought of them as as being poisonous because they wouldn't have had that introduction of yeah, so the fancy pewter plates, and they wouldn't have gotten that taxonomy lesson. So yeah, yeah, rich people would keep them on their tables as like ornaments, as like goth table decoration, like they thought that they were poisonous and they would have

them as these table centerpieces. Yeah, well, very cool. That that made us think we should have you guys on the show. We've been wanting to have you here anyway, so it was a good excuse to get you here to play this very very important quiz. What quiz are we going to have these guys play today? Super important? It's called real name of a mushroom or a band that's playing south By Southwest this year, so they're the

south By Connection again. So there are tons of names of mushrooms that are really quirking strange, like scurfy twiglet and fingered candle snuff names of actual mushrooms. Does that make you hungry? Yeah, so we thought it'd be fun to have you come on and work together. We're gonna have you work together because your teammates too. I can see how you do in a five question quiz. Okay, number one, Potato earth Ball. Is this a real mushroom or the name of a band playing at south By

Southwest this year? Potato earth Since since it's got the earth element to it, I would say I would say it's an actual mushroom. I agree. Yeah, Wow, these guys are good, right. It's a holy puffball mushroom? Is that from a description? The sexy shape of potatoes? Sees there? One for one? Number two snake tongue truffle club that sounds like a bar option. Um, I think I think drinking was involved in that one, though, So I'm going to go with band. Do you would you agree? Yeah?

I think that's a band. I'm glad we stumped him on at least one. Well, it was named in the UK, so there might have been some drinking in It actually looks like a big snake tongue sticking out of the ground. Number three a yucky duster, yucky duster, and he's making the most amazing face right now. I'm going to say that either if it is a band, it's also poisonous. I'm gonna go with mushroom. Oh wow, we got him again. Dang, it's a band. It's a four person band that sounds

completely different depending on which member wrote the song. Oh all right, here we go. You still have as for the big Price. Number four pancake Crust. We're trying so hard to not just like snort after every name we're hearing. Yeah, oh goodness. I mean that could certainly describe the skin on the top of I mean, I feel like I've seen that thing before. Well, I'll trust your judgment on that one. It's a real funny say infects a stone fruit trees. Nicely done. Okay, this is the big one

for the big prize. Number five, Delicate Steve, Delicate Steve mushroom or a banded south By Well, delicate Steve certainly sounds like a band that I I've seen four It sounds like some band members that I think many different Steves. They're all delicate. They're all delicate. Sorry about its Steve's So they're going with band? What do you think? You're right? It's a band from New Jersey, which shouldn't be confused with a slow Steve. A band from Berlin that's also

playing out going there, oh man. So, so how did they do today? Mango? They did so great, we're gonna give him a prize. So today they're going home with there's an actual prize of Rockabye, Baby Lullabye renditions of justin timber Lakes justin timber Lake c D. I had on my desk, oh Man, it's the only one. Good luck finding a place to play a CD. Yeah, I have to fight over this. Yeah, definitely, that's all right. Well, I hope all our listeners will check out food Stuff.

It's a terrific show. Lauren and Annie, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thank you guys so much. Thank you for having us so mago. We were just about to talk about some of the liars and the sexpots and you know, the plants your mother definitely doesn't want you hanging out with. So who's your favorite liar in the mix? Yeah, there's definitely some crafty greenery out there, just spinning lies and trying to get their seed into the wild. But I think my favorite ones are the

ones that trick insects. So there's an orchid that's apparently so sexy that wasts tried to mate with it, and it isn't just romance. It's like aggressive wasp sex, and the dumb male wasps gets so excited they get covered in pollen and then move on to another orchid, spreading

the pollen along the way. But the best and weirdest part is that the orchids are so good at their deception that male wasps actually prefer the flowers to females, and sometimes they'll leave a female wasp mid population because the flower seems that much more appealing. So I don't think you said, what what it's called. What's it called? Yeah, it's called the tongue orchid, which is which is gross. And wow, that's a good one, all right, So what

else you got, Well, this one's hilarious. While impersonating an insect is one thing, impersonating a piece of dung is a totally different level. But that's what the restiness say. I don't think I'm pronouncing that right, But it's from South Africa and it does this when it drops seeds that look suspiciously like antelope dung on the ground. Wow, So they just are they marking their territory. It's so

much more than that. So basically, the seeds attract dung beetles, which just saunter up the seed and roll it around. And when they decided to burrow into it, instead of getting a delicious treat, they discovered that they've been tricked into planning a seed in the ground. All right, that's pretty genius. But that's a common survival strategy, right, Well, I mean it's common enough that has a name. It's called fecal mimoric carrey. Alright, so we probably need to

wrap this up it. How about you send us off with one last plant that baffled you. Yeah, so I think I have just the one. So here's one that mother definitely wouldn't approve of, which scientists are just completely delighted by. It's an orchid called the halka glossom amasanium, which is this bisexual flower. Well this sounds juicy, okay, go on, Yeah, so basically the plant works against gravity

to pollinate itself. But let me just quote new scientists because they do a way better job of explaining it. Although many plants self fertilize, a rare orchid that grows on tree trunks in China takes the process to hitherto unknown heights through a gymnastic feat never seen before in plants. It bends its pollen containing male another round through a full circle before jabbing it into the female stigma to complete fertilization at sixty days. The act takes even longer

than tantric sex. This basically flower point. I kind of feel dirty listening to that. I mean, what's crazy is that the plant can basically self pollinate without any of the standard means insects when gravity, rain, none of that. It's kind of insane that it does it all on its own. But you know one thing we could never do on our own, I do the part time genius fact off. Yeah, let's go for it. M R. Did you know that you don't need those little flower chemical

packets to make your flowers perk up? A little viagora will make the flower stems straighten up fast. According to Business Insider, auguste, teen seventy seven set the record for the most flowers sold in the US on a single day. What happened? It was the day after Elvis passed away. Oh that's crazy, all right? What did you know that venus fly traps amid a fluorescent blue light to attract bugs. Also,

they're the official state carnivorous plan of North Carolina? I mean, what else is North Carolina going to give it to? Speaking of carnivorous plants, did you know figs aren't considered vegetarian. Figs are pollinated by wasps and then the flower captures and traps them. So there's wasps that's been coughton digested in most figs eat, which is funny to think that figs aren't vegetarian while oysters might be. I mean, according to some vegans and vegetarians at least, it's because they

don't experience pain. But that's not my fact. That's not the fact. Did you know that plants can hear water? I thought I thought that was just like an old wives tale. I used to think that too, but scientific

American and a professor from Australia proved me wrong. Was Professor Monica Gagliano, and she devised an experiment with pea seedlings where plants inch their way towards pipes, and she theorized that while the plants later followed moisture grades, they were initially drawn to the water sources by sound waves from inside the pipes. That's amazing. So I'm gonna have to let you take home the trophy today. Thanks, and I think that's it for today's episode of Part Time Genius.

Thanks so much for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things. We couldn't even begin to understand Chris and McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing. Gay Bluesier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan

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