Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

A conversation with my friend the Professor and Author Dr. Peter Bernhardt about the floral morphology of many of Australia's incredible terrestrial orchids and members of the ancient angiosperm family, Proteaceae. Two hours of un-edited conversation about some the strangest plants in the Southern Hemisphere.

A 2 hour conversation with Michael Eason about Texas Flora. Michael Eason is a botanist, author, photographer, and Texan.

From West Texas to the Mojave the entire Southwest is in a drought in mid November of 2020 oh, but that does not stop us from doing some vegetative botany and fucking around with the wonders of the volcanic rock known as rhyolite, builder of numerous desert mountains,you prick.

Long disjointed rants on native plants of South Texas, plant propagation, rescuing cacti that are in the path of the proposed border wall, ppeyote gardens, indigo snakes, Etc

(Re-upload because the first file was corrupted and cut out at 3 min...) 
Probably the episode I'm most excited about so far - a talk with the kind, humble and brilliant Bruce Baldwin, an expert in the largest (second in number of species only  to the Orchid Family) and most ecologically successful plant family in the world, the Asteraceae, also known as "composites" because of their composite flowerheads, consisting of many tiny "florets" (which are the true flowers).
 
We cover a lot of stuff here, and the last five minutes of the episode seem to wrap up a potential answer to the modern human predicament that we're in. But prior to that, we of course cover the incredible ecology and evolution (and genetics!) of the most successful plant family on Planet Earth.
 
 
 
 
Photo in the thumbnail is one of the "dinosaur sunflowers", Leucheria runcinata, from the High Andes of Chile.

2 hrs of conversation about Adaptive Radiation, Hawaiian Lobeliads, & Calochortus Evolution

East Texas botany, Ft Worth Botanic Garden /Home Depot Garden Center, Longleaf Pine Forest, Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sleaze, Limestone Dry Prairie Endemics, Complaining about the heat, etc.

PSA - your donations enable this here content. If you can throw a couple bucks to venmo address "societyishell", I would appreciate the hell out of it. The tank is running low at the moment and could use some re-ups. 
In this episode, CPBBD traverses 20 degrees of latitude to bring you lognwinded rants on the following topics :
-stromatolites
-banded Iron formations & the Great Oxygenation Event of the Proterozoic 
-Michigan Serpentine 
-"conservative species" and the Floristic Quality Assessment
-Silphium albiflorum
and much more. 
 
Feel free to email [email protected] with plant ID questions and reading recommendations, fuckface. 
 

A brief week-long trip East after fleeing the state of California (which is all on fire again) brings us into contact with a cast of prairie species and the unique nature of the Ambrosia dungeon (subtribe Ambrosiinae of the Heliantheae tribe of the Asteroideae Subfamily of the Composites) as well as some monster feral Cannabis plants, along with an exposé of the increasingly polarized and anti-intellectual, shit-for-brains nature of the modern American cultural hellscape ™.