A conversation with Tony Figueroa, Senior Manager for the Invasive Plant Program at the Tucson Audubon Society (no affiliation with the National Org) about preventing Buffelgrass and Stinknet from smothering fragile Desert Ecosystems in Arizona. We also discuss why some in the "online permaculture community" (oh gahd) have such an aversion to any and all glyphosate use due to a misunderstanding about how it's used. Other topics include using an electric chainsaw to vandalizeCallery Pears and Crepe Myrtles and other hotricultural atrocity street trees, Why Texas is so uptight, how an invasive arugula-like plant is invading the desert near Gila Bend, and the growth rate of Saguaro Cacti.

A conversation with Dr. Kathleen Pryer (Director, Duke University Herbarium) and Dr. Michael Windham, (Curator of Vascular Plants, Duke University Herbarium) about the University's Decision to cut costs by closing the herbarium as well as the general trend in modern US Academia of failing to recognize the importance of Botany in society as a whole as well as other attempts to defund it.

We also touch on the cheilanthoid fern genus Gaga, named after both Lady Gaga and a section of the roughly 1500 base-pair-long MatK plastid gene region and why cheilanthoid ferns (aka desert ferns) are so damn cool.

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Abandon your pre-med or law studies, tell your parents to get bent, and study plant & fungal science, evolution and ecology instead.

Rants about encountering a cool new legume species in the fog deserts and giant cactus landscapes of Baja California, the diversity of perennial raaaaagweeds in the deserts, Gabbro soils, a buckwheat that produces flowers along the ground, Arugula acting invasive as hell in the Arizona Desert, escaping the cultural disease of Southern California, the oils and secondary metabolites of Eriodictyon sessilifolium, a Gymnopilus species that likely contains psilocybin and eats dead Ambrosia chenopodiifolia, etc.

Includes a select reading from an old book of railroad stories I wrote ten years ago starting around 1:05:00

A long, disjointed rant about using and writing Dichotomous Keys and why it's sometimes a process of grasping for straws or throwing a bunch of stuff to a wall to see what sticks, what an ideal floral key might look like if it were written by a neurotic, rambling schmuck fixated on ecology and biogeography. Other subjects include the gradation between ecotypes and species in Fremontodendron as well as the mycorrhizal associations found with Ornithostaphylos oppositifolia (Ericaceae, Arbutoideae) in the chaparral of Baja California, Mexico.

More Deranged Rants, this time about Javelina Management, Getting City Approval for Cactus Restoration and Street Trees, growing endangered plants from seed, Eocene Sandstone, growing xeric ferns from spore, working the Ozol Local and running freight trains along San Francisco Bay and much more

Rants about Montezuma Cypress on the Rio Grande, Cool Desert Ferns in West Texas and the Subfamily Cheilanthoideae of the fern family Pteridaceae, DEA permits for Peyote, Mountain Lions vs. Auodads, kind Caucasian Birders behaving at the Mexican border, funding the research station in South Texas with the nice bathroom, and more.

Rants about South Texas Geology, Geologic Timeline Apps for your D@mn phone, why its better to water before a freeze, being dragged by a freight train leaving Ft. Worth Texas, how much self-hate someone must have in order to lower themselves to the point of patronizing Subway Sandwich shops, and more.

Rants about freezing while trying to sleep in the back of a truck in Lordsburg, New Mexico, why Agaves are monocarpic, the importance of having a "target list" should you ever get diagnosed with a terminal illness, fruit dispersal in Frankenia johnstonii, how rhyolite is just like Satan's play-doh, the biogeography of peyote gourds (Lagenaria sp.), microdosing LSD in the arboretum, and more

Thumbnail pic is Pellaea truncata (Pteridaceae)

A roughly 77 minute rant about how an Australian plant in the legume Family named Crotalaria cunninghamii "looks a like a bird" but only to humans who have smoked copious amounts of weed and certainly not as a product of natural selection, how glyphosate works and why it's the lesser of two evils when used for restoration and invasive plant management, and how dwarf ponies dressed in Hawaiian shirts could be used for the eradication of invasive grasses in desert habitats.

Michelle Cloud-Hughes is a Cactus researcher, botanist and Desert Rat who specializes in one of my favorite cactus genera - Cylindropuntia: the genus of the dreaded Chollas. She has described a new species of Cholla, Cylindropuntia chuckwallensis, and spent 2 decades trudging up mountains and rockscapes of the Mojave, Sonoran and Baja Desert. In this podcast we talk about how Chollas bang, why deserts are some of the best places to study plant evolution, and why the sh*t they can't put solar panels on top of the parking lots of any of America's vast and expansive shopping and automobile culture slums.