More Symptoms of a Poisoned and Obsolete Worldview and Values System.

I probably take 120 gigabytes worth of photos of plants every year on my Nikon. There are many I'd love to turn into posters but series of Ocotillo phyllotaxy is my favorite. Petioles become spines & next seasons leaves will emerge from fascicles & buds just above old petioles.

Lessons in suburban futility : Bagging leaves and placing them on the curb is a red flag that somebody is tremendously suffering on the inside and is in desperate need of clinician-assisted MDMA therapy

I was screaming at Boojum trees and my tourettes was in full effect as he photographed these.

Aristolochia erecta temporarily traps fungus gnats and tiny flies in order to force them to pollinate it. It does this by mimicking the scents of things like rotting mushrooms & decaying plant material. In photo 3 you can see the funnel-shaped trap door. Flowers are protogynous.

Beautiful large piece of the miles-wide pluton of intrusive igneous rock that took a million or more years to cool from a magma deep within the Earth & was later uplifted via thousands of earthquakes to form the San Pedro Martir mountain range in Baje California, Mexico.

White tops to the Saguaro indicate bursts of new meristem tissue as growth resumes in Spring

Some fossilized Cretaceous marine organisms, including some large snails, on 100 million year old limestone in West Texas. Long Live the Western Interior Seaway!

Variations (species) on a theme (genus).

Crazy to think that all of this Texas limestone was just chalky, calcium-rich mud on the floor of a shallow Cretaceous ocean while Tyrannosaurs and Pterodactyls roamed around on the continents.

All-natural Asbestos from an ultramafic exposure in Baja. More proof that the word 'natural' is functionally meaningless, especially when used on food packaging. If you mixed this asbestos into a jar of peanut butter, the contents inside would still technically be 'all-natural'.

Message from a friend in response to one of many memes I shared illustrating how much of the US has just been turned into a parking lot/retail slum/automobile landscape. The truth in this statement is unreal - forced car-dependency is the ultimate example of lack of choice.

Took my friend Dr. Jim Mauseth out to habitat in South Texas to see some rare plants. He pointed out that the lead blades of the Agave-like bromeliad Hechtia glomerata produce a translucent layer of water-storage cells above the photosynthesizing layer of the leaf, seen here.

It is hard to understate the diversity of form in the family Eriocaulaceae in Brazil. Genera such as Comanthera, Leiothrix, and Actinocephalus - many of them adapted to dry habitats, are not only impressive but utterly bizarre.

The Great Salt Lake may be gone by 2030. In this episode I interviewed Zach Frankl from utahrivers.org about the threats facing the Great Salt Lake.

open.spotify.com/episode/55tvmU…

Probably one of the worst invasive plants, surely leading to plant extinction, is buffel grass. It is still actively being seeded by ranchers here in the US southwest. It is also smothering habitat in Australia.

Texas Leafcutter Ants are 1 of 240 species of ants that farm fungi, in this case Leucoagaricus gongylophorous, which only produces a mushroom once the nest is abandoned. Mushroom Photo : Thiago RBM Inaturalist