Month: December 2020

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All the Plant Shows, part two

Plant podcasts are big these days, or at least that’s what it seems, which is why this has turned into a multi-part post (see part one). While in the process of compiling a list of plant podcasts that I’ve become aware of, I keep stumbling onto more. Which is great! It’s a trend that I hope continues. As it continues, I will go on compiling them here until we have ourselves a list of All the Plant Shows!

Planthropology – Plants plus anthropology equals Planthropology. This podcast covers all the many ways that plant lives and human lives intersect and features conversations with plant people about their love of plants and the work they do that involves plants. Vikram (the host) is a chatty and genial guy and a great twitter follow.

The Plant Prof – Another Vikram joint. This spin-off of Planthropology features Vikram sans guests talking about an assortment of plant-related topics. Each episode is only a few minutes long. Quick, casual, and easy to digest.

Plant Daddy Podcast – Houseplants are quite popular these days, likely due to the growing number of people living in dense urban areas. Apartment living generally means that if you want to garden, you have to do it indoors and/or on a balcony. With increased interest in indoor growing comes a slew of podcasts about it. Plant Daddy Podcast is one of the best. Matthew and Stephen really know their plants and have years of combined experience caring for a vast number of species. Other plant experts occasionally join the show to talk about the specifics of cultivating and caring for plants in small spaces.

Plantrama – Mainly a gardening podcast, but very plant-focused. C.L. and Ellen are experienced gardeners and quite knowledgeable about plants. Episodes come out regularly, and each one is under 30 minutes. In that time, the hosts cover at least three topics. Juniper berries, begonias, and orchid pots, for example. Or cherry tomatoes, silverberry, and saving seed. It’s two good friends having a chat about plants, and you get to listen in.

The Plant Kiki – A kiki is a casual conversation among friends. When plants are a major theme of the discussion, it’s a plant kiki! For each episode, Colah, of Black in the Garden podcast (another must listen), brings together a group of friends to talk about plants and whatever else comes up. The conversations are lively, humorous, insightful, and fun. If you enjoy exploring questions like “If Beyoncé were a plant, what plant would she be?” this podcast is for you.  

Crime Pays But Botany Doesn’t – Joe is a self-described misanthrope. He doesn’t care much for people, but he loves plants (and geology). This podcast is similar to Joe’s You Tube channel of the same name, in that it’s mostly him describing his time botanizing in various locations across North America and beyond. Expletive-filled rants help fill the time. Occasionally Joe brings on a guest to talk about plants (or trains). With hours and hours of content available, this is easily one of the best and most entertaining plant shows around.

The Taproot – A podcast produced by Plantae, a plant science hub created and managed by the American Society of Plant Biologists. Each episode is an interview with an individual who is working in or studying plant science. There are discussions about the work that went into a particular plant science journal article, as well as conversations about navigating academia and professional life. It’s a great source of information for students and professionals, with excellent tips on how to succeed in educational pursuits and beyond.   

PlantNetwork Podcast – PlantNetwork is an organization that supports public gardens and professional gardeners in Britain and Ireland. Their podcast is a series of short interviews with people who work at public gardens or in some other capacity in the horticulture industry.

Speaking of public gardens, educating the public about plants is a mission of botanic gardens and arboreta. Some botanic gardens do this through podcasts. Below are a few that I have come across. If you happen to be aware of others, please let me know.

Branch Out – A plant science podcast produced by The Royal Botanic Garden Sydney with a catalog consisting of six seasons covering a wide array of plant-based topics. Vanessa geeks out about plants and nature with a bevy of incredible guests. No surprise, much of the content concerns Australian plants, gardens, agriculture, and ecology. But who isn’t fascinated by Australia’s flora and fauna? The production on each episode is excellent, and the stories are captivating. 

Plant Power – A short series of podcasts produced by North Carolina Botanical Garden highlighting just how essential plants are to life on earth. Brief conversations about climate change, protecting pollinators, growing and conserving native plants, etc. 

Botanical Mystery Tour – A delightful podcast from Chicago Botanic Garden that takes the stories of plants in popular culture and explores the science behind them. In each episode, a staff member at CBG joins the hosts, Jasmine and Erica, to discuss the topic and talk about their work at the Garden. Whenever botany shows up in popular culture, it’s an event worth celebrating. It’s good to know there’s a podcast devoted to this cause.

Unearthed: Mysteries from an Unseen World – A podcast series from Royal Botanic Gardens Kew hosted by James Wong. Each episode is a mini audio documentary investigating a particular mystery, story, or current event involving plants (or, in the case of one episode, fungi). This podcast has great production and excellent, fact-based storytelling – exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a place like Kew.

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These certainly aren’t all the plant shows. Part three is in the making. In the meantime, is there a particular plant-themed podcast (or podcast episode) that you enjoy and would like to recommend? If so, share it with us in the comment section below.

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Winter Trees and Shrubs: Eastern Redbud

Botanizing doesn’t have to end when the leaves fall off the trees and the ground goes frozen. Plants may stop actively growing during this time, but they are still there. Some die back to the soil level and spend the entire winter underground, leaving behind brown, brittle shells of their former selves. Others, particularly those with woody stems, maintain their form (although many of them leafless) as they bide their time while daylength dips and rises again, bringing with it the promise of warmer weather. Plants that leave us with something to look at during the winter can still be identified. Without foliage or flowers to offer us clues, we rely instead on branches, bark, and buds to identify woody species. In some cases, such features may even be more helpful in determining a certain species than their flowers and foliage ever were. Either way, it’s a fun challenge and one worth accepting if you’re willing to brave the cold, hand lens and field guides in tow.

In this series of posts I’ll be looking closely at woody plants in winter, examining the twigs, buds, bark, and any other features I come across that can help us identify them. Species by species, I will learn the ropes of winter plant identification and then pass my findings along to you. We’ll begin with Cercis canadensis, an understory tree commonly known as eastern redbud.

Eastern redbud is distributed across central and eastern North America, south of southern Michigan and into central Mexico. It is also commonly grown as an ornamental tree outside of its native range, and a number of cultivars have been developed for this purpose. Mature trees reach up to 30 feet and have short trunks with wide, rounded crowns. Its leaves are entire, round or heart-shaped, and turn golden-yellow in the fall. Gathered below the tree in winter, the leaves maintain their shape and are a light orange-brown color.

fallen leaf of eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Eastern redbud is alternately branched with slender, zig-zagging twigs that are dark reddish-brown scattered with several tiny, light-colored lenticels. Older sections of branches are more grey in color. Leaf scars (the marks left on twigs after leaves fall) are a rounded triangle shape and slightly raised with thin ridges along each side. The top edge of the leaf scar is fringed, which I found impossible to see without magnification. Leaf buds are egg-shaped and 2-3 mm in length with wine-red bud scales that are glabrous (smooth) with slightly white, ciliate margins. Descriptions say there are actually two buds – one stalked and one sessile. If the second bud is there, it’s miniscule and obscured by the leaf scar. I haven’t actually been able to see one. Twigs lack a terminal bud or have a tiny subterminal bud that points off to one side. The pith of the twigs is rounded and pale pink. Use sharp pruners or a razor blade to cut the twig in half lengthwise to see it.

twig and buds of eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Bark is helpful in identifying woody plants any time of year, but is especially worth looking at during the winter when branches have gone bare. The bark of young eastern redbud is grey with orange, furrowed streaks running lengthwise along the trunk. In mature trees, the bark is gray, scaly, and peels to reveal reddish-brown below.

bark of young eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

bark of mature eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Eastern redbud is in the bean family (Fabaceae) and its flowers and fruits are characteristic of plants in this family. Fruits can persist on the tree throughout the winter and are another way to identify the tree during the off-season. Seed pods are flat, dark red- or orange-brown, and up to 2.5 inches long with four to ten seeds inside. The seeds are flat, round, about 5 millimeters long, and ranging in color from orange-brown to black.

persistent fruits of eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

seeds of eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

Eastern redbud flowers in early spring before it has leafed out. Clusters of bright pink flowers form on old branches rather than new stems and twigs. Sometimes flowers even burst right out of the main trunk. This unique trait is called cauliflory.

cauliflory on eastern redbud (Cercis canadensis)

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Photos of eastern redbud taken at Idaho Botanical Garden in Boise, Idaho.

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All the Plant Shows, part one

Podcasts are among the most accessible and powerful mediums through which we can tell and hear the stories of plants. The popularity of podcasts is evidence that if we want to share our love of plants with the world and get others to love them too, we have to be using podcasts to do it. They are essential tools in the communication of plant science and, when used effectively, they may even help the plant-indifferent gain a lifelong appreciation for the botanical world.

As a longtime listener of podcasts and a lover of plants, I have been on a constant search for podcasts about plants. I’ve even included reviews of some of those podcasts here on this blog (see reviews for Gastropod, In Defense of Plants, Native Plant Podcast, The Field Guides, Botanical Mystery Tour, and Plants and Pipettes). I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it seems that in the past few years, plant podcasts have experienced a boom. There are definitely more plant-themed podcasts out there now than I recall seeing when I first went in search of them nearly a decade ago, and I imagine there are more out there than I’m even aware of. Seeing that, I figured it was time to collect all those podcasts into a single post (or series of posts). Each podcast is deserving of a post of its own, but in the meantime, a few sentences will have to do.

When I say plant podcasts, I realize that could include gardening podcasts. Why shouldn’t it? After all, what’s gardening without plants? However, this isn’t a gardening blog, and even as an avid gardener (and a professional one), I don’t really listen to many gardening podcasts. A few gardening or gardening-adjacent podcasts are included here either because I particularly enjoy them or because they tend to go beyond the act of gardening and are particularly known for giving plants the center stage.

In Defense of Plants – Long-running and consistent, this is the go-to podcast (and website) for learning about plants and plant science. It’s adamant about telling the stories of plants for plant’s sake. A typical episode features the host, Matt, interviewing experts and plant science professionals about their specific area of study or work.

Native Plant Podcast – Going strong for 5 years now, this podcast is exactly what it says it is – a podcast about native plants. There is a major focus on gardening and landscaping with native plants, which the main host, John, has been doing since before it was cool. Every episode ends with a pet story and a toast.

The Field Guides – Easily one of my favorite podcasts, largely because the hosts are so affable and are clearly having fun, but also because the format is so unique. Each episode, Steve and Bill pick a natural history topic and then walk around in a natural area talking about it – the sounds of footsteps and the wildlife around them included. Not specifically a plant podcast, but plants come up in every episode even if they aren’t the main topic of discussion.

Plants and Pipettes – A podcast focused mainly on what’s going on inside of plants – molecular plant biology, in other words. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, give it a shot anyway. The hosts are fun and funny, good at explaining things, and find lots of other plant and plant-adjacent things to talk about in addition to molecular biology. Plus, you are probably more interested in cellular-level interactions than you think you are.

Plant Crimes – True crime stories involving plants. Well-researched and well-crafted tales about things like missing water lilies, redwood poaching, and how lemons and the mob are related. Ellen interviews people involved in or knowledgeable about the incidents and weaves excerpts from those conversations into her storytelling. I’m anxiously awaiting the second season.

Plant Book Club – Ellen (of Plant Crimes) and Tegan and Joram (of Plants and Pipettes) read a plant-themed book and then talk about it. Everything you love about their individual podcasts combined into one. It’s a tour de force!

Botanize! – An audio series produced by Encyclopædia Britannica. Each episode is a brief exploration of a plant, group of plants, or some other plant-centric topic. It’s way more entertaining than reading an encyclopedia entry. Melissa is a charismatic host who is clearly excited about plants and nature. Her and her occasional guests add personal experiences to the science of plants.

Cultivating Place – This is a perfect example of a more-than-just-gardening gardening podcast. In Jennifer’s words, “gardens encourage a direct relationship with the dynamic processes of the plants, animals, soils, seasons, and climatic factors that come to bear on a garden, providing a unique, and uniquely beautiful, bridge connecting us to our larger environments — culturally and botanically.” Each episode features a conversation with a grower, gardener, naturalist, scientist, artist, or otherwise and, while many of the episodes are garden-focused, others go beyond the garden to discuss other plant-y things like seed banking (see this recent episode with Dr. Naomi Fraga).

A Way to Garden – This is perhaps a more typical gardening podcast, but easily one of the best ones out there. My belief is that gardens ought have a purpose that goes beyond their aesthetic qualities. They should be ecologically functional, acting as habitat rather than destroying it. Margaret seems to think so too. Plus, she loves birds and is a great conversationalist, and who can resist her regular check-ins with Ken Druse?

This is part one of (at least) two. There are many more podcasts to highlight here. In the meantime, is there a particular plant-themed podcast (or podcast episode) that you enjoy and would like to recommend? If so, share it with us in the comment section below.

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Seed Shattering Lost – The Story of Foxtail Millet

For a plant to disperse its seeds, it must first let go of them. Sounds obvious, but it is a key step in the dispersal process and an act that is actually coded in a plant’s DNA. As fruits ripen and seeds mature, an abscission layer is formed that separates the seed-bearing fruits from the plant. No longer attached to their parents, seeds are left to their own devices. If all goes well, they will find themselves in a suitable location where they can germinate and grow into a whole new plant, fully equipped to make seed babies of their own.

The releasing of mature seeds is known as shattering, a term most commonly used in reference to grasses and plants with dehiscent seed pods (i.e. fruits that split open when ripe, such as those in the bean and mustard families). In grasses, seeds form along a central stem called a rachis. As the seeds ripen, they separate from the rachis and drop from the plant. In some cases, the rachis is brittle and a section of it breaks off with each seed that falls.

Seed shattering is not a desirable trait when it comes to food crops. It’s easy to see how yields can be poor if seeds disperse before they are harvested. Thus, an essential step in domesticating certain agricultural crops was selecting plants that lacked this particular trait. Instead of dropping mature seeds, such plants hold on to them, making them easy to collect. A simple and naturally occurring mutation in the genes of these plants allowed early farmers to select varieties that were more ideal for agriculture than their wild progenitors.

Genetic studies of agricultural crops have located genes in a number of species that code for seed shattering, confirming that domestication in many cases involved selecting plants with this gene turned off. A recent study, published in Nature Biotechnology (October 2020), took a different route in locating this gene, looking instead at a weedy, wild relative of a crop that was domesticated at least 8000 years ago. Green foxtail (Setaria viridis) is the wild antecedent of foxtail millet (Setaria italica), a crop that, while still commonly grown for food in parts of Asia, is mostly grown for hay, silage, and bird seed in North America. Recently, interest in foxtail millet and other millets (a term used to refer to the grains of several different species of grasses) is on the rise due to the ability of these crops to tolerate drought and heat.

Illustration of three Setaria species from Selected Weeds of the United States (Agriculture Handbook No. 366) published in 1970

Setaria viridis is an abundant, widespread weed adapted to human disturbance. It’s of Eurasian origin but has been present in North America since the early 1800’s and was likely introduced both intentionally and accidentally. It’s an annual grass with prominent, bristly flowerheads that are easily recognizable and the reason for its common name, green foxtail. A handful of other closely related, similar-looking species are also common weeds in North America. Due to useful traits including its short life cycle, small genome, and self-fertility, S. viridis has been used frequently as a model species to carry out a variety of scientific studies. The study referred to above aimed to further enhance the use of green foxtail, particularly when it comes to crop science.

Researchers traveled across the United States collecting nearly 600 samples of green foxtail in order to better understand its genome. They found that the North American population of green foxtail is composed of multiple introductions and that, as the species has followed humans around, it has quickly adapted to diverse climates found across the continent. In examining the genome, they were able to identify the genetic underpinnings for three traits that have importance to agriculture: response to climate, leaf angle (which is used as a predictor of yield in grain crops), and seed shattering.

foxtail millet (Setaria italica) via wikimedia commons

The seed shattering gene – which the researchers named Less Shattering 1 (SvLes1) – was an especially interesting discovery. When compared to the orthologous gene found in foxtail millet, they found that a frameshift mutation had caused a disruption in the gene, turning it off. Using CRISPR (a gene editing tool) they were able to recreate a similar interruption in green foxtail, which resulted in a loss of seed shattering similar to that of foxtail millet. It became clear that selecting plants with this mutation was an essential step in the domestication of this ancient grain.

An excerpt about seed shattering from Fruit from the Sands by Robert N. Spengler III: 

In many of the world’s domesticated grains, especially those from the founder crops of southwest Asia (i.e. wheat and barley), the earliest phenotypical trait of domestication that archaeobotanists look for is a tough rachis, the small stem by which an individual grain or small cluster of grains is attached to the ear. In their wild form, most grains are programmed to detach easily after the grain ripens; however, in domesticated cereals, the grains remain attached to the ear throughout the harvesting process. This change is an inadvertent result of human harvesting with sickles: as people reap their harvest, the grains with a brittle rachis are dropped and those with a tough rachis are collected, stored, and replanted for successive harvests.

Further Reading: