Joey Santore
@JoeySantore
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Producer of Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Host of Kill Your Lawn. Botany, Taxonomy, Evolution, Toilet Humor. 6 out of 10 PhD candidates can't stand me.
wherever
Joined August 2019
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Chicago River Snapper aka Chonkosaurus. Great to see this beast thriving here on what was once such a toxic river, but is slowly getting cleaned up & restored. Somebody planted a bunch of native plants up the river from here, too. I can only wonder this things been eating.
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The destruction of this Arizona Golf course is as beautiful as a mountaintop sunset. This will be the new happy thought that I keep close to me in times of strife.
Come along with me on my carnage (I mean course) check this morning. What should be one of the most beautiful golf courses in the country is being destroyed by herds of javelina. If anyone has a contact in AZ state govt that can help us find a solution please pass it along.
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News Media acts so nonchalantly about the fact that a gigantic swath of boreal forestland in North America is on fire right now, with smoke choking out cities hundreds of miles away. THESE FORESTS ARENT SUPPOSED TO BURN. We are the next mass extinction event.
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Rescuing hundreds of rare cacti for replanting that grow no place else in the US except South Texas as the state-funded border wall destroys thousands of acres of habitat for a fence that will do nothing to stop true criminals or cartels.
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It would be hard to find a more uncharismatic plant than Trithuria submersa if you tried. Yet this plant, long mistaken to be a grass, is one of the most ancient lineages of flowering plants still alive, situated right after Amborella on the angiosperm family tree.
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The Legend of Chonkosaurus..She's back, w/ a friend. Somebody from Paddle Rat Collective Chicago, a group of kayakers that frequently lurks on the Chicago river sent this to me today... looking like the same old giant sand bag posted up on the rusty chains and rotting pylons...
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Still one of the most stunningly cool plants I've encountered - the high Andean carrot Azorella compacta (Apiaceae) at 13,000' in Northern Chile. It displays all the evolutionary traits selected for by high dry environments - thick waxy cuticle, low-growing matted habit, etc
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The Great Welwitschia mirabilis, occupying a narrow coastal strip of barren desert inundated every morning with dense fog due to the cold Benguela current off the coast a few miles away. The only other plant here is Arthraerua leubnitziae, a shrubby succulent Amaranth.
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The world's only parasitic conifer, Parasitaxus usta, in the incredibly dark & humid forests of New Caledonia in February '20. This plant parasitizes another member of the family Podocarpaceae, Falcatifolium taxoides. It lacks chlorophyll & its berry-like cones are sky-blue.
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Starting filming on Kill Your Lawn Season 2 in September. Its going to be in Chicago. If you live within 10 or 20 miles of Chicago, have a large lawn & you're ready to kill the shit out of it & install a native plant garden, please email killyourlawn44
@gmail
.com
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One of the coolest evolutionary adaptations I've seen is the "herbivory mimicry" seen in the leaves of Babiana cuneata (Iridaceae) seen here. This geophyte from South Africa avoids being gnawed on by producing truncate leaves that look like they've already been gnawed on.
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STOP BLOWING MY MIND. This is a moth that has evolved to look like a wasp. The adaptive benefit inherent in resembling a predatory insect that can also pack a painful sting to any vertebrate should be obvious.
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Agave gentryi is a massive bastard of a plant that grows at high elevations (11,000') in the mountains of Northern Mexico. After a few decades of photosynthesis, it flowers once then dies. It will flower all summer and provide sugar for hummingbirds,moths, bees, flies,etc.
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White tops to the Saguaro indicate bursts of new meristem tissue as growth resumes in Spring
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Al & I are in New Orleans this week wrapping up filming KILL YOUR LAWN, a show where we destroy the American Lawn ™️ & replace it with native plants. After installing a native swamp garden in heavy clay soil, we took a dip in the pond.
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Lawns, forced car-dependence, no sidewalks, total ignorance around native plants for landscaping & tree cover - so much of the sunbelt states in the US are unprepared for what's coming. Too many people are living in a world that doesn't exist anymore. Reality will hit hard.
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One of the most iconic plants of the Brazilian Campos Rupestres biome, Cippocereus minensis is a bat-pollinated cactus w/ blue fruits & white flowers that open at night & close by dusk. It's an obligate out-crosser, so without bats it will cease to reproduce.
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Microcachrys tetragona is a strange, dioecious conifer colloquially known as "Strawberry Pine"(no relation to pines) that only grows in the alpine zone in Central Tasmania w/ Epacris sp., Athrotaxis sp., Nothofagus, etc. It is part of a lineage that evolved in the Jurassic.
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Just finished 17 days of straight filming for
#KillYourLawn
in Chicago. Thanks to everyone who let us kill their lawn, donated native plants, gave us legal advice, & generally tolerated us. I love seeing people embrace this movement & learn to appreciate the world around them.
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One of those things that's so logical, practical & easy (like solar panels above strip mall parking lots in the American Southwest) that the fact that it's not being done makes you question the collective intellect of the society you live in.
Prairie strips are a farm conservation practice that requires minimal intervention and delivers huge benefits
By converting 10% of cropland to native prairie, farmers can reduce soil loss by 95%, total phosphorous loss by 90%, and total nitrogen loss by 85%
A quick summary:
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In Northern Nevada exists one of the most bizarre exposures of petrified redwood I've ever come across. Despite being 12 million years old, some of the wood is only partially permineralized, with many of the wood fibers still visible & carbonaceous, as if the trees died yesterday
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Pleurothallis ornata is an orchid from high-elevation Mexico that produces tiny flowers that smell like rot, with dangly white appendages on the sepals that mimic maggots to attract predatory wasps. Orchids have an endless variety of tricks up their sleeve to achieve pollination.
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Despite all the habitat destruction, selfishness, infighting, etc going on in South Texas right now around Peyote, it is still important to remember how potentially beautiful these cactus gardens could be if people ever care enough to restore them to what they once were.
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Sphaeropteris intermedia is a fern that can reach heights of 80' or more & grows on the botanically notorious Island of New Caledonia with a diameter of nearly 2.5'. It belongs to the tree fern family Cyatheaceae.
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Pach weberi is a cactus species that grows in thorn forests at 4500' elevation on the border between Puebla & Oaxaca State Mexico and gets as big as a fucking house. It produces night-blooming flowers that are pollinated by bats, which later mature into edible fruits.
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Recently finished filming our 1st piece for a show encouraging people to kill their lawns & replace with low-maintenance native - or at least non-invasive - gardens. Lawns are a bland, unthinking waste of space/water/money/chemicals & an out-dated psychological eyesore.
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@benshapiro
@elonmusk
@jordanbpeterson
Doesn't the culture war ever get boring? Don't you ever want to just say "fuck this" & go swim in a mountain lake or something? Do you really believe any of it matters in the end (it doesn't)? Seems so exhausting.
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What's been remarkable about "Chonkosaurus Fever" is that in some ways it shows how much people appreciate having "nature" around, especially in a big dirty city. Few things offer an antidote to the bleakness & anxiety like seeing native plants & wildlife thriving.
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I broke down & got an android tablet for drawing last month. It was weird as hell to draw on at first but I got a screen protector that mimics paper & it's coming together nicely so far. Here's a few recents.
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One NIGHT of bird deaths via collision with a single glass skyscraper in Chicago during migration season. Slightly changing the design or just breaking up the visually reflective plane of any of these ugly glass dildo skyscrapers could change this.
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Some of the best habitat in the state of Texas being cleared for the performative border fence ™️. I know this land well. It should've become a preserve. I was joking w/ border patrol a few weeks ago about how little this fence will do to stop human trafficking & crime.
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Browningia candelaris has to be one of the most bizarre columnar cacti in the world. Near the Peru border in Northern Chile at an elevation of roughly 8,000' (2400m) these cacti live for centuries in the driest (but not very hot) desert on Earth, 40 miles inland from the Pacific.
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Building solar facilities on intact habitat is insanity. These should all be going up above bleak shopping center parking lots in places that are blatantly depressing & future-less anyways, like the Phoenix suburbs.
These photos say all. Photo one by Teresa Pierce of thousand year old desert ironwood trees killed in minutes for the Oberon Solar Project near Desert Center, CA. Second photo by BRW is the before. This does not save the planet. This is insanity masked as green.
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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.
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When I die, plasticize my body and set it up in the Welwitschia diorama at the Field Museum in Chicago.
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If you see a cactus like this - with a fake plastic flower glued to it - know that the ethical thing to do is steal it.
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Need to make sure this message gets out there. Can't have one without the other.
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Will this ridiculous period of human history ever be over? Will we ever be able to let go of the notion that personal cars are an absolute necessity & move on? Will we ever build cities accordingly?
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Today, a property owner called the cops on me for planting trees on the strip of city property between the sidewalk & street in front of the parking lot he owned. I can't fathom his rationale, but the cops of course didn't care & told him to take it up with the city.
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Our small-scale TV show about Lawn Killing is out now. Unfortunately it's not available for streaming, only cable (though you can stream on DirecTV or Fubo), so nobody I know can watch it. We kill lawns in San Diego, Miami, New Orleans, & South Texas. Times/Channels listed below
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12 million year old only-partially-infused-with-silica wood fibers of an extinct species of Metasequoia in Oregon. I can't emphasize how cool this was to see & touch. Turns out volcanic ash with a 3-foot-thick "cap topping" of basalt is a pretty good way to preserve wood.
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Some images of a few of the crumbs of native habitat in South Florida that haven't been yet turned into parking lots, turnpikes, or soul-sucking retail slums. Such an incredible cast of native plant species on these dry sands, so perfectly adapted to such a specialized habitat.
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Tristerix aphyllus is a parasitic plant that spends its entire life living inside the stems of Cacti in Chile, like Eulychnia breviflora pictured here. As an endoparasite, the only time it ever breaks through the epidermis is to flower. Its flowers are pollinated by hummingirds.
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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
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This pic encapsulates everything wrong with American planning. The destination is a 3 min walk if you brave the deadly 12 lane road with no sidewalk. But you're forced to drive, so it takes you 14 min & navigating a labyrinth of car-dependent suburban retail hellscape.
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No matter how many times you see it, it never gets old seeing Lophophora (peyote) thriving in habitat. Hundreds of plants today, nearly 70% of them in flower from the 12" of rain this area received in a single month. When I was last here, most plants looked stressed.
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Rubus squarrosus. This is what happens when you take a raspberry & put it on an island w/no native mammals save for bats & a large flightless, plant-eating avian megafauna & let natural selection & a few million years do their thing. Broad leaf nodes, small leaf-to-stem ratio etc
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Leaf blowers have to simultaneously be one of the dumbest & most annoying fucking inventions ever created. I wanted to enjoy my coffee but now I get to inhale tire dust & fungal spores off the ground from seventy feet away. Use a broom, lazy fuck.
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More Symptoms of a Poisoned and Obsolete Worldview and Values System.
The Bureau of Land Management is proposing to let a mining company destroy this for a kitty litter mine. Not joking. Kitty litter.
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It's still 100° f (38° C) in South Texas & dry as hell. The grass at this park is entirely defoliated & covered in mud tubes made by desert termites, which serve the ecological role of getting rid of dead vegetation much the same way as fungi or fire in any other ecosystem.
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Pleasure meeting Dr. Mike Simpson, whose textbook "Plant Systematics" changed my life & the lense through which I see the world when I first got my grubby dago hands on it 11 years ago. Stoked to learn he's working on a 4th edition, due out in 2025. Thanks for everything, Mike!
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Some kid asked me what my "job" was.
"Travel around the world and teach people about plants. And try not to die doing it." I told him.
I'd never heard it like that before but I guess that is indeed what I do. And I'll do it until it sucks or doesn't pay enough anymore.
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6 years ago this month I realized alcohol sucked & that I didn't want it in my life anymore. I've never regretted it. That first year was rough shifting my life around, but quitting booze was one of the best decisions I ever made. I never look back & I've never regretted it.
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Meet the world's tiniest conifer, Lepidothamnus laxifolius, growing here on the cold slopes of an active volcano on New Zealand's North Island. The family Podocarpaceae is thought to have diverged from its sister family, Araucariaceae in the Permian, 250 million years ago.
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I get tired of expressions of futility/depression regarding how bad modern humans are fucking the planet into a coma. It's important to try to not get depressed about watching the things you love be killed by a mindset you hate, but just love them & rep for them that much harder.
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It's wild that I grew up thinking a forest preserve inundated with an impenetrable thicket of invasive Buckthorn & Amur Honeysuckle was "normal". It was anything but. Finally the forests in Chicago are being managed properly, making way for cool natives like Trout Lilies.
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The Tasmanian endemic moss, Pleurophascum grandiglobum. The inflated globular capsules will later turn orange & split open to release spores. This peculiar & lovely bastard resembles a carpet of jewel-like green beads hiding amongst the sedges of its acidic peat habitat.
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Aristolochia is such a huge genus, and there are so many different "variations on a theme" out there in terms of species. Here is Aristolochia erecta from the weathered Eocene sands near the Mexican border of South Texas.
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Expensive but easily-rendered-useless political stunt. All that cleared biodiversity isn't coming back.
REALITY CHECK: you can cut through our $18 billion border wall with a $5 grinder blade.
This wall at Organ Pipe has destroyed desert wilderness & severed migration routes for endangered wildlife, but it will never stop people from crossing.
Time to tear down the political prop.
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Fuck Bolsonaro forever. One of my favorite people to hate. Hopefully he dies soon. I can't wait to pass out cigars. (This is purely a test of Twitter's content moderation policies).
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Dracophyllu milliganii is another weird "blueberry" from the Epacrid Subfamily that's endemic to Tasmania & looks more like a monocot. Here it is at 3,000' elev with the basal Iris, Isophysis tasmanica, being filmed during a summer hail storm (lovely schizophrenic Tassie Weather)
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Without any condemnation, I have to wonder : How rich & fulfilling can life be if you've never bothered to learn the names of the plants, fungi, life that surrounds you? A life thats absent of any connection to the rest of the biosphere sounds like such a broke-ass existence.
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I think if more people knew how much the simple act of tending to a garden calms you the fuck down & gives you a connection to something larger than yourself mental health in this country might improve drastically. We might even see a reduction in violence in this rotten culture.
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Make no mistake - there is an undeniable connection between how increasingly shitty humans are making the world & how incredibly soothing it feels to be surrounded by native plants & ecosystems. Don't be afraid to dive deep into it & bring it home to your own yard.
#KILLYOURLAWN
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Paepalanthus bromelioides (or P. latipes) is a member of the family Eriocaulaceae, which is hyper-diverse in Brazil. It resembles a small yucca & has leaf blades that split at their ends into tiny button-like inflorescences. It grows on thin soils atop quartzitic sandstone.
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The English-garden-landscaping "mind virus" is real....the urge to hedge & put wide spaces between monocultures & "blocks" of the same species planted in uniform lines...its revolting in all its bland sterility & desperate attempts at control. Even if using natives, it sucks.
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I don't trust 96% of landscapers & for no fault of their own. The market demands them to produce garbage. It's almost not their fault. Any landscaper who mimics actual nature wouldn't be able to make a living in the current culture. Maybe in another decade or two. More below :
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Euphorbia attastoma is a leafless, stem-photosynthetic wax-covered succulent from seasonally dry Campos Rupestres in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Its seeds occur in bird-dispersed fruits & its Cyathial bracts are usually glistening with nectar.
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I, of course, welcomed the conflict, because these kinds of interactions -like fights with HOAs - draw the issue of planting native plants, killing lawns, & planting native trees out into the open. If done strategically & politely, this is how bad policies & mindsets get changed
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Females of the beetle species Acmaeodera neoneglecta pollinating Peyote today right in South Texas. Larvae of this species bore into blackbrush acacia & other legumes & the females feed on pollen. If you don't have black brush, you don't have peyote. Everything is connected.
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There is a childlike innocence one can observe in watching humans have an appreciation of the living world that feels almost psychedelic. It is one of the most innately hopeful things about the human condition, transcending all the petty primate infighting, territoriality & ego.
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To get good at anything you have to be willing to be shitty at first -sometimes for a while- & not give a fuck if others see it. I see so many people w/ so much potential who are unwilling to be shitty at first, & so they never get good. There's no practice. They're afraid to try
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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.
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Some fossilized Cretaceous marine organisms, including some large snails, on 100 million year old limestone in West Texas. Long Live the Western Interior Seaway!
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Looking closely at this cactus forest, you'll see they bend away from the sun. This is to keep the side with the hairy patch (pseudo-cephalium) where the flowers are produced out of the sun so the flowers last longer. Ceoh columna-trajani. Puebla, Mexico.
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"What is it good for?" Is probably one of the most annoying - although inately innocent - questions to be asked about a plant. It takes a while to learn that the puzzle needs all the pieces in order to function.
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In a morbid, macabre way it's going to be interesting to see how all these shitty sunbelt cities & metro areas that are surrounded entirely by retail parking lot asphalt & concrete respond to the extra 10 or 15 degrees of summer heat we're going to be getting from here on out.
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A little-known but incredibly remarkable family of Monocots, Velloziaceae consists of two genera & 212 (known) species in Brazil (more elsewhere). Many of these plants are "resurrection plants", able to tolerate near-completr dessication but become active again w/ rainfall.
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Hello, "Tree Carrot". This is Apiopetalum velutinum, a woody member of the Apiaceae (carrot family) that grows on ultramafic, serpentine soil on the botanical "time capsule" island of New Caledonia. The leaves are leathery/stiff & the undersides & stems are covered in "velvet".
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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".
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Nivenia binata is a shrub member of the Iris family (Iridaceae), 1 of 3 genera in the subfamily Nivenioideae that have evolved a woody habit, rather than a geophytic one. Here it is blooming out of a rockwall in a remote mountain range in South Africa in September, '21.
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These drought photos are like porn to me. Rich (or pretending hard to be) ignorant fools chasing a carrot-on a-stick lifestyle that's completely unsustainable & shouldn't be lived anyway, in a climate & landscape that doesn't support it. I want to get a photo like this framed.
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I hype this plant all the time for it's MASSIVE ecological importance. Vachellia rigidula aka Black brush "Acacia" is a small shrub that is often the main shade cover for Peyote & other cool cacti in S. Texas/N. Mexico. Its flower spikes provide nectar, its branches are often...
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So many American cities are now overpriced, high-rent epicenters of people who moved there from smaller towns & suburbs for "cultural opportunities" & walkable streets who don't mind stepping over the poor & destitute who grew up there while on their way to $40 a plate sushi.
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Walking around DT Chicago I learned to hate tulips & Euonymus fortunei & Pachysandra & all the other big-box store horticultural puke you're beaten over the head with here. Quit trying to be Northern Europe, Chicago. Embrace where you live : Midwestern Marshes, Dunes & Prairies.
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The other shooting location for KILL YOUR LAWN Season 2 is in Atlanta, Georgia. We'll be shooting 4 episodes in October. If you have a *big* lawn that you'd like to annihilate & replace with a diverse & dense landscape of native plants, email pics to killyourlawn44
@gmail
.com
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Asclepias melantha is a milkweed that grows in clearings and disturbed areas at 8,000' elevation in Cloud Forests of Southern Mexico (Oaxaca) consisting of Pines, Oaks & giant forest Agave (A. atrovirens). Its flowers are a deep burgundy color. It reaches heights of 4' tall.
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Eulychnia iquiquensis is a cactus that grows in the fog deserts of coastal Northern Chile adjacent to a very cold ocean. It produces flowers with incredibly tomentose tepals, an adaptation to the incredibly dry environment where most of the moisture that plants receive is fog.
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Colloquially known as "the galloping cactus, Stenocereus gummosus is a densely armored species of cactus from Baja California that produces massive flowers & edible fruit. It is often found covered in various lichen species. The fruits are edible but spines must be shaved off.
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Long lost forests of Gondwana - Huon "Pine" (no relation to pines at all), Lagarostrobos franklinii, is an extremely long-lived, slow-growing conifer endemic to Tasmania that grows in perpetually wet, cool boggy forests. Last pic is a female cone, less than one inch long.
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Hesperoyucca whipplei is a monocarpic relative of Yucca from the California Floristic Province. Unlike Yucca, it only blooms once then dies. But like the genus Yucca, its flowers are pollinated solely by Yucca moths, a classic case of mutualism.
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Asclepias humistrata is a sand-loving species of milkweed endemic to the Southeastern United States. It is a long-lived species with a perennial taproot that can go as much as four feet down into the soil. Like most milkweeds, the flowers emit a pleasant fragrance.
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Helianthus argophyllus - the silver leaf sunflower - is a wooly sunflower endemic to the sandsheet of South Texas. It can reach heights of 18' in a single season & has a thick coating of hair to protect the leaves from overheating. It grows well in hot full sun gardens, as well.
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I know this will piss some people off, but the older I get, the more convinced I become that college is to be avoided, at least in the US. Discipline & regiment are good for learning, but the 150k in student loans, un-used degree, parochialism, elitism & insularity are not.
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Nassauvia lagascae is proof that Chile is one of the coolest places in the world to study the sunflower family. We saw this species at 10,500' in the mountains near some tacky ski resort East of Santiago. Mutisioideae is a more basal (earlier branching) subfamily of Asteraceae.
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This is the situation in South Texas : dwindling harvests of peyote by licensed dealers(peyoteros). Entire plants dug up & stolen from habitat rather than cut to resprout, all of them far too small to begin with. This was all entirely legal. THIS + land clearance = extinction.
This should not be legal. Baby
#peyote
seedlings culled from threatened habitat and legally sold to members of the
#NativeAmericanChurch
Learn more by visiting and listening to The Peyote Lorax podcast.
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@hankgreen
More genetic isolation = more speciation. Evolution of pollinia (pollen grains aggregated into nodules, pollinator specificity (reproductive isolation), evolution of the epiphytic habitat (largest sub-family, the epidendroids) & resulting ability to colonize new niches.
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