Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Venice and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Michigan State University professor, Miranda Montgomery, Riasca.

Our plans are leth-hitter-roll geniuses.

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Venice. I'm so excited for this episode because I have been wanting to learn about trees for so long without any further ado.

Welcome to the show, Professor Miranda Montgomery, who is a molecular and biology and microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University professor, the resume.

And welcome.

Thank you so very much. I think my mom is most excited about the resume, but thanks a lot.

I mean, I can see why you have like a literal and you are a professor of so many different things in your title that is really I have to say coming in handy to serve our alternative and question of the episode.

Now I have two like two pronged question into this as my new my own business in February of 2020. I was in New Zealand on comedy tour.

I know it's weird. It's like it was like six weeks before everything shut down. So it was still like the last the last time I've ever been on the plane. But anyway, so these trees in New Zealand, like the second I landed and looked at the trees.

I was like these trees are like really interesting and different than any tree I've ever seen like around home. Like the roots were like kind of like skinny and tall, but like outside the ground.

And I was like these interesting like wedgie sort of shapes that I never seen before. And I just could knock it enough of the trees. Then, you know, while like two months later, the world shut down coronavirus, like shut down you North America United States.

And then my now husband taught me how to garden and we got really into gardening. Yes. So between those two things, I was like, I have been a nightmare millennial just running around the world and not realizing that nature was so cool.

So I think that's a great way to get all these questions. So thank you so much for being here. Well, I'm really excited about being here. Congratulations on the husband part and how cool that he's teaching you about gardening. That's a keeper for sure.

Thank you. And you have a new book, which is called Lessons From Plans, which is published by Harvard University, press not too shabby I have access again.

I mean, you're just a perfect person to talk to about this. So I think my first question is why are New Zealand trees so different than American trees.

Yeah. So it's really it's one of the cool parts about plants is that because they're in different environments, they have different behaviors and different adaptations and unlike humans that also adapted their local environments.

And you see the adaptations that plants make so you saw these roots that are sometimes called brace roots because they're helping brace the plant because of the kind of either stability of lacrosthability of the ground that they're growing on.

Ah, okay. Yes. Let's zoom out because it's important to zoom out because that's such like a specific question I just asked. What is literally a plant.

So plants, they're super cool beings, first of all, but more technically, they are multi cellular organisms that are capable of making their own food.

So from very simple compounds water carbon dioxide and sunlight, they can convert that into sugars and in the process they produce oxygen.

So they are by nature organisms that are it's called oxygenic photosynthesis. So using light to make sugar and in the process producing oxygen.

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