Would you like more In Defensive Plants each month?

Well, you're in luck.

Indefensive Plants is now offering bonus mini episodes over at our Patreon page.

To find out how you can gain access to this bonus botanical content, head on over to patreon.com

slash Indefensive Plants and consider becoming a patron.

And as always, thank you for your continued support of Indefensive Plants.

Together we are helping cure plant blindness around the world one episode at a time.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensible Plants podcast, the official podcast of indefensibleplants.com.

What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week?

Last week we talked about

oak conservation ex-situ, so setting up groves away from endangered oak populations so that they're

secured in different locations and spread around different institutions to increase the chances of

success. Well, today we're looking at some conservation work on oaks in situ.

Joining us from the Morton Arboretum is tree conservation ecologist Dr. Sylvia Alvarez-Clair,

and she specializes currently on the restoration of two endangered species of oaks.

The first is Quercas Brandecii, which is endemic to the Baja Peninsula, and as you're going

to hear, the work she's doing with her colleagues is leading to successful reproduction for this oak species for the first time in what might be over a century.

The other is a tropical species of oak, native to high elevation areas in Central America called Quercas and Cygnus, and it produces the largest acorns on the planet.

Having seen them in person, it's a mind-blowing experience to see an acorn pretty much the size of your fist.

Her work is really inspiring, and it gives me hope for the future.

And as you're going to hear, it involves communities.

It gets local people involved in the conservation process, which is a model I think all conservation organizations need to be following.

...