Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefense Plants Podcast, the official podcast of indefenseplants.com.

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

I'm doing great because I have a fantastic episode for you today. Joining us is a personal

idol of mine because her research is so amazing, Dr. Joan Edwards, and she studies among other things

exploding flowers. Now that seems pretty extravagant and it certainly is, but I don't want to steal

any of her thunder to hear her talk about her research and how she got to where she is today is

absolutely fascinating and inspiring. So let's just jump right into it without further ado.

Here's my conversation with Dr. Joan Edwards. I hope you enjoy.

Alright Dr. Joan Edwards, I am so excited to have you on the podcast. I've known about your work

for a really long time and I'm really excited to talk to you about it, but first let's introduce

yourself. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do.

Okay, I am a botanist and I'm proud to say I'm a botanist. Some people don't like to be called

botanists. They want to be evolutionary biologists, but I love just being a botanist because I have

loved plants for most of my life. I never knew that I could be a scientist or make new discoveries

and it wasn't until I actually spent a summer at the University of Michigan biological station

because I had added botany very, very late as the major. So it was between my

sophomore and junior year. I needed to make up a lot of biology classes to finish the botany major.

So I went to the to bug camp as they call it. The tip of the mitt. Nice.

And I took two classes. One was fresh water algae and the other was limnology and because I

signed up so late those were kind of the only two classes that were still open.

And it was an eight week program and about four weeks into the program I realized that I just

love doing field biology. I love being out in the field. I love the amazing world, particularly

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