From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. When spring approaches and we get out into the garden again, it's easy to get distracted by the to-do list or just by the latest pretty thing that's emerging after winter's relative blank slate. But there's a whole other layer out there in front of our eyes and ears and noses, and it's actually the foundation layer of life. How about we gardeners learn to tune in not just to the horticultural happenings outside, but to the wonders of botany unfolding before us? Today's guests, Ben Goulet, Scott, and Jacob Su Suiza encourage us to follow our curiosity to look closely and learn how the plant world works. They want to encourage us to botanize so more in a moment about how that works but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com And by High Moeng seeds, Wolcott Vermont, professional quality vegetable, flower, and herbal seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com. And by Whiteflower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerfarm.com. Ben Goulet Scott and Jacob Swiss are evolutionary biologists who have created a popular social media presence together,

plus a nonprofit educational foundation, and now a new book, all appropriately called Let's botanize. Their idea to use entertaining content to encourage people to follow their curiosity and take a closer look at what's growing around them, and in the process learn more intimately about the the intricacies of the botanical world.

When that outboughtonizing, Ben oversees educational programming at Harvard Forest, Jacob teaches evolutionary plant biology at the University of Tennessee. And I'm so glad to welcome them to the program today to get us all ready for some eye-opening adventures in the soon awakening garden. Bring on the soon awakening garden. How are you guys?

So good. It's great to be here. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably been enjoying the book is beautiful. And of course, I've always enjoyed the Instagram, Reels and posts and so forth. They're wonderful and you have a great following there. So that's been fun. How long have you been doing that? social media thing. Thanks so much. Yeah, we've been doing it for about six years now. Yeah. So actually it started, you know, humble beginnings actually when when Ben and I were graduate students at Harvard University, in particular, our labs were based at the Arnold Arboretum.. So let's botanize, really started as us going out into the woods or the grounds of the Arnold Arboretum and just botanizing. And initially we really just had these amazing experiences sort of hanging out together, looking at plants, you know, talking about different aspects of their morphology, their pollination syndromes, their ecology and evolution. And we thought that it would be a great idea to share these experiences that we have on social media for everyone else to enjoy. Yeah. So I love that you guys say you want to activate our curiosity because I, to me, gardening, that's what it's all about is curiosity, is indulging and encouraging our curiosity. And how you compare what you call botanizing, adding the I and G at the end of botany, sort of, or the Zing, actually, at the end of botany. To what happens, it's sort of like the, you say, I think, in the book, the way that it's, there's birds, and there's birding, the active part of it. Yeah, so tell me a little bit about what's botanizing. Yeah, absolutely. So botanizing is, it's a natural history hobby, so it's a lot like bird watching, but for plants. And it's the natural history hobby that's based around being curious about paying close attention to plants and trying to learn more about them and appreciate them as organisms. And as much as we would love to have invented that word, it's actually an older term. It peaked in popularity in the mid 19th century. And it's sort of been declining in usage since then, but we would love to be part of a wave of people bringing that word back and the idea of that hobby back. Yes, it is total aside, my late Victorian era grandmother on my mother's side actually went to college. She went to college at the university, what's part of now part of the university of Wisconsin. And one of the courses that she took besides lots of sort of domestic arts kinds of things that women were allowed to do. Was botanizing, and so she became, she had a flower press and she pressed specimens. And she, you know, so anyway, botanizing was a thing. So yeah, I loved that you did that. I knew that, that was from a long time ago. So anyway, so speaking of birds and birding and then botanizing in the opening of the the book you have a page that says something that I loved also, there are more species of grass than birds, more mints than mammals, and more beans than butterflies. Now, of course, people probably know more about the latter in each pair of those than the former, you know.

But even if we know the name of the plant, because this isn't just about plant ID, that's not what your botanizing is, memorizing names of plants, this is what else do we know? Do we need to know what's the, yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. And so, I mean, I think we use those sets of facts about plant and animal species richness to really just highlight the staggering diversity of plants. I think it's amazing and sometimes overwhelming. But I think, you know, one point is that because plants are so diverse, if your end goal was to identify all the time and to identify every single plant, it would, it was just impossible, right? And so there's sort of other layers of botanizing that can be extremely rewarding. I want to say, you know, identification is a very fun goal of botany, and it also isn't enriching one, and it's an important one, and we do it a lot. I think it elevates your relationships with plants, and it's critical in a lot of scientific studies. But again, it's not the end goal. You can appreciate things like plant form, what's the shape of this leaf or the architecture of a tree, or you can appreciate things like pollination syndromes, which we mentioned earlier. What is the structure, morphology of a flower, and how do we think that that interacts with the way that this plant is pollinated. You can think about things like the ecology of the plant. Where is it growing? Why is it growing? Who is it growing near? And you can also start to think about evolutionary processes. Why did these particular traits evolve? How did they evolve? What are the common ancestors of this one, of this one plant and what sort of traits did they have? And sort of more broadly, you can start to, you can botanize by relating to plants, sort of thinking about the timescales that plants grow on. Those can be very slow when you're thinking about a tree that's a thousand years

older. Likewise, you can think about the very rapid processes that plants undergo, including the way they move water through their body or how they do gas exchange or the cellular processes that happen on time scales that we also can't understand. Yeah, I mean, just the grass thing in that statement that you may, you know, there's more grasses than whatever, you know, birds. Yeah, I mean, I think I said that there were 30% of the earth's land mass is covered in grasses. But like how many of us even know or even really consciously understand without thinking about it, that grasses are flowering plants. Yeah, that's right. That's right. What do we have to do to get down on our knees and crawl around and have a hand lens? Is that a good idea? Absolutely. Yes, so to analogize the whole hobby of botanizing to bird bird watching, bird watchers have binoculars and botanists and botanizers have a hand lens. It's really a small magnifying lens that'll fit in your pocket or on a lay near it or around your neck. Usually about the ones that we use, I think are 10X magnification. That's usually about right for a lot of the structures that you want to get a closer look at on a plant.

But yeah, it's

grass has have a lot to offer if you

If you stop and catch them, especially when they're flowering or when their fruits are

maturing and yeah, and then you see if you look as you again point out in the book and it got me thinking about it

I was like, oh of course

They are probably not built for somebody to come and stick their body part in them or move their pollen around right. They're not filled with that, right? Right. Absolutely. So how does it get pollinated, huh? Right. Wow. Yeah. That's great. Those you did all of that without needing to know which species of, you know, which of the 11 plus thousand species of grass that you were looking at, right? So that's a great example. So there's one that it's the wind, right? Is it's companion? It's partner in pollination. Yeah, absolutely. And pollinated. And there's a lot of really interesting traits that are associated with wind pollination. So, you know, within grasses, right, if you don't need to, or really any other wind pollinated plant, you don't really need to invest in the structures that attract, you know, large visual or sort of scent, you know, queuing animals, right? So there's no, and I'm putting air quotes, you can't see, but there's no need to invest in petals, right? Large petals or showy structures, right? So a lot of these wind pollinated plants, like grasses, have actually lost over evolutionary time, really highly elaborate petals and such. And really, you can sort of think about them as being fine-tuned, being highly adapted for wind pollination. So what does that mean? It means that they also have large, pendant stamens. So those are the structures that produce pollen, right? And they produce copious amounts of pollen that can easily fly in the wind. They have these large elaborate stigmas that are often feathery. So these are the parts of the female parts of the flower that collect pollen from the wind. So you can sort of read the evolutionary history in these lineages and these plants by just sort of looking at the structure sometimes. Sometimes it's a little They're more difficult. Right. And so the book is kind of divided into, I think it's 101 prompts. Yes. So you call them prompts. And they're divided into three categories, parts, patterns, and perspectives. And so the parts one, it's going around and looking closely, and for instance you suggest, okay, go and look at leaf edges. Look at the edges of a bunch of different plants leaves. And are they all serrated or lobed or they all not that way? You know, is that called entire? What do they call it? What do they call it? It's called the entire margins. So what does that mean? Do we know what that means? So the observation then leads you to, hmm, I wonder why. Just like what we just talked about with the grasses and how they get pollinated and why are they like that. And at least this whole lesson, potentially, if you want to do a little homework. Yeah. Or it's, yeah. So it's kind of fun. Hopefully it is. And so, right, so the book has 101 of these prompts that try to get you, sort of, activate your attention a little bit and get you out looking for something in particular. And then there, there's a block of text after that. And that text is hopefully going to give you some more of the biology to understand and make sense of what you're seeing. That's really what the hobby is about. One thing that we talk a lot about is active observation. All natural history hobbies are really trying to practice active observation, which you could think of active listening. You can hear stuff, but not really the actively listening. You can look at something and not really have made any sort of sophisticated observation of it. And so what do you need to do to become an active observer? It's really looking in order to understand. And so with that block of text and just all of the stuff that we do, we're trying to help folks like build their knowledge bank to really have context to make more sense of what they're observing out in the plant world. Yeah, I mean, there's just, you know, such familiar things, again, in the book, you know, I'm just the parts, the parts department, the parts that I said chapter, you know, climbers, go out and look at all the climbers in your garden do they all? Yeah. Well, I'm the same way. Absolutely. Yeah, there's yeah. No. All kinds of different ways. You're right exactly. Yeah. And so and and the and these and these these prompts, right? As you were saying, they're not just scattered throughout. So the different sections have different categories. Right. So focuses on morphology and structure and patterns really focuses on things like development and the evolution and ecology. And perspectives really allow us to really try to help us connect more with plants as these living organisms that are so fundamentally different than us. But back to your point about climbing plants,

right, yeah, like so we think about

these different categories of plants,

climbers or herbs or epiphytes or whatever,

but there's many different ways

to be these different plants.

Many of them ways to be a climbing plan, right?

So for instance, you can be a climbing plant

that climbs up a tree because your stem twines around another stem. You can be a climbing plant like something like ivy that produces these small little rootlets on the underside of the stem that's essentially a glue that adheres to another, to the structure it's climbing up. Other plants have evolved things like tendrils, which are highly modified either leaves or stipules or other parts of the plant that twine around the thing that it's climbing up. So, so there's many different ways to climb.

And actually this is a fascination not just of us now,

but also Darwin focused a lot on climbing plants as well.

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