Welcome back everyone to the epic gardening podcast. Today we have a really awesome guest.

We have Ari Novi who's the president and CEO of the San Diego Botanic Garden. In fact,

just last week our our team was up there for the world of houseplants exhibit. Had a lot

of fun actually saw the corpse flower not in bloom but post bloom I suppose with a huge

leaf it was a I've never seen one in person so it was a really cool moment for me.

That's an awesome plant yeah that that one just went in through its leaf cycle and you

know if we're lucky it'll be in leaf for maybe 12 months a little more and then after

that hopefully we'll get another flower. Yeah yeah I do want to be up there for the

flower. I was learning that the smell is truly pretty intense. Oh it's rough yeah I've always

described it as like you know a teenager's bag of gym shorts with a little bit fish and maybe

some you know meat thrown in and like left on the side of the road like on a hot day in

burrito you know oh my gosh it's rough that is quite the mental image you just painted there.

It kind of brings us to this idea of like you know we hear a lot about evolution of all species

but I think we pay more attention probably to animal species and as gardeners you know not a

lot of us have like crazy botanical knowledge mostly it's practical in the garden but you know

what should we know about just kind of like the basics of plant evolution. Well you know first

of all I love not being apologetic about being a giant plant nerd you know it's you know plants

make up 85% of the living things on earth by by weight and so you know when we're learning about

plants we're really learning in a very deep way about our planet and our biosphere so it feels

sometimes like a little trivial because people care more about animals than plants but you know

I think plants are just you know they I'd like to say plants are almost everything in quite the

literal sense and you know how have plants come to dominate you know the world so much I mean they

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