I love this guy, also my favourite Youtube channel and one of my favourite podcasts, he also guests on In Defence of Plants from time to time, I have the impression he's friends with the host.

Loved him ever since I randomly stumbled across his guerilla tree planting video in I want to say 2020?

Anyway, we all must support the train driver turned botanist.

does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age?

I do, and I've seen it in others, but from the limited data points I've seen there's no causal relationship with age. I.e. what I've seen is people largely oblivious of nature/ecosystems/flora/fauna sudenly becoming very invested in it, for various reasons, but this doesn't happen at or only beyond a certain age. For me it was around 30 but that's simply because of a series of coincidences (new house, large garden, needed solution for mowing, happened to see a 2nd hand scythe, looked into grassland ecology, etc). But I know people whos obsession started at 16 and at 60 and like everything in between.

I've experienced that with trees over the last 5 years. I've been working on forest restoration on some land as a hobby and everywhere I travel I try to identify the trees I see.

For me, it's really just trees though. Birds and other wildlife are nice, but they don't draw my interest in the same way.

I got very much into biology when I started growing weed at 24.

Now I can’t not have a little garden(currently growing chilli’s and a citrus tree, from seeds)

> does anybody relate to this grown interest to plants and bird distinction with age

I have a similar interest but mine is about passively assimilating foreign languages while watching movies. Every time I grok a new expression it feels like a rush of dopamine.

It is clearly a very useful skill to have as it helps us find food we know is safe. I think in the modern world this tends to be something most kids don't have an oppurtunity to develop. When in a more natural environment it would be expressed much earlier.

I don't relate to it myself, but I see it in people around me. It appears that's something that may not be limited to but is very prevalent in adults with very high functioning autism.

Besides the utility for users, Flora Incognita is also a massive crowdsourcing project for science: They use the GPS location of photos in combination with the identified plants to build a temporo-spatial database of confirmed plant sightings. (To my knowledge no link to any personal data of users.)

I use iNaturalist for plants and animals, mostly insects (and Merlin for birdsong recognition).

No ads, non-profit, contribute to research, etc. It also allows you to find out what others have spotted in your area. I like the range maps, the images across seasons, and other seasonal information.

The actual ML-based recognition is somewhat hidden, I think that part of the UI needs some work; it seems like it was made for researchers first then hacked for non-experts to use.

https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about

It is a pity that, while their focus is on openness and accessiblity, neither Flora Incognita, nor iNaturalist or PlantNet can be installed from the F-Droid appstore. I unfortunately don't use Google Play, so can't testdrive them.

Better than PlantNet?

How does it compare to iNaturalist or observation.org which are like the 'standard' ones?

+1 for Flora Incognita. This is what apps should be.

Very nice! Really incredible amount of sources you’re pulling from.

I actually vibecoded a personal app just last week to handle my personal collection of rare succulents and cactus I grow, primarily from seed. I wanted to create something for my young daughter that showed the mature plant along with information about its habitat, growing conditions, how to cultivate (I grow indoors due to my climate), etc.

I’m actually really interested in the devices you have coming soon as I grow indoors and am always looking for improvements on lighting, monitoring, etc. I have a real hodgepodge of lights and gadgets.

I think I also first found him from his "guerrilla gardening" work in Oakland. I think it was in a median, planting native species on a barren strip of dirt. Something of that nature.

His backstory is really one-of-a-kind. If I recall correctly, he got really into botany because he worked for Union Pacific railroad, and while stopping in a city, would go to the library and checkout different botany books.

I discovered it recently, and I find it quite funny

I'm not really into botany itself, but I enjoy their rants about how people manage "green" spaces

I am lost they have training videos, they have a reading list, they have tutorials... everything you need to get started. How else would you acquire skills? There is no upload function yet.

His interview with the old railworker and grease-pen graffiti artist Colossus of Roads was fascinating. Unfortunately I cant find it on youtube anymore with a quick search, otherwise I'd put the link here.

Agreed. The author in question (Linnaeus) was from Sweden and professor at a Swedish university (Uppsala). Latin was used across the board in "traditional" sciences in northern Europe at that time and in fact the distinction of disciplines was not as clear as it is today. Linnaeus was a professor of medicine formally but focused on botany. He traveled a lot and had many international "contacts", especially in the Netherlands. His correspondence was usually a mix of Swedish and Latin (which I find interesting because I assume Swedish was not widely studied at the time) but his professional publications were in Latin.

But it was an interesting time as slowly native languages became more common. The chair for economic sciences at Uppsala was specifically to be taught in Swedish (1741).

Southern and central Europe were ahead of the curve a bit and it was more common to see French, English and German for example (French and English scientific journals date back to the 1660s).

For more information, I can recommend "Languages of science in the eighteenth century" by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson which specifically focuses on Linnaeus. It's Open Access: https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/97831102...

Of all the things you could criticize as backwards in 18th century biology, the choice of using Latin is probably the silliest. It was the language of learning. It's a practical choice that you and I would make if we were transported to that time.

It's an interesting topic, though. If Latin is backwards because of assocation with European cultures, what are biologists nowadays proposing to replace it with? Some kind of universal coding system like ISBN or DOI?

Luckily the author continues with

> I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).

The way I parsed the sentence, the backwards and goofy part is just the """he was probably mostly thinking of “white European cultures”""", not the choice of Latin. Just a concilatory disclaimer to avoid being cancelled for talking good things about someone born before the abolition of slavery.

More scientific lectures should be delivered with a blue collar Chicago dialect and accent.

Simlish was intentionally designed to be linguistically neutral, so we didn't have to laboriously translate all the game audio into dozens of languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simlish

For the same reason, botanical nomenclature should obviously be standardized in Simlish. Sul sul, Laganaphyllis simnovorii!

Laganaphyllis simnovorii is the scientific name of the Cowplant, literally suggestive of a plant that devours Sims. It first appeared under that name in The Sims 2: University as a Natural Science career reward. The Sims 3 Store also uses the full name officially.

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Laganaphyllis_simnovorii

>This bizarre bovine vegetation is large enough to swallow your next-door neighbor whole. In fact, it WILL eat your neighbors. Your friends will be hard-pressed to resist the tantalizing vine-cake of the carnivorous Laganaphyllis Simnovorii. After it has consumed some prey, milk it for sweet, rejuvenating nectar of life. A swig of this liquid refreshment will add precious days to a Sim's life and wash away any regret they may have over their visitor's fate.

A proposed technical lexicon:

Plant: floragerb. Flora: floragerbia. Vegetation: verdigerbium. Fruit: pomofroob. Vegetable: olerinoob. Root: radixgerb. Stem: caulob. Leaf: folinurb. Flower: anthofleeb. Seed: seminib. Pollen: pollinoob. Spore: sporib. Cell: cellubo. Cell wall: muracellum. Chlorophyll: chlorofleebin. Photosynthesis: photofroobulation. Cellular respiration: respiragerbation. Germination: germinoobulation. Pollination: pollifleebation. Fertilization: gametogerbination. Transpiration: evapofleebulation. Xylem: xyloob. Phloem: phleebum. Stoma: stomabo. Phylogeny: ancestragerbics. Morphology: formagerbology. Binomial nomenclature: duonominoobulation.

Because latin was common only for part of one continent where he happened to be and not to the rest of the world while english happens to be spoken all over the globe due to a big goofy empire that went places.

However, let's keep out the culture wars from a post mainly about plants.

What is healthy dirt, if not dirt that grows healthy plants. Which will of course depend on the plant.

Absolutely check out his multi part series "it doesn't have to suck" about turning Tucson AZ into a living greenspace city. It's hopeful and inspiring what they are doing there!

I don't think it's a real problem. It's a way that one group of humans agreed to label things, and that way is the currently dominant way. Even the agreed rules (whoever publishes first gets dibs on the name) are just an incentive for academics to publish. If there were another labelling system, it would have the same problems and would only serve to split the humans into multiple ways of doing the same thing.

But, ultimately, the naming is just for us humans. We care, the trees don't!

To quote Richard Feynman:

> The next Monday, when the fathers were all back at work, we kids were playing in a field. One kid says to me, “See that bird? What kind of bird is that?” I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn’t teach you anything!” But it was the opposite. He had already taught me: “See that bird?” he says. “It’s a Spencer’s warbler.” (I knew he didn’t know the real name.) “Well, in Italian, it’s a Chutto Lapittida. In Portuguese, it’s a Bom da Peida. In Chinese, it’s a Chung-long-tah, and in Japanese, it’s a Katano Tekeda. You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.” (I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.)

Also, a tree coordinate system? We can't even be certain what a tree is, we can only look at a particular species and put it somewhere on a tree-bush continuum.

This diagram is insane: we have trees with non-tree ancestors, and non-trees with tree ancestors!

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

> Names were given by the first white european man that "found" the plant, instead of the local inhabitants who have known and named the plants for thousands of years.

I see this brought up often in all sorts of contexts. It's the "if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around" thing. If some indigenous group with no writing system nor contact with the rest of the world has a name for something... does it really have a name or even exist in the global sense since no one else can be made aware of it?

What specifically makes these issues, much less glaring issues?

>We could probably come up with a better system using a tree coordinate system.

I'd suggest having ones that count from origin, and other that count from present, so the current extant species would be +1, LUCA would be -1.

Eukaryot? count from origin, Beagle? Count from present.

Congratulations! Add a water feature ... it will attract birds. And next to that some smaller shrubs. Then once the trees grow you can put climbers and ferns in them. And throw down some rocks for good measure. It encourages variant microclimates which encourages biodiversity.

There are a lot more to Criminal Botany. There's the chaotic evil variety, like planting an invasive species, planting bamboo near your enemy's house, and sprinkling mint on someone's garden plot. There's the chaotic good variety, like broadcasting native seeds on a grass lawn and releasing moles onto a golf field. There's chaotic neutral, like making air layering on trees that you don't own, or otherwise taking seeds, cuttings, or plantlets from them.

Most plant–related crimes are pie–on–the–windowsill–on–Sunday tier.

There's also guerilla gardening, where you plant stuff where you're not supposed to, typically municipal soil

You’ll have to start with S1E1

Man you must be really fun at parties

If you read a bit further, they author then explains why they put that in:

> The fucker [Linneaus] created a beautiful system, and it works. And that’s why we still use it. I say this because a few unthinking “performative leftist” nitwits as of late have decided to attack the science of taxonomy itself).

I think its in there to head of compliants from people who would otherwise say that latin scientific names are bad. The author goes on to illustrate why thats bad

The ones listed? You might want to get in contact with them because they are unlikely to be reading this thread