pinned post: FAQ

welcome to BSP! i’m quill, i love plant science, we are all here to have a good time.

BEFORE SENDING AN ASK:

-i do not do plant identifications. this is because plant ID down to the species can be pretty tricky and takes time, and its best to have the plant in front of you while you do it, not to mention that i’m only well-versed in iowa plants (my home state). if you’re in the USA, it’s likely your local/state DNR or USDA office will have a key to local plants up on their website. i’m in the process of compiling a resource list for plant ID state-by-state in the US and US territories, I’ll get that up as soon as i can

-plant care stuff is similar, mostly because even though i know a lot about plants on a scientific level, im TERRIBLE at taking care of actual plants. i’m actually best versed in commercial greenhouse care and diseases/plant pathology on a wider scale. at some point i’ll try to get a basic resource list for better plant care stuff up, too

-i don’t check my dms unless you send me an ask specifically pointing it out; i do, however, read every ask i get, although i get enough that i can’t respond to all of them!!

-because i started this blog in high school, some of the older posts on here can be inaccurate or poorly worded; typically my newer posts are better sourced and executed and stuff imo.

THE BEST POSTS ON THIS BLOG (under construction as i remember more i really like):

- “Can u tell me about moss“ (moss crash course post)

- ”what's the dumbest piece of plant anatomy. where do you look at a plant and you're like "why did evolution do this instead of literally anything else"” and (similar topic) ”so when i see museum paleobotany illustration like especially pre-cenozoic most of the plants look intuitively 'simpler' to me; more cartoonish than modern plants, even modulo the overall realism of the illustration. i vaguely assumed this was because they were based on degraded fossil evidence, but lately i was thinking it's not inconceivable that morphology actually tended simpler in the past. any insight?”

- ”Whats a lichen if not a plant“ and (similar topic) “What exactly IS a lichen?? Pls im just an artist who only knows that plants are pretty” (closest current post to a lichen crash course)

- ”A little while ago you made a remark about ferns along the lines of "God really left you unfinished huh?". Can you please elaborate on that?”

- ”OH! about double fertilisation: bls explain the polar nucleii”

unironically a growth form which is wild. there is no ‘tree family’ and many plant families have accidentally reinvented the tree through history. there are some plants that are like, bushes and herbaceous plants related to plants that are trees, etc, and some families where everybody is living the tree lifestyle, which like. it’s cool but like with many evolution things you get out of the tree lifestyle what you put in to the tree lifestyle you know what I mean. many benefits to not taking the tree lifestyle as well

you see mosses dark green you see mosses brown-green but when you see mosses BRIGHT green….holy shit

ok. not gonna pretend like I know much about plywood. or legally trading plant based goods without a declaration. or declaring or using plant materials legally or illegally in the us to begin with. but. Florida couple sentenced to 5 years in prison for between $25 million and $65 million of illegal plywood commerce related crimes

asking people at the bar if they know what a lichen is and it’s. a little guy on avwrage

dichotomous plants are so weird man. like they’re not even weird it’s the becoming the dichotomous that’s weird. i went to a talk once about a population of strawberries that were accidentally slowly becoming dichotomous and they didn’t even have sex chromosomes, like they had like a bunch of genes across a bunch of chromosomes that did a little bit of sex but not a lot and it added up to one whole sex kind of but not enough that they had all collectively decided to be one sex or the other, so there was still like, a sizable chunk of the population that was producing flowers of both sexes. like they were microdosing it. taking the sex genes for a spin in the strawberry patch

society will tell you the creeping charlie is bad and wrong theyll tell you the creeping charlie invades gardens and is a pest but i know the truth. which is that the little purple flowers are cute

not to be the guy who stops and admires the flowers but when I go outside. they do draw me in fr fr

hey, is anybody here an herbarium curator/someone who works at an herbarium? and how did you get there? did you go for a masters’ degree?

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ah to be a moss in a beautifully manicured Denver botanical gardens exhibit…..

incredibly obvious statement but it MUST be said. ah to be a lichen or shrub on a mountaintop

in an odd place as a zillenial in ag where I’m generally anti-consumption, would like to be able to own and fix my own stuff etc but I also work with old farmers so I’ll be like ‘hey can we throw this thing away?’ and they’ll be like ‘NOOOOOOOOOO those are the truck balls from the first model T we need those!!!’ and it’ll look like this

miscommunication at my workplace a few months ago led to an unknown persons disposing of untreated soybeans in the wrong spot, which then became a soybean disaster zone when a skid loader picked up said soybean pile on accident and spread soybeans everywhere in the sloped parking lot while backing up over bumps like a comedy skit, which then caused cars to drive over them regularly until they got crushed into tiny soybean pieces that often ended up on the curb by a grassy area with a couple trees. as you can imagine this has been huge for the local birds, the dark eyed junkos specifically. the moral is that sometimes you just hit it big as a little guy