#another iowan talking shit about plants #new stereotype alert!!!!!!!!

if you spent any amount of ur life in iowa literally surrounded by endless fields of maize (’beautiful rolling hills of gold’ or whatever bullshit people who dont live here call it) and you remain unwilling to call plants out about the rate at which they fuck, always, constantly, ceaselessly, aggressively, than you have learned nothing and i hope u walk into the bathroom in the middle of the night and experience a scene like the bloody bathtub one in scream where u pull back the curtain and theres maize growing up the drain into ur home

@botanyshitposts U get it thank you. 

I haven’t lived in Iowa for three generations and the urge to talk smack about plants still runs strong.

Please tell me about oak hybrids! I’ve learned a lot about citrus hybrids recently, but not about oak hybrids!

Full disclosure: I’m not an arborist, but this is how i remember it being explained to me by DBG’s Dan The Arborist:

It’s not actually clear if Oak Trees HAVE species.

To elaborate:

• One oak tree looks/grows/and even tastes very much like another, to the point where some botanists and arborists are going “Can you really call this a different species when the changes are so miniscule that they could be chalked up to differneces between individuals?
  
  
• Yes, Taste.  sometimes the only way to tell one oak tree from another is that the bark is slightly more bitter than a different kind fo oak.
  
  
• FURTHERMORE, when you DO find two very different-looking Oaks from different parts of the world whose last common ancestor was back in the goddamn Pliestocene, you can plant them next to eachother and they will gleefully comingle their DNA into a perfectly viable new tree.
  
  
• Which will somehow manage to look exactly like another, unrelated tree.
  
  
• So the theory espoused by Dan The Arborist, on that cold march morning after he’d spent 5 minutes loudly and somewhat profanely rambling in front of the most Charlie-Brown-Christmas-Tree-Looking Motherfucker of an Oak Bastard Child as mentioned above, goes as such:
  
  
• Dan thinks that Quercus is a genus comprised of a single, highly variable species of tree that’s managed to take over most of the temperate parts of the world by being a little whore, unquote.
  
  
• Those variants are the botanical equivalent of breeds, and a scrawny little Scrub Oak and a majrestic Burr Oak are the same species in the same way that a Chihuahua and a Newfoundland are both Dogs.

This is very much up for debate in botanical circles but if Dan discovers another redheaded bastard oak growing in the gardens he will take it to the next conference and thrash it about until they see it his way.

Quercus is a genus comprised of a single, highly variable species of tree that’s managed to take over most of the temperate parts of the world by being a little whore  

I need this as an illuminated botany text page or something. I have not laughed this hard in weeks.

@theshitpostcalligrapher takes comissions!