EP: 460 | Re-Wilding our Landscape

On this episode we’re joined by Bob Brzuszek  and Tim Schauwecker. Bob’s “retired” and Tim still teaches at the Mississippi State School of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design.  These guys are buddies and LOVE native plants and utilize them where ever possible. It’s a fascinating discussion about what the past landscape looked like and it gives us insight into making habitat decisions, both in our yards and out in the country, for today and the future.  Understanding the role of native plants and how to give them the best chance for success was a very enlightening discussion. 

Listen, Learn and Enjoy. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I'm Jeff Foxworthy and welcome to Gamekeeper Podcast. If you want to learn more about farming for wildlife and habitat management, everybody, you are in the right place. Join the Gamekeeper crew direct from Office Yoke Land Enhancement Studio as they discuss the latest wildlife and habitat management practices. News, and of course, honey. There's no telling what you'll learn, but I'm gonna tell you, I bet it's interesting. Enjoy.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

We're live in three, two, one. All right, guys.

SPEAKER_07 0:30

I don't know, I'm not sure what we're getting into today, but it's fun, it's gonna be cool.

SPEAKER_03 0:36

I'm a I'm a fan before they walk in.

SPEAKER_08 0:38

Deadly is giddy. I invited the whole neighborhood. There you go. There you go.

SPEAKER_05 0:42

And we kind of touched on some of this yesterday with these end up.

SPEAKER_08 0:46

We were talking about that at lunch, you know, old field management and whatever. It's all it's very related. It's all landscaping, rather at a different level.

SPEAKER_05 0:56

So yeah, landscaping.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Y'all have heard me more and more as we've evolved that the brand, the Mozilla brand, is about connecting humans with nature. That is at the core of everything we do. Obviously, it starts with hunting and conservation, but many other things. But you know, this particular topic and the our guest today, or that's the center of the bullseye for them. Speaking, speaking of your shirt, is that something I can get down at the store? Uh no, I had them just make one for me because I'm the coolest conservation guy in the world. Yes, you can buy them at the store.

SPEAKER_07 1:27

Conservation is cool.

SPEAKER_03 1:29

I'm actually the last person to get the cool stuff. You know, the kids all have it. And I, you know, where'd you get that? Oh, we're doing samples of those. I used to get all the samples and you know, licensed product samples. I never get them anymore. Yeah. Hey, speaking of samples, you brought this up. Bobby is the best Santa Claus I got left. You do take care of me all time to time.

SPEAKER_07 1:48

Let me tell you all the story. So last year at the Foxhole shootout, there were some bed sheets, uh mossy oak bed sheets. And I said, I gotta get them because you know I'm trying to decorate a little cabin, and they were the same queen, which is what I'm all having everything. In the silent auction. In the silent auction. So we bought them. And they've been sitting in a drawer. Yeah, we won it sitting in a drawer since then. Till last weekend we finally got a bed, and I got over there. And when I pulled them on there, they had printed across them sample.

SPEAKER_05 2:20

Are you serious? That is awesome. Perfect. That's perfect. You have a very unique one of one. One of one, exactly.

SPEAKER_07 2:30

That was fun.

SPEAKER_08 2:31

So, Dudley, why don't you introduce our guests? All right. So both of these guys are actually my neighbors in Startville. Well, sorry for that. Disclaimer, disclaimer. Both of them have had tours at Mississippi State, you know, in the in the landscaping department. Uh both of them have been to the nursery bringing students a gajillion times. Uh so I've got Tim Shalaker. Right. Um and then Bob Bruzek.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Nailed it. In the house.

SPEAKER_08 3:01

Um they kind of helped get me involved uh with, you know, I've always been a tree guy, and just through osmosis, I've I've kind of, you know, broadened my horizons into plants and grasses and actual landscaping and all of that.

SPEAKER_05 3:16

So didn't Tim's crew come over there and help us uh tear down the nursery and rebuilder? They did.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yep, that was an extra credit project. We appreciate that. That was a good day. That was a good day. That was a good day. We needed it. Yeah. That nursery, I I I told Dudley not to make this into an ad or anything, but we'll take it. Well, it looks like an ad, okay. Yeah, the the nursery for us has been a great resource professionally as well as for our students because we get to go show them something that we talk about. And it's like, okay, we're gonna go out and see a nursery where they're actually uh you know doing this, producing plants that are beneficial to uh wildlife and our our game, you know, the the landscape game. And uh and so having the nursery here, having it be a local resource is just a huge, huge uh advantage for us. We we use it all the time. We love it.

SPEAKER_08 4:09

Yeah, and so they've both taught at state, they've both worked out in the real world. I I want to say uh Tim kind of did it backwards and and Bob kind of went the the normal way most people do. But uh which means retiring, but not retired. Right. Uh so Bob uh helped run Crosby Arboretum down on the on the Gulf Coast for years. Amazing place.

SPEAKER_03 4:32

Um you did that right out of college too, right? I did, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 4:37

Uh Tim in the last century, actually. Uh you you helped co-author a book about Blackland prairies and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Edited, edited, edited, not not authored. Uh that would be that's even cooler. That that was my thing in graduate school. Because he knows how to spell his prairies, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 4:54

Black prairie is awesome.

SPEAKER_07 4:56

Yeah. Laney, I got a couple quotes. I want to see if you can nail down who may have said this.

SPEAKER_05 5:00

Am I the only one who gets to answer if you're not going to be able to do that?

SPEAKER_07 5:02

No, everybody can answer, but I'm I'm your your ability to name who said this is uncanny.

SPEAKER_05 5:10

After I nailed the 50 cent comment. He's got Google pulled up on his compute laptop.

SPEAKER_07 5:14

All right, here we go. The beauty of native landscapes lies in how they harmonize ecological function with unfiltered authenticity, celebrating naturalism over human domination. It is the realization that healthy, locally adapted habitat gardens is not a mess, but a profound display of true functional beauty. I know that one. God, that's Bob Brusé, right? Uh quoting. Those are some good words. Well, listen to this one. Tell me this one, Lanny. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. That one I know.

SPEAKER_04 5:53

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

And it's Aldulia Bowl.

SPEAKER_07 5:56

That sounds right. Yeah, and then listen to this last one. This one, this one I made me think because the guy who said it thought I'm surprised at him. So the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of other others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my propositions. And some see no nature at all. But to the eyes of the imagination, nature is imagination itself.

SPEAKER_05 6:31

Wow, that's pretty deep.

SPEAKER_07 6:33

How about that? You know who said that.

SPEAKER_05 6:34

I'm gonna go with Walt Disney.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

I'm going with Teddy Roosevelt.

SPEAKER_07 6:38

Yeah, I'm going with William Blake. William Blake. Wasn't he the guy who was the detective on that show Beretta? No. What's show Beretta? Probably.

SPEAKER_06 6:48

Yeah. Right. What is that? Bob. I'm pretty sure it's your Magnum PI kind of guy.

SPEAKER_05 6:55

I do like magnum.

SPEAKER_07 6:58

So I'm setting the tone for today. I mean, nature is sort of we celebrate nature every time we sit down in here in some shape, form, or fashion. You guys look like y'all are a lot of fun to be around and look like y'all really love nature yourselves.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

Yeah, we hope to, as as teachers anyway, to teach others, I think, by example. And if we're passionate about what we do, we hope that students and the public can also get passionate about getting involved and getting interested in the natural world uh around them, no matter what context they're in. Whoa. Yeah. Two on that.

SPEAKER_07 7:38

You know, more and more people are spending so much time on screens these days and not looking around and looking up at the trees and the beautiful things that we have around us.

SPEAKER_05 7:46

Well, and even us as gamekeepers, you know, we're always acting on what we can add and what we can change, but there's a whole lot of stuff there that we need to be managing for. We talked about a little bit of that yesterday, too. So it really opens your eyes to uh what more you can do on your property because you often limit yourself by thinking, you know, of a certain way of doing things, but native plant management.

SPEAKER_03 8:11

We all at the core of gamekeepers is people who have access or actually own land or lease land or even if you're in a club or you have a neighbor and and doing stuff to it, you know, and there's a lot of choices you have, you know, to plant things and do things and kind of, you know, whatever, I hate the word manipulate, but manipulate things better. A lot of it's based around, you know, making my hunting better or whatever, too. But I guess the point I'm getting at, when you get a broader constect context of holistically uh managing and your awareness of all the things in nature, you take a particular place, especially, you know, and they're all different, like you know, we got a lot, we talk, we all love the Black Prairie and everything. I talk about it all the time on podcasts because that's where we are, but then there's so many different things. What I was getting at is like if our core consumer that is a big hunter is in the last 20 years has become addicted to doing stuff on the place that they have access to, their farm, their whatever. Uh, and it seems like you never have a uh, you know, you never run out of things to do. These guys, especially, there is an endless mosaic to paint from like no other artistry in the world. When you've got nature involved, every single piece of dirt, every single piece of soil, climate, everything's different. What works there, what doesn't, even actually, you know, carefully maybe introducing things, and I don't mean exotic or invasive, but things that will improve there. I mean, it's endless. And so you talk about getting addicted to you know, connecting with nature, making the place better, take a broad view of everything. Uh, one thing for me we had in common in our walkthrough the other day in my house was like I've become just a nut job for wildflowers. I just love them. And there's something about something that you know God put there and nature put there, as opposed to, you know, man bought it a lows and plant it or wherever, you know. Um that I've just become so addicted to and trying to manage and do. But anyway, my biggest point was like that that is the ultimate canvas and colors to draw from is land.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah, and I'm gonna add time to that. Um, and I think that that's one of the things that we tried to get across to our students was that good things take time and that a lot of the decisions that you make today, you're gonna be dead by the time they come really to fruition. And that, you know, you start talking about a Mississippi forest takes no less than a hundred years to mature. Well, that's well beyond your lifespan. And if if you start looking at it like that, you start seeing those layers like you're talking about, Toxie, where okay, this is the first layer, and then now there's there's these other things that are gonna come in after that, and it's gonna take a long time to get right. And that's a hard thing to convince a landscape client because they expect really short instant gratification, gratification and really quick turnaround. And uh, you know, we we try to caution against that when we try to talk people into taking a little bit more time for things to develop and watching them over years. You know, you don't have to be in a hurry to do most of the things that we're gonna talk about today. Uh, you can you can go really slow, be deliberative, and uh and make choices uh in a in a really long-term fashion.

SPEAKER_04 11:35

We used to have native plant sales down on the Gulf Coast, and I remember one time this elderly gentleman, more elderly than me, uh came up with this little one-gallon plant of it was like an oak, and he just put it on the table and he was ready to buy it. And I told him, I said, you know, it's gonna be a few years before you can hang that that swing on that tree. And he said, I'm not planning it for me. And I think that's the kind of attitude we need to have. It's it's not us. We're we're leaving a planet for others to live with.

SPEAKER_08 12:09

So when we first started the nursery and taking phone calls and all that, you know, probably 50% of the time or more, the question would be is how how fast is this tree gonna produce? How long is it gonna take? Yeah, winking a hunt over it, winking a hunt over it. And then it's progressed into you know what Bob was just saying is is people are more often enjoying just watching that tree or plant grow.

SPEAKER_03 12:33

I remember when we started and I kept thinking, slow to respond. It's hard to get people, you know, and I started thinking about we just start and we started talking about hey, just take a little tiny piece of your budget you have for each year, whether it be for you know planting some in the summer or fall or whatever you're doing or property, just take a little bit and just try planting a few trees. And I think what really in just a year or two, I would ask Dudley, he said, you know, most of the most of the orders are coming from current people that already bought from us. I mean, they love the service and the quality, but they've after a year or two, they taste what you're talking about and they see the they actually can see the effects of stuff that they did, even it wasn't an instant gratification thing, because they'd already done it a couple years ago. And then all I've done since then is regret that I didn't do more early on. Sure. But it's funny the whole time listening to them talk, and I gotta say this, I could just feel my dad in the room with us because the most profound thing said in the history of Marseille, he did when he said the good that men do were live long after they're gone. And it speaks exactly to what they're talking about.

SPEAKER_07 13:38

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_03 13:38

You know, and and there's only one way to kind of taste that. It sounds so inspirational, and it really is, because the way he did it was the truth. People were always saying to him, you know, you're 80 years old. What are you doing planting hardwoods? He said, You'll never get a dime from them. And that's when he said, I it's not why I'm planting them. You know. He wanted to know it was there and he was doing stuff for the next generation, too. So anyway, pretty cool stuff. It's just the point is, we all at our biggest job here is just to get people to try things, to sample it, to like, hey, prove us wrong. Love to hear otherwise, but go down the road and do some of these things that are beyond you know, huntover a couple weeks from now, you know.

SPEAKER_07 14:19

All right, well, let's get this show started. Why don't we uh let's do the rapid fire brought to you by Nutrient Ag Solutions? Yeah. And uh, I think basically uh they're gonna ask you some. Oh my goodness. Yeah, Dudley, set this up, got it going.

SPEAKER_08 14:34

Prepared my own list with without using AI. Okay. That's normal.

SPEAKER_07 14:38

Don't don't let your foot off the gas, Dudley. I'll save them.

SPEAKER_08 14:42

I'll save some of these questions for later if you're right, Tim.

SPEAKER_01 14:45

Okay. All right. Uh so first one, Dudley. And you guys can bet on Dudley, uh, Colorado or New Mexico. This is a this is just a warm-up.

SPEAKER_08 14:54

Well, it used to be Colorado, but now it's New Mexico.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

All right. All right. Uh Flip Pallet or Jeff Foxworthy.

SPEAKER_08 15:04

Oh man, that's that's that's a tough one. Well, I'm gonna have to choose my deceased buddy over Jeff, even though I love Jeff to death. Uh so you had to choose.

SPEAKER_07 15:15

You could have put a nap in there. That's where it would have really got.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a hike or a nap, but I already know the answer. Uh let's see. Uh okay, so flip palette. Uh say maybe called you one day. Would you rather go bone fishing or turkey hunting with flip palate? That's easy. Uh that's easy.

SPEAKER_08 15:38

Turkey hunting.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Oh, that one's not my load.

SPEAKER_08 15:42

That one's not my he needs to come to our hunting camp and go turkey hunting. But I guess we'll be waiting for heaven to do that.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yep. All right. Uh Anthony's Fresh Food Market or Dave's Dark Horse Tavern.

SPEAKER_08 15:58

Dude, you are so brutal. That's old. This is great. You are brutal.

SPEAKER_03 16:03

Um, so you know Taste of your own medicine, good. It depends.

SPEAKER_08 16:08

Uh I'm just gonna have to say Dave's just because it's in my hometown. But for for business reasons, I love Anthony's, you know, for bringing clients. Uh, I'll take a stake at Anthony's over any anything. There you go. I like that one.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Okay, last one. Widespread panic or fish. I knew this one was coming. Music.

SPEAKER_07 16:32

Uh we're talking fishing. Yes. Or fishing. With a pH.

SPEAKER_08 16:36

I've got more history with panic, but uh fish is is my favorite movie.

SPEAKER_03 16:40

See, I would have see what got Bobby is he has widespread panic over someone finding his fishing hole. That is for sure. Don't be able to do that. But he thought you were talking about that. I did. That was great. Very good. Yeah, very good. That Dudley in a box in a corner. Oh my gosh. I'm a pressure zone.

SPEAKER_08 16:59

I'm a terrible person now.

SPEAKER_03 17:01

Return fire now.

SPEAKER_08 17:02

Let's just say so. Tim's on my left. Tim, you answer first. Bob, you answer right after him. Okay. Uh pretend you contacted Alpha Gal tick allergy. What do you think you'd miss the most? Beef, pork, venison, small mammals, or dairy? Pork, other.

SPEAKER_05 17:22

Can you say all the above?

SPEAKER_08 17:25

Yeah. I know for me it's I can't believe it, but for me and Toxie, it's dairy.

SPEAKER_03 17:30

Yep. There it is. Jeez.

SPEAKER_08 17:32

Where did you live when the United States turned 200 years old in 1976? And how old were you?

SPEAKER_01 17:40

Yeah. Carbondale, Illinois. I was actually moving that summer uh between Elkgrove Village, Illinois and Carbondale, Illinois, and I was nine.

SPEAKER_04 17:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_08 17:50

Back to you, Bob. Detroit, Michigan. 17 years old. Oh man. Name a native species in the maple genus that you prefer, that you love. Oh, good one.

SPEAKER_01 18:03

Okay, so Catalpa Creek box elder. And I know everybody hates a box elder, but I'm a huge box elder fan.

SPEAKER_08 18:10

Okay. I thought you were going to say uh Florida maple. All right.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

Well, I love it. Florida.

SPEAKER_04 18:15

Chalk chalk maple, Acer Leucoderme, is uh a white bark version of a maple that has stunning fall color.

SPEAKER_08 18:24

Okay. Um let's see, what's the next one? Can you think of a city or town off the top of your head you visited that you would say is leading by example with including natives and best management practices? Starkwell.

SPEAKER_05 18:41

Hi. Good answer.

SPEAKER_08 18:43

Bentonville, Arkansas. Okay.

SPEAKER_05 18:45

Ah, lots up there. We've seen that a lot up there.

SPEAKER_08 18:47

Um about how many cups of coffee do you drink per day? One gallons. Uh be honest, when was the last time you used a dichotomous key to ID something?

SPEAKER_01 19:00

Uh man, Sedge's like uh six, five, six months ago.

SPEAKER_08 19:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 19:06

Yeah, I would say a year ago, the manual vascular floor of the Carolinas. Okay. Well, y'all have me beat. Uh name an album that changed you.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

Dark Side of the Moon.

SPEAKER_04 19:19

Ooh. Wow, how many albums changed me? I know. Maybe the first one.

SPEAKER_03 19:26

Name them all.

SPEAKER_04 19:28

I would say Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Bands live album.

SPEAKER_08 19:35

Okay. Name a preparation from a summer vegetable that you crave.

SPEAKER_05 19:42

Uh fried okra. Ooh, just had some at lunch.

SPEAKER_08 19:46

Fried tomatoes. Had some of those at lunch.

SPEAKER_07 19:50

Can't believe nobody said Jerry Clower live at the Grand High. I know. I know you were thinking.

SPEAKER_08 19:57

Uh okay, so we're not through yet. And last but not least, both the state flower and tree are the southern magnolia. If given the choice, what would you choose as a state flower?

SPEAKER_05 20:10

Great question.

SPEAKER_08 20:12

Or would you keep it the same?

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Oh man, that's tough. I know.

SPEAKER_04 20:17

So we have a state wildflower.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Do you know what tulip tree? I would go tulip tree.

SPEAKER_04 20:22

For the pop for the flower?

SPEAKER_08 20:23

For I mean, what was the other one? State tree. Well, mac southern magnolia is the tree and the flower.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

It's not the wildflower, but let's see. Oh, I didn't. Okay. But it's okay. Uh what's the wildflower, by the way? I wrote one. It's choriopsis.

SPEAKER_05 20:39

Oh. Oh, we got a lot of that.

SPEAKER_01 20:41

Yeah. Yeah. It's a good one.

SPEAKER_05 20:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

So, what's your favorite flower? Yeah, I'm going with I'm going with tulip poplar. I just like the tree and the black. Beautiful flower. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:51

I think the may pops are really cool. Okay. Well, that's it. Good ones, guys.

SPEAKER_08 20:58

That was really good, Dudley.

SPEAKER_05 21:02

Reverse rapid fire. They had Dudley sweating. They did. He was back behind the mic. Forgive me, sir.

SPEAKER_08 21:09

Forgive me, friends.

SPEAKER_03 21:11

Well, he's he's he's so worried that he's gonna mess up, and these are his close neighbors, he's gonna have to hear about it a lot more than usual. I was trying to put him there.

SPEAKER_06 21:19

Yeah, you didn't have a job.

SPEAKER_04 21:20

He looked like a rabbit leg caught in a trap.

SPEAKER_07 21:23

Can y'all help me understand? Well, one of the early things about um non-natives that Dudley explained to me was that like caterpillars and stuff don't end up using it. And then we learned through some bird podcasts about how many caterpillars a little tit mouse made like 300 a day needs it to feed for two weeks. That's all Doug Talamy stuff. And so can you help me understand how the the insect life doesn't react properly with the when you bring in something that's non-native.

SPEAKER_04 21:56

So it's about adaptation. So over how many. Many thousands of years have insects co-evolved with the plants of the southeastern United States, and just that relationship of time uh you you really can't break. I mean, it's they're adapted to these things, they feed off of it, and that's what makes a complex ecosystem is the fact that these plants support the insects, which support the wildlife, which support us. Uh, and all those things are interrelated and not able to be separated very easily without major changes happening.

SPEAKER_07 22:39

That was that was news to me. Oh, and and and it starts to do that.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

I mean our decisions have so many more ramifications than just what meets the eye.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

Yeah. Yeah, we and we always are we try to get our students to to understand the idea of a community and that you know it's not just about that one tree. Although a tree can can certainly be a community, it can have the things on it that that uh that make that, but we try to get them to understand that you know we all understand food webs, but they're really, really way more complicated than what we see in a textbook, or you know, there's there's so much diversity in a in a food web from soil to plant root to plant uh you know the the above ground growth to all the animals that visit it to all the things that eat those, and it's so much more complicated than we than we even give it credit for. And uh so we we tried to get our we try to get our students to understand that it's more than just a single tree, that that tree belongs to a community and that there's a myriad other species that that are tied historically, evolutionarily to that to that species, that it's more it's bigger, it's bigger than just a single tree. Uh so when you're thinking about natives or using natives, we're we we try to get people to to expand and and think about a community rather than just a single uh species or a single specimen, uh and to to get more complicated combinations uh out of out of the the space that they're managing. That that's a a huge part of what we've tried to communicate, I think, over the years.

SPEAKER_03 24:18

So uh thinking about them coming today, I was just and having spent some time with Bob just listening to him. Um the word that kept popping in my head like a little scroll across there was you know, and and it's like the word that we could get in people's minds that maybe our normal listeners don't consider enough, and it was just I kept hearing symbiosis. It's like everything's just so connected, and one reason to learn more than just like I'm gonna make my place better to kill a 160 this year, you know? Which we all love. I'm not knocking that, but that when that's all, you mean you're gonna almost fight an uphill battle trying to do that if you don't just like we talked about yesterday, it was amazing about you know the old fill management style for deer, whitetails especially. There's just so much more going on, and and I guess important saying that instead of I've you know, instead of flashing by like I've been I'm talking about most of the stuff I've kind of sound preachy about because I've been guilty of. And you know, um just learning all these things why I've the the the plant apps we kept talking about. It's been so much fun for me because you can learn so much. I must talk to Tom who helps manage stuff for me today. Well, game keeper tool buy him, yeah, the the app so he can do it because he was along for the rival Marcus the other day. And he was like, Oh man, I'm stupid, I don't know nothing. I said, Well, you join the club, me too. There's just so much to learn. The best way to do it is get that out, see stuff you like or you're interested in it, or you don't have any idea, and see what it is. And especially if you're on your place and you see something being really grazed and utilized or whatever, or you know, you may have a real invasive something you need to get on top of. Well, you know, it's a great way to if you you snap that picture, it'll teach you. It's crazy how you know, with the negatives of modern technology, that's a really good one for people. Because then the more we can educate everybody listening, the more the better job they can do, not just today in the sun season, but for passing it along, like Daddy said. So anyway, the more you learn, and of course, you know, people aren't gonna go to class in the school and necessarily read books all the time. Get that app and take it, make it apart, and you begun begin to learn more. The more you finally learn, the more you'll want to learn. And then you can paint that canvas so much better.

SPEAKER_08 26:42

Um to add to that, the more you learn, and we've discussed this in the podcast, but the more things you notice that kind of disturb you.

SPEAKER_05 26:51

Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. I'm there. I see that's kind of where I was gonna go uh with the question is you know, it seems like most of this stuff is already in the seed bank, you know, on a on, and I understand maybe you know, planting pocket prairies and stuff around your house, how you know you might plug those or seed those, but is it a better approach on a landscape level to um to Dudley's point, you know, to work on what you don't want there to promote native growth, or is it or is it you know, like planting a food lot, we burn it all down and then we're re-establishing.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

So I'm I'm a huge proponent of what I call successional landscapes, which is stop mowing, see what comes in, learn, learn the plants, you know, try to keep up. Uh, but you're not you're not gonna learn. I don't know them all. I I'm not even close, you know, not not even close. Um, and and I never will. I I'll never know all the plants that are out there. Yeah, and and which is the great thing about it, but just to to see that first wave and kind of see what comes in, see which invasives you're gonna have to get on top of, read a little bit about, like for me, privet. You know, it's like, okay, what's my privet strategy? Well, on my own, I got a Dudley's in our neighborhood. We we our our our neighborhood looks like Asia. You know, there's there are so many Asian plants in our neighborhood that are have been set loose from the landscapes in our neighborhood over the last 50 years. Um, but you know, for me, I go out after a rain and a privet seedling pulls pulls right up. It is but if it's dry, I can't I can't pull a single one of them. You know, so you learn your little strategies uh to to time things, right? And I think timing is everything when you're talking about these long-term approaches. What am I what are what are some spring things that that I can get done? What are what are the things that I don't mind doing in the summer? I find maybe you know, find myself in the shade. Uh in the wintertime, I try to do all my gardening from basically like November to May. And then I don't want to have anything to do with it through through the the heat of the summer other than to mow a little bit and hopefully pick some vegetables. Um, that's you know, I I try to find these seasonal tasks that that make them easier at a at a at the right time. So you're not killing yourself in the summer trying to get rid of privet when there's a better time to do it. Um, and those kinds of things. We we struggle with this uh, you know, in town working with the city trying to help them time things right. And it's not easy because they work on these municipal schedules instead of kind of a natural schedule. It's like, hey, we we got to spray three times between now and October. And sometimes that's hard to you know to get scheduled. Uh it and and so those kinds of things uh are to me the the things that you learn over time, how how to how to do things the easiest way, not necessarily the the hardest. You're starting.

SPEAKER_05 29:46

I'm always good at the hardest way. I don't know why.

SPEAKER_08 29:49

Want to do it, but and you're you're smart to say that. Like just let it grow up and then and then learn and and do little bits at a time.

SPEAKER_07 29:57

So you guys aren't mowing your yards.

SPEAKER_04 30:00

I have a patch of turf that is maybe one of the size of these area rugs, which is probably 20 by 15, enough for the dogs to go on, enough to go to the bird feeder, uh, and everything else is vegetated. And uh, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, it was there was a lot of bare dirt. Um, and so a lot of it was healing. And to me, the place to start is the soil. The soil is the heartbeat of your landscape. And if you have poor soils, poor in the sense that maybe it eroded, it was heavily overcropped, um, then you're gonna be limited basically as to what's gonna happen there. Um and building soil is another thing that is extremely useful if you're interested in gardening, if you're interested in producing good, healthy forest uh areas, then having an understanding, I always liken it to buying a car. It's like, you know, if you buy a used car, pop the hood and look at that engine. Uh, because you know, you got to make sure it's in there. And so the same thing. I anytime I've ever looked at property, I take a shovel with me and I go to see what I'm inheriting because that will tell me what I'm able to do with that piece of land.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

And and soil building is another really slow process that you just gotta sort of commit to. Um, but letting things grow up in it and starting those cycles uh to cycle nutrients back into the soil is one of the I think the quickest ways to do it. You know, you just letting it letting it happen. And uh I'd so I'm in the process of minimizing. I I I've kept turf. My son played soccer, uh, baseball growing up, uh, you know, so we we always wanted to have a a place to to play, you know, and that's always been the case. But I've got a stream buffer that I basically add about three feet to every year. Uh I I let it grow up where the tree limbs are reaching out to, and that becomes my new, that becomes my new line. So the the early successional stuff is coming up and meeting the lower branches of the trees in my buffer, and I've always got this kind of nice tight line that follows those tree branches. And so it's it's easy to see it. There's a there's a veil there that wildlife is using my that corridor, and and there's a veil between them and me on my front porch, you know. But I know they're back there, and uh, and they're definitely, you know, I'm creating a corridor in our neighborhood that that they can use. And every year I give about two or three feet more over to it. And so it's it's creeping in, but you know, my wife doesn't even notice. So right.

SPEAKER_07 32:45

Any of your neighbors ever like drive by and go, hey, when are you gonna cut that? That would be my yard.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

Yeah, I send them over to Dudley's. I say you seen his yard? No, no, uh, not yet, but we understand actually there there's been a crew going around Starkful giving people citations. Have you you seen this? For not cutting their grass. For not cutting their grass, yeah. And so there is an ordinance, and if they see around my mailbox, they're they're gonna have a hard time with it.

SPEAKER_08 33:10

And uh, but that's just that's just oh I noticed your butterfly weed is in full bloom. Going off, going off right now. And my uh they got a few other things in there, and in that area he was talking about, he's got uh our local wing stem that I need to collect some seed from. But that's that's the plant that you know when it when you get a hard frost, you see the ribbons of ice coming out of the base. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I got a good stand of that.

SPEAKER_04 33:35

Verbacina. So many communities have landscape ordinances or what they call weed control ordinances, which limit the height that your lawn or whatever else can grow to, typically addressing the front of the property along the road edge. Um, also HOAs also have often their own sort of set of conditions. Um, what I have is my front yard actually exceeds the height because it's gardened. Um, and I also have a sign out there that says pollinator garden. So if anybody has a question, look at that sign and it's telling you what's going on. So identifying these sort of cues to care, what you don't want it to look like is you just abandoned it for six months and not taking care of it. But if you're planting things, if you're kind of managing the aesthetics with what the successional models are doing, and there are ways of doing that by pruning or just addressing the edges, putting a log edge along the edge of a bed kind of you know makes it look like somebody's taking care of it. And certainly you want to be, you know, you want your neighbors to be happy with you as well. But um there are ways I think of kind of, and I think that's the art of landscape design is really how we interface with nature, and yeah, that is as different to each person as a personality. Um I used to I always wanted to write an article called Haircuts and Horticulture because I had a guy who lived next to me who was in the services who always had a buzz cut, and his front yard looked like it had a buzz cut. Uh, and then I had friends who had long hair, and that's what their landscape looked like. So stereotype in a well, a little bit, but you know, yeah, it's got something to do with the hair. That's all I'm saying. Hair bigot. You can see my mine is pretty tight. Um, but I think that yours is bare dirt, right?

SPEAKER_03 35:32

Yeah, exactly. Yours and Bobby's half of mine. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 35:36

You know, it's about context. Um, and I think that's the interesting thing about landscape design is how can you meet your interest in nature and at the same time express yourself as you know, what you like, what you think the world around you, you know, to me, each of our properties is like our own little piece of heaven, right? We're living in we're living in our little castle, and whatever that castle is, a lot of times unfortunately is being dictated by what you think the neighbors are gonna say. Um let them all talk.

SPEAKER_05 36:13

That's right. Or get you a place without any neighbors.

SPEAKER_08 36:15

So uh you you were just kind of talking about what people do with their lawn. Uh why do you think we went? Uh why do you think we evolved to having this perfectly manicured lawn that you know most people have? Where do you think that came from?

SPEAKER_04 36:36

So there was a dude back in the 1800s, his name was uh Frederick Law Olmsted, and he became the father of landscape architecture. And what he did was in the early settlement of North America in the 1800s on the East Coast, um, he year England and France were really sort of the uh at the top of the line of garden design and influencing different countries around the world. So Frederick Law Olmsted visited England, the pastoral part of England, which had you know sheep, which actually maintained lawn in North America uh before there were lawnmowers. So there were sheep that were maintaining lawns but he saw that as part of the beauty of this sort of uh uh managed nature, if you will, where you've got open space, but you have trees and you have water, and so he brought that to the United States, and so I think turf grass now has become the um kind of the default default landscape of what people expect. Now, if you look at your city ordinance, no one may requires you to maintain a lawn. But it's just something that we feel it's part of the open space network. You know, our front yards are really more part of a commons, visual commons, not necessarily a a property commons, but it connects neighbors together, and so that's one of the values I think that it brings.

SPEAKER_05 38:15

Yeah, I never thought about it more.

SPEAKER_01 38:17

And and pastoralism is this like this idea of a long view. You know, so you think about looking out over uh, you know, uh uh the back 40 that you know has a little bit of management, but maybe not manicured lawn. But the idea was that you could have these long views that allowed you to take in specimen trees and and it wasn't uh it wasn't confusing. It was easy to to process when you looked out there, you felt uh you know peaceful in that in that long view out over the the pastoral landscape. And I think that um, you know, we just lost an appreciation, I think, for uh for overstory, for cover, for uh, for a lot of the things that uh can also uh be uh peaceful, but we we it's the first thing we take out. You know, we we get rid of the tree cover almost immediately in so many situations. And you know, again, it that takes a long time to grow back. So it's it's not a it shouldn't be taken lightly to me. I think we take it very lightly. I think we take that decision you know way too lightly uh to just you know knock them down, knock them all down, uh start start from scratch. Uh sometimes it's inevitable, but I don't think that we put enough, and and granted, there are monetary reasons why that's how we develop, but uh, but that's uh you know it's a drawback for those of us I think that appreciate that that aspect of it, the the cover, the understory, the the ground layer, the all the things that come along with uh with you know a little bit older forest habitat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 39:58

But I think attitudes are changing too. And just in 50 years of my observations, how we went from the modernist landscape of meatball shrubs, open lawn.

SPEAKER_08 40:11

I call them lollipop lollipop trees.

SPEAKER_04 40:15

Cut them into meatballs, right?

SPEAKER_01 40:17

Crew cut lawn. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:18

And uh, you know, today it seems like there's a a growing interest in the ecology around us, including the urban ecology, because 15 years ago 50 years ago, the biologists were not interested in urban systems. They were out in the tropical rainforests and they were doing all these cool things somewhere else, didn't see a value to the urban landscape. But you had mentioned Doug Talamy and his work, and they have found that a small residential lot of a quarter acre, one of the smallest you can own, actually is a dispersal point. If you start planting natives into a quarter acre lot, it then starts populating outside of into its neighborhood. So there's a value to even a small piece of property that you have in improving the ecology. And I think it's really great for families and for kids where you can take them outside in the backyard and you can show them what a golden rod is, and you can show them how a butterfly emerges. Um, those are important parts of growing up that unfortunately it's it's it's better to see it outside than it is on a TV screen.

SPEAKER_05 41:28

And we we uh recently had some guys talking about the the historic decrease of songbirds, you know, and it was directly related to urbanization. So you gotta think, I don't know, but you know, using some of these techniques that y'all are talking about. I mean, I know birds are still gonna fly into uh buildings and stuff, but it would seem like it would help to curve that a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Yeah, absolutely. Um, and and there is this there's a move, I call it, I'd say it's I guess it's a movement. I don't know when something reaches the the level of movement, but the idea of rewilding um is a discussion that is going on in urban places.

SPEAKER_03 42:05

I love that term. I do too. I wrote that down. Rewild.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

Rewilding is uh and it's a concept that our students uh grasp onto. They they love the idea. Yeah, but the but it's hard to do. It's and it's it's hard to sell, um, and it takes time. But the idea, for example, that the way water flows probably should be something that is a little bit wild. Right. Okay. And so if we give our stream courses in these urban places a little bit of room, so the Wolf River Greenway up in Memphis is is one of the best examples that you're gonna see of this happening in an urban, the most urban setting, you know, I don't know, around here anyway. Yeah, for sure. You know, and uh the Wolf River runs right through the heart of Memphis and flows into the Mississippi River. And uh that is that is a greenway that is got a lot of wild aspects to it. And that's creeping into our landscape discussion. We we're trying this on Mississippi State's campus. Uh and so if you go between the forestry and wildlife and fisheries building and and our building right across the street. I can see that. Okay, um, that's a that's an effort to rewild what's left of the upper Catalpa Creek uh on our campus. And you guys know Catalpa Creek, you know, it's right down here, right down the road. Um, you know, but it starts on the Mississippi State campus. And so having that that discussion about what is a creek, you know, what and and getting students to think about what a what a creek means to them, and they automatically think of mountain streams and it's like, yeah, but you know, there there's a creek right outside your window. Right. Um or there could be if you let it. And that's the idea is that you gotta you gotta see them out there. You have to see where a creek could be, but it's not a creek until it's got tree cover. Right. Okay, so those those things have to go together. You've gotta you've gotta give it. Things that it needs to be what it wants to be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 44:03

And in development, I mean we're taking the creeks and we're making them straight and get the water off of them as quick as can trying to hide it. Yeah, but in reality, that's not what we need to be doing. No way. Yeah. Um they need to wind and wander and slow down and throw all those things. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 44:18

They need to collect leaves in them. You know, they they gotta have leaf pack, they've got to have logs in them, you know. So, you know, just getting people to think about leaving a log lay in a stream, yeah. It but you know, it goes, it's it's it goes anti because of this sort of European, uh very European idea of the the cleanliness and the orderliness of the landscape, that log that's laying in the in the creek um goes against that. And but you know how much habitat is, you know, you know how much is going on on that log? That and that's the thing that our our students don't come to our program with that idea, but we try to give it to them before they go, you know, at least think about that this idea of just cleanliness and order being the way of everything. Is that is that in our best interest?

SPEAKER_08 45:06

But so to expand on that, uh Tim was describing uh on the landscape side of the road, you know, across the street from forestry and wildlife, that was just this drainage, yeah. And they just kept mowing it or mowing it and spraying it, or you know, put rip wrap in it. And uh I don't know how y'all got everybody convinced, but it was just let it grow back. And so there was probably a good bit of a tug of war there, but uh there's a good story behind it. Bob was there when it actually happened, and I came in like a couple of years later, but uh it grew up and it's beautiful, you know, it started with grass and weeds, and then willows came into the scene, big woods, other stuff, and now it's coming in oaks.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

You know, there's there's two, three, four-year oaks that are coming in now.

SPEAKER_03 45:52

How'd they get there?

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Uh the animals on campus, you know, that squirrels.

SPEAKER_03 45:58

That's the only thing that could have been squirrels.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

Yeah, wildlife students. Who knows? That's a great idea. You know, they're I'm Dudley was collecting acres and dropping them out of his pocket.

SPEAKER_08 46:08

Yeah, I've collected a lot of acorns from Thompson Hall.

SPEAKER_03 46:11

You have. Yep. I remember the tree we both saw there. Is it still around?

SPEAKER_07 46:16

Oh, yeah. A while. So do do you guys like if a guy had a uh wanted to do this around like a like Toxie's got a beautiful cabin sitting sitting out? Do you do y'all do like native suggest native landscaping around that too? It's funny you said that.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

I had a lot of things. Is that something y'all do? That does exactly what I have praying that I can, you know, get get there with him because I think it's a one I think he likes the canvas that I showed him.

SPEAKER_04 46:43

Yeah, and part of it is just understanding what the land's trying to do. The any good property owner, any good designer is gonna watch and listen, and that's the best thing anybody that owns land can do is try to see what it's it's it's intending. And if you listen, and if you look, and if you look at comparison landscapes, like okay, you know, walk down the road a little bit. I always tell people if they want to start looking at natives incorporating in their landscape, walk down the road and look for a patch of woods and see what's growing there and see you know what species are there, what's what's happening. If it's similar soils to what you have, then most likely it's going to do fine on your property as well. So there are different types of models, um, and we tend to look in plant communities. So you can go to the garden center and buy a plant and plop it in, but looking at guilds or how plants associate with themselves, and I learned that when I first came to Mississippi, I asked a wonderful wildlife, a birder down on the Gulf Coast about what is the success of attracting more birds and wildlife, and she just plain said diversity. The more diversity you can add to your landscape, which includes more different species, but not only more different species, different types of landscapes. If you don't have water, add in water. If you don't have uh a woodland area, add in a small woodland area, or some logs, or some snags, or some things that might not be there that would enhance and even bring more uh to the table. So I don't know, it just seems like that's a universal truth. The more diversity you have, the more it's gonna allow opportunities for other things to come in.

SPEAKER_08 51:25

So uh maybe let's dial it back a little bit to some of the basics, you know, like uh if somebody just wanted to do a spot in their yard uh to get started, what what could possibly be some good all-purpose type compatible species that would, you know, be good gateway plants to get this going?

SPEAKER_04 51:47

I would say look at your native online uh nursery through Mossy Oak as a good starting point. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 51:56

Yeah, ton of good information there for sure. And and I think too, you you you for us to say, oh, it's it's the post oak, or it's the you know, uh it's the white oak, or or it's the shortleaf pine, or you you can't really do that until you know a little bit, and again, since it's your show, uh we're gonna say it depends. And you gotta do a little bit of a little bit of background. You know, you gotta you gotta see, am I on an acid cap or am I in a in a prairie soil that is, you know, if it's if it's got that whitish or or grayish tinge to it, chances are you're in a more alkaline soil and you gotta you gotta go that route, you know. So there's a whole that that's green ash and uh and uh chinkapen oak and and some of the others that maybe aren't what you might automatically uh guess, you know. So I think that doing that little bit of background on your soils and we we always taught to ecoregion, a level four ecoregion, just knowing which ecoregion you're in is a huge first step because there's a whole plant palette that comes immediately along with just looking at the map and seeing which ecoregion you're in and which plants kind of go along with that ecoregion. And I think that that carries through from you know habitat restoration in the most diverse places right into the heart of the city. That doesn't change. You know, geology is but we're we're never gonna change the geology. So looking at the geology in the soils tells you a lot about what you need to know to make those decisions. But clearly, yeah, you're going for the dominant, you want to create some uh some dominant cover, whether that's grassland, you know, a grassland still has a canopy. It's just only a foot and a half off the ground. Same as a forest has a canopy and an understory, all those things are going on in a grassland the same way. So um, you know, just knowing am I going grassland, am I going forest, am I going woodland? Uh, you know, those are those are some base decisions that you make, and then you just sort of, you know, fall in on which which plants are right based on that that background information.

SPEAKER_08 54:05

So, I mean, do you have to make it look like you're out in the middle of the country, or is it okay to like have beds and a little bit of mulch?

SPEAKER_01 54:13

And I I think Bob Bob does a lot more with order than I do. I I tend to be I I I'm encouraging people just to let stuff grow and then and then sift through it. But I know he's got clients that that want more order, but you can still get that from I mean, what's wrong with having a couple of uh non-native trees or whatever that aren't invasive?

SPEAKER_08 54:37

Is that just evil? Or, you know, what is your thought on well, that's two questions, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 54:42

First question. No, I think uh first of all, we're we're human, we love plants, we love wildlife, and I think on your property you have a right to express it however you wish. Um, I think we've gotten better with understanding ecology, I think we've gotten better with understanding uh the interactions. But for as an example, yesterday I looked at a property uh and they were interested in some areas of getting some natives in. And the question came up: how does this little piece we're looking at fit into the overall property? And just by looking at the big picture and say, look, you've got a ridge up over here, typically that's oak, hickory, pine that typically occurs in that type of area, and then it actually there's a lake in the backyard, so that transitions in nature down to a bottom land, down to a lake edge. And so if you have that sort of big broad picture, then you can look at the plants as part of it. In this case, it was a neighborhood, and you can pick the cool plants that you really want to work with. And so, in an upland pine oak hickory, there's red buds, there's Grancy Greybeards, there's these wonderful plants that are great to have in the landscape that you know you don't have to have it full of Yopon holly, uh, but understanding that as a gardener, you are incorporating things that you like that you think are important to your landscape, and then all the way down to the lower areas where, yeah, maybe some cypress is a good choice along the edge of the lake, or some of the other types of plants, you'd be surprised at how many wonderful plants. There is a plant for every part of Mississippi, every square inch of Mississippi is adapted to growing some type of plant. And often you have a client who says, I can't grow anything over here. Well, that's because you're trying to grow St. Augustine grass underneath a magnolia tree. It just nature doesn't work like that.

SPEAKER_07 56:43

I've kind of found that out the hard way with I love wild azaleas. And I'll find one and I'll try to dig it up at the right time of the year.

SPEAKER_08 56:51

Or do you go to like some public land and dig it up?

SPEAKER_07 56:54

Hold up, hold up, don't a toxic place. I found some autox place. No, you can't. But then I'll try to plant them where I want to put them, and they just don't ever make it.

SPEAKER_03 57:04

They're notoriously hard to transplant. My mom was such a plant nut, and she tried and tried and tried, um, including having someone dig up so far outside where a root could be. And she finally got a couple.

SPEAKER_04 57:19

But if you look, if you go and you observe where native azaleas tend to be found in nature, it's along a creek bank. What's it growing on? That sandy soil of a creek bank, what else is happening is moisture's coming down that hill feeding it. So you have a well-drained, moist condition. If you put it in clay soils, it's gonna it's gonna turn its little leaves up. Same thing with dogwoods. People love flowering dogwoods in Mississippi uh and other places, but if you don't have a similar soil water relationship, um it's there's probably other plants that'll do a little bit better.

SPEAKER_08 57:56

And we've learned that trying to grow stuff at the nursery in a pot. You know, uh it's it just doesn't always work. Yeah, there's some species that just battle with us.

SPEAKER_07 58:06

I bet you guys get to see some really neat stuff when it's put more in an urban setting and you don't have a lot of wildlife. Um I'm thinking of the strawberry bush. Yeah, it's such a strikingly beautiful when it's in those red little berries are on there, it's just gorgeous. Yeah. But in the wild, you you might find one along a creek bank, like you just mentioned, that the deer can't get to, but yeah, good luck finding one anywhere else.

SPEAKER_04 58:28

Yeah, it's got the deer really like to browse on that. And um it's a beautiful plant, and um, and it has these striking green stems even in the wintertime. And um, as an accent plant, I think it works really well.

SPEAKER_03 58:44

I found a bunch in the wall like one time. It was actually a little creek island small, won't even half the size of this table, but it was mounted up and surrounded, and there was tons of them. I grew up with it. Yeah, it was a good many in that one spot. It's the only time otherwise, I guess it's been browsed so hard anywhere. I don't say how it survives anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 59:05

Yeah, a couple of they eat it so hard. They they get on them. And we used to we used to send a class out to to find the oak leaf hydrangea in the woods, you know, because it was such a thing. Uh man, there there's some good ones down in uh kind of around Louisville where you know, and and they kind of knew what they were looking for, but it was uh, you know, it still had a bloom on it or an old seed head on it. And student every semester somebody found it, but you know, it's like they had to go a little bit further down in the um in the draw that we were that we were out there to see. And uh that one and and American Beauty Berry are two that that you know I love coming upon them in the in the woods, uh and you know, because they are really common landscape plants, both both very common landscape plants and great landscape plants. But I to your point, Bobby, I I love finding those ones that are kind of in the landscape vernacular that we when we see them out in the woods, that that's uh something that we try to drive home to our students, like look, this is where it lives, you know, look and see here. Um, this is what it needs. And and that so you know, you don't reach every student, but you you get a lot of them. You you get a lot along the way that that start noticing those things and and taking you know those the mental pictures in their head of of where that's where oak leaf hydrangea belongs.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:06

Yeah, very site specific. Dudley, are these the guys that you've been talking about that the guys he's been talking about behind the back?

SPEAKER_07 1:04:14

The idea was to put up like if you just did if if if if so many people in America did their yards, yeah, it would turn into as much property as the as the national parks.

SPEAKER_08 1:04:25

That's the whole dug Doug Tallamy spiel. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:28

The Pocket Prairie.

SPEAKER_08 1:04:31

You know, kind of the theory with that is you know, we've turned a lot of our stuff into like, you know, we gotta grow food, so we got you know, monoculture ag, we've got cattle, um, we've uh we've got to have houses, so we plant pine trees and and manage them as a monoculture. And you know, at some point, you know, insects and birds and everything have to have a place to live. And and uh so all of these backyards combined add up to a tremendous amount of land that you know you can make a difference on.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:04

So he calls it the homegrown national park. Yeah. And and the idea is is that you get individual homeowners, landowners to sign up, you know, and then there's a resource there for them to sort of help uh make some decisions about what they might be able to do from a wildlife habitat standpoint on their property. And you can register your your house, your property, and that is you know meaningful to a lot of people to be a part of you know that that bigger thing. The homegrown national park idea is is still growing, and there are lots and lots of people that have signed up to to take part. And so again, they know that this isn't just something that I'm gonna do in a year and then it's done. It's this is something I'm sort of committing to for the long term, and I'm registering it with this uh this bigger idea of homegrown national park to to be you know a part of something. I think you know that that's a that's a huge incentive.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:58

Yeah, I just went to the website. Look at there, homegrown nationalpark.org.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:03

And it's not only the native plants, it's also the management as part of it. When I first moved to South Mississippi, there were plenty of pastures, there was plenty of pine uh being burned regularly with prescribed fire. Uh, and every year when I go back, I see less and less. I see these larger plots of land uh being subdivided into either residential areas or or weekend places or whatever. But folks that move in from other areas that aren't used to fire are not managing um landscapes that are adapted to fire. So if you have pines, that's a fire-adapted landscape. Um, and these savannas and many of the species that you find as part of it, um, if you are not managing it properly, it grows into a vegetative succession, which again it's it's about proportion, it's about conserving the things that are really important out there in terms of species, which I think they're doing that on federal lands and state lands. But I think the more insidious part is we're not seeing this creeping development that happens that not only is going into some of these areas and that maybe should be conserved, but also are not managed properly under prescribed fire. You know, Mississippi fires have been a part of this culture here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:33

Before humans even started setting the landscape on fire.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:36

There was a biologist at LSU named Dr. Bill Platt. He did fire research across the southeast. What he was doing was going into old growth um stumps and coring them and seeing their ages, and he found that in a 10-year period, over hundreds and hundreds of years, in a 10-year period there were three to four fire rings, meaning that that was pretty frequent intensity of fire. It would happen on a regular basis. And so, you know, these denser understory types of forests is really not what used to be here a couple hundred years ago.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:15

I would have loved to have seen what what this place looked like a couple hundred years ago. I would love to see like a whole county set on fire and see what it looked like afterwards.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:25

Not everything.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:26

Not everything, but you know, not that yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, cuz it did back then. I mean, the lighting would strike, I guess it would just run, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:34

There was we were a pretty good this is one thing about the prairies that it was um more grassland than a lot of Mississippi and Alabama simply because we have the clay high pH soils, you know, what you're gonna grass will probably be the the end result of that. But there's a few adapted species to that kind of high pH. So I mean it it's it's a narrow corridor, and when you don't have that around here, it's great forest land, but it's kind of woven like a little matrix of really good wildlife, I mean uh forest soil and habitat with native grasslands. Well, you know, it's not only grass, but I mean I remember uh Bob just saying one time that uh the you know I was asking about a place for the place in Alabama, the first place I ever bought, and he was like, that that's uh hard clay, some of us real high pH. I said that's it. He said that was made for burning, literally. Not not the tree part of it, just the open grassland part of it. It's just made for burning, and the more you burn it, the more you're gonna get what you want. The prairies were really islands of grassland amongst still a forested because most everything else, the the the ultimate end game of um habitat was gonna be trees. Still big tall tree.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:56

I'm sure what it used to be, uh I guess uh and and so especially in the water courses, still still absolutely forested, and then forested areas on a lot of the a lot of the caps, um the the acid soils that were kind of found intermixed with the prairie. So the prairie you know, we shouldn't picture it as a solid crescent-shaped grassland that went from central Alabama to the to the Tennessee border. It was islands that are of prairie that were found in that shape, but the islands of prairie were were of a lot of different sizes, really small ones, really big ones. Um, Bob and I both got into the what are the general land office records of the original surveys of Mississippi from 1832, the GLO records and 1832, and and you can you can paint a picture of what the landscape looked like by reading those notes. And they're written in cursive and can be really hard to read, but the the information is at a really, really high level of detail in terms of what was the forest cover here, where did I walk into a prairie, where did I walk out of a prairie, uh, what are the dominant species? Uh, what are the soils? They were there to look at soils so that everything was either first rate, second rate, or third rate land. That that was the note. And that's how you knew like is this a really good, high, highly productive soil, or was this one that was, you know, marginal or not even expected to be very productive at all? But man, the the level of note-taking that those guys put into those surveys is really amazing. Um, and you can go back to 1832 and read it and feel like you're right there. Um, it is that's cool. It is way cool. Yeah, and and they're more and more available. We originally started out with a set of 14 CDs that had this really janky way to search those CDs, and now it's all online. You know, you just Google BLM, GLO, and and you'll get the site to go. And you can read about as long as you know what township and range your property's on, you can go and read about the 1832 picture and the the plat maps that they drew were really, really accurate. And they they uh the the thing that strikes me about Mississippi that has been lost is the wetland complexes that you see in those old maps. Extensive wetland complexes that are now a lot of them are agricultural, but a lot of them have been developed. You know, at least the margins of them and and the margins have been pushed in. But if you look at like that wetland complex that was around Tibby Creek and Catalpa Creek, I'm talking about it stretched from you know the edge of West Point all the way over to you know past the airport. Um it was an enormous wetland complex there where those where Sand Creek, Tibby Creek, and uh and Catalpa Creek all come together, and and it's and it's right there in the plat map, just you know, thousands and thousands of acres of wetland.

SPEAKER_08 1:13:02

And so could you go to somebody in Kentucky, go look that up and see similar yes, they they vary. So that would be so cool. Like just say somebody buys a piece of property and they're like, I want it to look like it did 250 years ago.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:18

Well, if for no other reason then like it in mind right now, be doing stuff that the place would lean into. Correct. You know, even if you don't want to go back and re you know, because a lot of people today are wanting to go back and touch the the history of their place. But even then, it's just smart to go look at what did it prefer with nobody messing with it? What did it would it what evolved there? What does it prefer? And and try to lean into that as much as you can because you're gonna have so much more success that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:46

So when you guys walk around and see a big sweet gum, do y'all like a uh not nearly as if it's in somebody's yard, I do because I hate it for them, you know. But but no, I I have a couple of sweet gums that I'm letting go in a in a creek buffer because you know, from a distance, especially in the fall, a sweet gum is a is a badass. Um you know, uh do I want it in the middle of my you know uh the the edge of the the road where where all the balls are gonna you know accumulate and people are gonna cuss me when they step on them. No. Um but there is certainly a place for a sweet gum. And and I know what you're talking about when they come in thick as dog. Yep, and and you know, that's certainly something that you've got to contend with because man, it wants to be there bad. And it's good at being there. And you it's hard to it's hard to butt your head up against that.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:41

So I uh it doesn't matter. I I'm not asking if you guys are hunters, but are you guys hunters? I hunt with cameras.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:50

Yeah, I'm I uh I don't hunt. I grew up fishing far more than I did hunting. So I'm I'm definitely more attached to creeks and streams and lakes than I am uh deer habitat, for example.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:00

Yeah, so my question is but d does the wildlife aspect of what y'all was doing that does that kind of touch your heart when you when you set something into place and then you see whether it's songbirds or describes everything. Yeah, yeah, that that means a lot to you guys.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:15

That's to me, it's the most satisfying part about. I mean, yeah, you know, you realize like the soils and the plants are the key. Uh, but when it all comes together and you start getting weird things showing up, that's when you know, like, okay, we're on the right track.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:31

Yeah, and I have clients that are specifically interested. Pollinators is a real big thing right now with butterflies uh and bees and different types of things that are pollinating wildflowers. So I have seen a lot more request and interest in establishing wildflowers or savannas or prairies. Um, I've got some some folks that are that love birds and they just want to incorporate and and provide more for birds in their backyard. So understanding that wildlife ecology and how that ties into the landscape is pretty fundamental, I think, to what we do.

SPEAKER_08 1:16:07

And I'll I'll add, uh, you know, Bob may not be a big hunter, but he manages hunting properties. A bunch of them. Yep. Big big properties.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:15

So yeah, think about though. Um, and we learn more and more listening to people all the time. Like one of the very top things, if my maybe the top thing of I mean, turkeys have to be born and quail and stuff, but then beyond that is the insect colonies that are there for them readily. I mean, it's got from the day they're born, they gotta consume there's only a certain few things they can actually consume. And if you don't have the right ones, then you may hatch all these pults or quail or even probably other bird species, and they're gone. They can't survive, you know. I guess some mom brings them food, but I don't think that's the case with a lot of these. And so you think about the things you're doing, you're talking about, and even having the effect of optimizing the insect population, you're gonna help you gonna help everything.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:04

It and you go back to that, those connections that you talked about at the be at the open, and that you you cannot discount the connection between the soil bacteria and fungi and what's going on on the surface and all the things that are using that, and then up to the the game species that are you know just really important for so many reasons. Um, we gotta have them. And uh, you know, that to me is the most satisfying. I did a I did a fair amount of endangered species work in in Southern California where we were doing habitat for for threatened and endangered species. But what so when you do fly catcher habitat or uh California gnat catcher habitat, that's that's a great reason to do it because we don't want to we don't want to lose species. I I think everybody hopefully agrees with that. But all the other things and the game species that came along with what we did for the California gnat catcher was really important and really satisfying because you're you're contributing to you know that recreational piece that gets really so much of the funding and so much of the attention comes from the game species. So uh, you know, we we've got a we're we're definitely uh supportive. Uh I mean we're trying to build that.

SPEAKER_08 1:18:21

That's similar to our local Noxaby refuge, and I absolutely think we're gonna be podcasting about this soon, but you know, they're great place their management for the endangered red cockaded woodpecker makes uh some incredible upland bird hunting.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:35

Yeah, you know. Yeah, and I think quail are gonna come along for the ride there, right?

SPEAKER_07 1:18:41

Yeah, turkeys, quail, yeah, deer, everything. So what seemed like it'd be a really cool project to me is if we if we created a film about y'all just really show off and do something really special, make Toxies the landscaping around the just really cool. We make a film about how to do it, why you're doing X, Y, Z. In the meantime, you guys turn into the Martha Stewart of Native Landscape.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:04

Poor chatbot, poor charcoal. I couldn't think of another choice. Get to hang out with Snoop Dogg, but other than that, you guys.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:11

I've seen Tim in an apron before, it's not pretty.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:16

But that seemed like that'd be a good project. I'll I'll you had to paint that picture.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:22

Sorry. Uh and another thing I think that's real cool to mention is uh when they do bring students to the nursery, you would be surprised at the amount of camo hats that people are wearing. God bless them. That's right. It is a good thing. I will argue to say that it may be more than the forestry and wildlife folks.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:43

Well, and I will say that they're probably some of our better students, ones that already are going to the woods that are that know what a bottom land is, that know where good hunting habitat is, and know the value of those things, that makes a great land management professional, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:02

So what what goes on over there? Okay, you got landscape contracting, which is kind of your expertise.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:08

That's my thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:09

Um landscape architecture.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:11

Correct. Bachelor of Landscape Architecture is the undergraduate degree, Bachelor of Science, Landscape Contracting and Management is that degree. And we have a lot of students who get both. And they're usually really good students, and they usually have this background that Bob's talking about. They have an interest that's a lot broader than some of the other students. So if they grew up hunting and fishing, they come in, like Bob says, they're they're they're really thirsty. They want to get all of it. They want to be able to build it, they want to be able to take care of it, they want to uh you know have a hand in all of that. And and they really so anyway, we we get a lot of really good, a lot of interesting students that, especially from in-state, that come in with just a lot of really good natural history uh from hunting. Um they they know exactly the kinds of things that we're talking about because they they've they've thought habitat through, uh whether it's fishing, hunting, whatever. They they're seeing it when we're talking about it in their head. And that's that's the ones that really excel.

SPEAKER_08 1:21:12

Um, and then early on, Bob was talking about you know how you know you can improve the soil. You know, we've depleted a lot of our soils in the past, and uh you're working on uh biochar.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:26

Is that right? I I work with biochar in uh in bioreactors, which are basically just edge-of-field practices to remove uh excess nutrients from uh from agricultural uh landscapes where where uh you know we get a lot of a lot of algae as a result of uh eutrophication and one of the which is excess nitrogen and phosphorus. And we are you know algae ought to be at the top of our list in terms of if we see algae, we gotta we gotta start we gotta start working on that. That we've got water issues when we see algal blooms the way that does our because it affects the entire food chain uh to have that in there.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:13

But that biochar is pretty cool stuff. I mean it's like it's charcoal that you can make and it kind of acts like a slow release fertilizer when you when you it it certainly holds a lot of things and it holds a lot of water.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:26

You know, it uh it is really good at at holding water for long periods of time, releasing it slowly. Um that's all all to the good.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:33

I want to try it out at the nursery.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:35

Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah, we've we've got some mixes ready for you to try out. We we're experimenting with those, a lot of compost and and biochar mix uh like to dial that in.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:47

Well, let's go.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:49

Anyway.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:50

Tell me what you uh don't you have a trivia question for me?

SPEAKER_08 1:22:53

I do.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:54

Good luck with that.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:55

I was thinking we could talk another couple hours. I know it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:59

I could I could I could definitely listen a couple. I could too.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:03

Um uh while we're at it, one of my rapid fire questions that I missed was uh outside of the Black Prairie, what is what is y'all's favorite ecoregion or physiographic region?

SPEAKER_04 1:23:17

Oh, uh Mississippi Gulf Coast. Just love all the everything from brackish to salt water to freshwater, and that that whole confluence is really amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:29

Yeah, I'd I'd put uh you know, pitcher plant bogs right up there, uh quaking bogs in particular. The the most interesting place I feel like I've ever been in Mississippi was walking across a quaking bog that you know just sort of felt like I was on another planet, something it was not it was not normal.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:51

Um and uh actually, do you know what the you know have you ever seen a quake?

SPEAKER_01 1:23:55

I've never heard of one.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:56

There's one down there in Picune, it looks like that's right. So that one's artificial. Oh, it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:02

I think I have picture plants. Well, picture plants, but then there's uh they'll get a mattress of sphagnum that that builds up over time, and then their roots hold it together, and the quaking part comes from you you stand, and if I jump up and down and Bob's over there, he it the it undulates over that way and and it quakes, and you can fall through it. Bob, I've never I didn't see anybody fall through it. Bob's got a great story about a student falling through, and uh where'd he go? Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:32

All right, well, all right, so I've got a trivia question here, and uh it's not simple, so I made it multiple choice.

SPEAKER_07 1:24:40

So our trivia is brought to us by the friends at the peanut pack. That's right. We love those boiled boiling and we we appreciate them uh so much. Jackson did anybody did we pull a review?

SPEAKER_02 1:24:53

We did pull a review. The winner this week is D Edwards1394, and he said that he loves the podcast and he's been listening since the very first episode, episode one.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:04

Oh my goodness.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:07

That was rough back then, by the way. D Edwards we have that. Didn't even have video back then. D.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:13

Edwards wins listener of the month.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:15

Yeah. So what did he win? You know, that's a really, really good question. Did he win something out of your closet because you forgot to get something that's where we picked out? We ran out of more soup yield.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:25

Yeah, oh no. So I thought maybe native could do some kind of thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:30

We got some wildflower and native grass plugs. That's right. We'll do that. We might not ship them to the club. Toxie locked his closet last week.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:37

I couldn't get in there. I moved it. Yeah. I was thinking maybe we can give away some like tick prevention stuff. That's a great idea.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:46

The defender guy.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:47

Defend.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:48

Defend. Yeah, we have some.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:49

Okay, so here's the question. What North American indigenous species from from this group I'm gonna read is exists on every continent except Antarctica. Right. So black locust, brackenfern, plains coriopsis, or sweet gum?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:13

Yeah, I'm gonna go brackenfern.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:15

I'm with you 100%.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:19

I was gonna say coriopsis, but I'm no. Yeah, so but the sweet gums, there's someone growing up there. There's some. There's one in already going out there, someone they're trying.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:28

If I show up, I'm gonna see one. That's the cockroach or hardwood scene.

SPEAKER_08 1:26:33

I wanted to ask one more thing, and uh, I know Toxie's a big app guy. Uh, what are a couple of apps uh that folks can use to uh you know just strengthen their knowledge and learn more?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:50

Yeah, at relevant to let's just say that our listeners, and there's so many that crave um more of what your knowledge and Dudley's is of all the different native species on their place and also specifically for that use.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:05

Well, so the one that I use most is Merlin, um, which is a a bird ID app.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:11

Yeah, I have that, but just for bird sounds.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:13

Yeah, but again, uh, you know, I start I kind of try to put the plants and the birds together and and like the time of the year, but I think iNaturalist is probably the the one that is the most engaging. Is that fair? Yeah, because people have to put data into it, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:31

And there's a fair amount of data in it, correct.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:33

It really is, and it's getting really, really good, dense data too.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:37

A lot of them should really be getting a lot of things.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:40

Yeah, and you don't you can kind of keep it private. If you find something cool, there's a I think there's a thing you can click that hides it, kind of hides it to everybody except like professionals that they need to know.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:52

So, but it wouldn't it wouldn't let you let them know where. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:57

So you know, like just say you find a Chickasaw plum or something you can put it on there, but if you find something rare, you can put it on there and and kind of privatize it.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:08

So, what if you take a picture and you don't want to do anything else, but just tell me what it is and read about it, but you can always look it up separately. Yeah, I naturally but you don't have to let them know where it is.

SPEAKER_08 1:28:17

That name and what's the name of your app you use a lot? Um picture this. Picture this. Um, I usually just use Google too.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:24

Google, they say Google's pretty good, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:26

But the iPhone info thing is okay. I would say it it seems like it's pretty good, but it's not it's not great. We're gonna get better with that. But they're getting better, exactly. They're learning more.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:36

I'll say the the picture of this when I go through spurts, it seems to be getting better and better, and which makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:42

Yeah, and I don't know. I think Facebook groups for a lot of these things that we're talking about, or I I use Reddit uh because I I like the the native plant stuff that's on Reddit, the habitat stuff that's on Reddit. Um you know, joining those groups has has been really valuable for me. There's one that I love on there, uh, which is called uh uh Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't. Um Chicago and he's Italian and he's just really entertaining. But from a plant standpoint and like entry sort of botany, uh he's fun to listen to. Joey Santori, I think is his last name. Uh, but Joey just you know rants on plants, and it's just it's just fun to listen to him uh talk.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:29

So that kind of rolls off your tongue, rants on plants. Yeah, you rants on plants.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:32

What was that other app you mentioned at lunch? I can't remember.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:37

I don't know. The Mississippi Native Plant Society Facebook page is very useful. If you don't know what a plant is, people are always posting photos asking what is this, and more than likely someone will have an answer. And there's probably something for every state.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:52

Correct, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:53

And and there are there are some botanists on there, amateur botanists that are that are paying attention. Top notch. Top notch. Um, and you know, they they got some other job, but that's their hobby, passion, yeah, exactly. And I mean, they are they are ready to help you figure out what a plant is. Those groups are great, they really are and very valuable, I'd say, to us.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:14

And everybody loves the answer. What is this? You can get some answers, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:19

And they'll start arguing a little bit, you know, which is kind of cool too. They'll fight it out.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:22

Okay, this is what it is.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:23

Two other things I use all the time. One is uh called Soil Web Survey.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:28

Yes, just looked at it.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:30

Which, if again, if you're trying to understand your land and what makes it tick, is understanding how the soils work on it. So every piece of land in the continental United States, as far as I know, you can you can pretty much look up your land and get an idea of what type of soils and what it's composed of. The other thing I use all the time is Google Earth, which is a great way to especially be able to put a pin somewhere and say, This is a tree I need to remember, or here's here's a location of this thing. Um, I use that uh on a regular basis.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:04

They have the best maps. Well, I gotta tell you on WebSoil Survey has been around, I think, as long as the internet, and it hadn't changed. Early early adopter, yeah. Yeah, it's still a little slow, but it works when you can really find it.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:19

And that is that is how I use that one when I'm getting ready to go look at the general land office records. Yeah, the WebSoil Survey has your townships and your ranges in it, and you can uh find that easier, it's one of the easiest places to find your township and range because there's a layer in there, and it's just like you know, I was the only one still used, and I'm glad y'all are. I don't know, man, as much as anything. NatureServe was the one that we were talking about at lunch, and it is not an app yet. It's it's online, but NatureServe is a plant community description database. And so, like we're working on a project with the city of Starkful where we've got 14 habitats that we're targeting, and they come basically straight from the the Nature Serve descriptions for each one of those 14 habitats. Gives us a species list to work with. You know, we're we'll miss we'll make some decisions about which ones get the most play, but you know, it it's got great lists of native plants that you can see. Okay, here's a community, and this is what that community looks like. And um it's a it's a really, really helpful, but it's it's hard, it's it's not easy to learn to use. It's uh it's a it's made for biologists, I would say, I think.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:41

Yeah, but it it lists a lot of the plant species. So for example, if you're if you're planting dogwood, what are the other plants you could plant with it that would grow in a similar type of situation? And so it's useful to be able to go through their lists and just say, hey, for this type of forest type, here are the species that are there that are typically associated with it, and it's got some really good useful information.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:03

So hey, I'm I should know this. Probably the answer is no, but you know, we can we have all especially born out of the ag community, these all these soil testing services. And we even offer one. And so you can, you know, take the soil sample and send it to them and tell them you want to plant whatever clover, brisca, whatever grasses of, you know, cereal grains, and it'll give you, you know, what to do to get you there. Yep. Is there something that'll you could say dogwoods or you know, Corcus alba or whatever, you know, and they would tell you about tree and native other native plants?

SPEAKER_08 1:33:37

You know, they would somebody I doubt it, but that needs to happen. Somebody's just but you can just you can use the results that they give you to see what is in your soil and that's true, yes, and know if you need to imagine.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:49

Well, I mean, if you ask more, because what what what get I get back is I get different um parameters if I ask for clover than if I ask for cereal grain, than if I asked for another pl type plant. So it just what made me think about it if when you said dogwood and then other things that go with it, if you would just know what's the best soil for the tree, because you're kind of gonna build around a certain tree or two or stuff and then go from there, you know. You could if it would tell you what tree would do well there or what to do for the dogwood there, then you could just it wouldn't be hard to look up other things that would go with a dogwood then. But if you in saying that, I was like, I fear I would stop. Start out with trying to put the dogwood somewhere it's really not needing to be if I wasn't careful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:37

And Nature Serve can help with that because what you put in is you put in, you specify Mississippi, and if you put in Cornice, Florida, okay, it's going to give you every community that Cornice, Florida is is found in. And then you got to whittle it down. There might be, you know, there might be 10 different plant communities where you're going to find that flowering dogwood. But then you get into the descriptions of the soils that come along with it. And it and it gives you that list, like Bob's saying, some of the communities will have, you know, only six or seven species listed. Some of them will have 50. Right. And so, and I would bet, I would be willing to bet that flowering dogwood would be one of the the plants that has communities that have a very uh lengthy list of uh of plants. So you would see all of now the the vacciniums that come in. Blueberries. All the blueberries and and gooseberries that come in with that.

SPEAKER_04 1:35:33

Um buckeyes and big leaf magnolia.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:36

Yeah, exactly. Big leaf magnolia. That one's bottle brush buckeye.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:42

Have y'all ever you've got bottle brush near the cabin?

SPEAKER_03 1:35:44

Yeah, we sure do. Might just beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:46

Have y'all ever noticed Bob did that uh big leaf magnolia uh landscape at the Wildlife and Fisheries building? Have you ever noticed it? Well it's like in a cove. So and it is one of the most uh elegant solutions for that crazy little spot. But Bob saw basically that here's this building that is basically the the or overstory tree structure, and he just put that one big leaf magnolia right right there in the middle of it, and it works like a charm. And it is so perfect for wildlife and fisheries, you know, it's it's right there where they want to be. And that was I I think one of the one of the best examples when we take a student, students out and we say, like, think about communities, and then it's like, here's this postage stamp. And Bob built a community in there, and it is uh, like I say, just one of the most elegant solutions to a really hard landscape problem that was solved just by thinking about community, just by thinking about structure. And uh it's one that that I feel like every I I every student in our building gets to see it at least three or four times before they graduate because it's I love that spot.

SPEAKER_08 1:36:57

It's just like this nook carved out of the building. It's like somebody took a square area and notched it into the building, and the rest of the sides jut out. Right. And it was it's a weird spot, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:09

And that was the perfect solution. Well, and part of the idea, the big leaf magnolia flowers are typically on the tops of the branches. So it's a three-story building. I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be up on the third floor looking down, looking down on the flowers? So that's where a lot of that came from.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:25

Cool stuff.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:27

I know we could talk for days, but yeah, you know, it's funny.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:31

Just have them back. Yeah, that's right, exactly right.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:33

We've been here for a while, so I guess it's time to go check emails and do that. Maybe Tim can bring some better jokes next time.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:40

Yeah, sorry, sorry. Uh I love to be able to do that. Pretty good, pretty good. I mean, you don't have the bar's not real high around here when Bobby's pretty charge. Yeah, he's king, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:48

After work, we're gonna go play in some canoes uh on Cotawpa Creek.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:52

So be watchful of the gay tours. Yeah, they are.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:56

Yeah, so we were talking about that the other day. Where where uh we didn't see any in Oh, you're if you're in Spring Creek, you I mean in Cotappa, you're gonna be at the epicenter of them.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:04

Yep, that's it. I didn't I mean I didn't see a one the other day. It was out there on Monday. Maybe a little hot form. Who knows? Yep, they're full of them. I gotta go closer to Tibby.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:12

Uh yeah, I mean, pretty much. I think you know, from my experience in this part of the gator habitat, uh Tibi and Spring Creek are the spots.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:19

Well, you don't have to see them, but they'll see you.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:21

Yeah, that's right. But I've been in the Pearl where I've was uncomfortable. Yeah, like you don't want to see near as many as you do.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:27

I wouldn't go swimming out there by that.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:29

And ever since it started the gator season started here, it's they've they've definitely knocked them in the head as far as as many as you used to see. Because you used to just ride down Tibi and see big gators.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:38

What I always say, nature adapts, whatever you do to it. Yeah, but it's good stuff.

SPEAKER_05 1:38:42

Yeah, thank y'all for being here.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:44

Uh thanks for having us great.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:45

No doubt about it. Bob, do you want to mention the name of your business here when you have a chance? Or is that scared you do that?

SPEAKER_04 1:38:52

It's the artful gardener, and the whole idea is gardening, uh gardening your landscape or gardening the earth. Either way, we're taking care of something. Artful gardener. That's it.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:03

You know what? Then all of our gamekeepers out there, that's exactly what they're doing and wish to be as an artful gardener. Uh, maybe a little different than the backyard garden.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:13

Yeah, nice.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:14

May not, but I mean you're doing the same thing. Actually, you're landing, you might want to think of yourself more with your property as a gardener than just a farmer.

SPEAKER_08 1:39:24

No, that's that's symbiosis. That's a great thought.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:26

Yeah, that's the word.

SPEAKER_08 1:39:27

Artful and heartful. Oh, look at that.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:29

Oh, it says heart's in it.

SPEAKER_04 1:39:31

That's a spin-off company.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:33

Company.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:34

So y'all ought to get in touch with them because uh walk around your place is worth it.

SPEAKER_05 1:39:38

Cool with them.

SPEAKER_01 1:39:39

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna throw out there that uh in in our department, you know, we have more jobs than we have students. And so if if this is something that you think uh you know you're interested in if you're a if you're a high school student or the parent of a high school student, um that that we talk about this, we get to talk about this every day. Yeah, and it's really satisfying uh to to show students that this idea, but you know, we we have more jobs than we have students, so uh that's a good place to be. It really is. But it also is like one of those things, like, yeah, you know, we'd like to have a few more students. So uh, you know, think about you know us as an option. We're a niche.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:17

You know, it's it's time bulls on down the road, and you know, we're getting I'm getting along in the tooth and things evolve into another generation of stuff. It's an important, it's not just a from a making a good living opportunity standpoint, it's important to the earth job. That's right. You know, you just talked about what it all adds up to.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:36

And I mean, the more and more, just think about how important it's gonna be in the future because more and more and more housing is the population growth. It is a very important to the earth, much more so than it might have been 30, 40 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:50

And land management is AI proof.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:53

Yep. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:54

I mean, we we need to be hundred percent more there need to be more of us because uh you know we're not gonna be able to depend on anybody else to do it for us. And uh the the more people that are into it are the better off we're all gonna be. Great point. Great point. Give me all my soapboxes.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:11

Jackson, you're supposed to hit the horns when you see that.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:13

Yeah, we are the uh we are the anti-venom or the antibiotic to the digital artificial, that's right. Yeah, we can save people because I'm telling you, it's we hadn't done the Mr.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:24

Know It All sound in there. I was just gonna do that. Probably deserve that as well. We could cue that up. So anyway, I I think we probably ought to end this. For now, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:41:36

Goodbye, Dudley to be continued. There it is. There's no Bobby, so I guess that's it. Why don't you say goodbye, Dudley? Goodbye, Dudley. Get us out of here, Jackson.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:44

Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Game Keeper Podcast. And be sure to tune in again. Subscribe to Game Keeper Farming for Wildlife magazine, and don't miss the Mossy Oak Properties Fistful of Dirt podcast with my good buddy, Ronnie Cut Straight.