u/Hot_Difficulty6799

In 1955, the NPG television network launched a quiz show called the $64,000 Question. Hosts would show photographs of native plants, and ask viewers to identify them. The format was wildly popular, and became a frequent part of NPG programming.

Later, the upstart NPCJ network, on the UHF band, began a series of investigative journalism reports into whether the $64,000 Question native plant identification show was rigged. Primary evidence that the game was at least unfair to contestants, if not outright rigged, was the often fuzzy quality of the photos shown, and the lack of photos of the botanical features actually needed to identify the plants.

Investigation centered on a quiz show episode requiring the identification of five asters, from two photos each, with the winner being 12-year-old Patty Duke. In later testimony before the Senate Agricultural Committee, Duke exposed that the native plant guessing game was in fact at least highly manipulated.

Here is an except from the testimony:

SENATOR: I'd like to establish your credibility as a witness. You have a squeaky clean public image, do you not?

PATTY DUKE: The squeakiest. I am squarer than Dick Clark, and twice as honest.

SENATOR: You are in the sixth grade. Are you familiar with the concept of "show your work"?

PATTY DUKE: Of course, Senator. Show your work is foundational to our educational system. Schoolteachers require it of me all the time. I get more credit for an incorrect answer well explained, than a correct answer that is unsupported.

SENATOR: When answering questions about plant identification, in the guessing games, do you ever have to show your work?

PATTY DUKE: No Senator, I do not.

SENATOR: Do you find the fact that the plant identification games you participate in, do not require you to show your work, to be suggestive that the game is rigged?

PATTY DUKE'S LAWYER: Objection. Calls for speculation.

SENATOR: There are allegations that you use an electronic robot to identify plants for you, and then submit the robot's answers as your own.

PATTY DUKE: I find the idea of a futuristic robot plant identifier to be outlandish. You've been watching too much science fiction, Senator.

SENATOR: OK, fair enough. Are you familiar with simplified identification systems, such as the Peterson A Field Guide to Wildflowers, or Newcomb's Wildflower Guide, which avoid the difficulties of abtruse dichotomous keys?

PATTY DUKE: No Senator. In 1955, color printing is expensive, and botanists are rather stuffy. An Idiot's Guide to Native Plant Identification would never sell.

SENATOR: So I take it that you own a copy of the 2-1/8 inch thick Gray's Manual of Botany, eighth edition, by M.L. Fernald, 1632 pages of small type on onion skin paper?

PATTY DUKE: Did Asa Gray teach Charles Darwin everything Charles Darwin ever knew about North American native plants?

SENATOR: How you mean?

PATTY DUKE: I mean, of course my family owns a copy of Gray's. Any American family with some interest in nature does.

SENATOR: So when, on the game show, you identified five of five asters from two photographs each, you used Gray's to key them out?

PATTY DUKE: Fuck no. Have you ever read that book?

SENATOR: How you mean?

PATTY DUKE: Aster puniceus will later come to be known as Symphyotrichum puniceum. This is the first aster I intentified in the game show episode. Here is what Fernald's Gray's says about the species:

>Stem usually stout, 0.2-2.5 m high, from hirsute with often tuberculate-based hairs or densely pilose above to glabrous, leaves of dry texture, narrowly to broadly lanceolate to narrowly subrhombic...

SENATOR: OK stop I get your point. And please use Freedom Units. And why is "tuberculate" in italics, but "pilose" isn't, but "subrhombic" is?

PATTY DUKE: You didn't even let me get to the "loose subequal linear-attenuate scarious-margined phylaries."

SENATOR: You're making that up.

PATTY DUKE: Sadly, no. I only make up that I am my own identical cousin, or Helen Keller.

SENATOR: So how then did you identify Aster puniceus as Symphyotrichum puniceum, even though the photographs did not fully display the traits needed to do this?

PATTY DUKE: I identify by intuition. I identify by sense of smell.

SENATOR: Do you know the story about the time the wealthy celebrity film actor, Robert Redford, did an expose of corruption in the television industry? Redford offered Herb Stempel a $100,000 bribe, to reveal how Stempel had been coached on correct answers, to make a quiz show more dramatic?

PATTY DUKE: Yeah. That smells. Every briber has their price, and Redford was not offering a big enough bribe for Stempel to reveal how he cheated.

SENATOR: Do you know about the concept of internet karma points?

PATTY DUKE: I don't. Please explain.

SENATOR: Imagine you are on a plant identification quiz show. You are shown two photos each of five asters. The photos do not contain enough botanical detail to actually identify the asters, like closeups showing the hairiness of a stem, or the underside of the leaves.

As a fundamental part of your education, you have been taught to show your work. But you are not required to show your work here. The game looks rigged.

A plant identification game where contestants have to say why they think a plant is x or y would be educational. But a plant identification game where contestants just blurt out answers, is not.

I can understand rigged games with big money corporate advertising sponsorship.

But why would anyone run a rigged game, just for a few imaginary internet points?

PATTY DUKE: That's the $64,000 question, Senator, isn't it?

>The Identification of Grasses
A grass can be "glumey" in more ways than one,
When its classification remains to be done.
You pull off the parts, and soon feel your age
Chasing them over the microscope stage!

>You peer through the lenses at all of the bracts
And hope your decisions agree with the facts;
While your oculist chortles with avid delight
As you strain both your eyes in the dim table light.

>You are left on the horns of quite a dilemma
When you count the nerves on the back of the lemma;
Then you really get snoopy and turn one turtle
To see if the flower is sterile or fertile.
--How To Identify Grasses and Grasslike Plants, H.D. Harrington (1977)

>Without strong magnification (25x), it is very difficult to distinguish from the introduced Barnyard Grass (Echinochloa crus-galli), which has a membranous tip on lemmas and paleas, the lemma tip with a line of minute hairs separating it from the hardened body, and only some hairs may be papillose.
--Echinochloa muricata (Rough Barnyard Grass), Minnesota Wildflowers

A patch of barnyard grass has spung up on the pond shoreline that I maintain.

There are two main types of barnyard grass hereabouts, a weedy native, Echinochloa muricata, and a weedy nonnative, Echinochloa crus-galli. Unless you use a microscope, they look exactly the same.

In an agricultural field, the native and nonnative varieties are both invasive weeds. Near a pond, they have equal beneficial value to wildlife. The seeds of both are eaten by dabbling ducks.

Using my "How to Identify Grasses" book, I have learned that "papillose" means bearing papillae, and that papillae are minute nipple-shaped projections. I have reviewed the difference between lemmas and paleas, and what papillose lemma hairs look like.

I have examined the lemmas and paleas under 25x magnification, and determined that I have the nonnative variety. Should I nuke it?

They are exactly the same, so far as the ducks could care. But the native variety has Murica in the name, whereas the nonnative sounds suspiciously French.

Note: see also the recent post, can anyone tell me if this is Cyperus brevifolius or Cyperus brevifolioides? They look exactly the same, but one is native to the United States, and the other isn't

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) prohibits international trade in species threatened with extinction. The U.S. Endangered Species Act implements this to prohibit trade across state lines. The Minnesota Endangered Species Statue prohibits trade within the state.

The purpose of the international law, the federal law, and the state law is to protect species at the brink of extinction.

And yet, here at the Native Plant Superstore™ in Minnesota, we sell species threatened with extinction, to anyone with a credit card, no questions asked.

For example, we offer to the discriminating rare plant enthusiast, leafy prairie clover (Dalea foliosa).

To the undiscriminating native plant gardener, this looks just like the very popular purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea). To pollinator gardeners, they are probably equivalent:

>Floral visitors of Leafy Prairie Clover are probably similar to the floral visitors of Dalea purpurea (Purple Prairie Clover); the insect visitors of the latter include many kinds of bees (short-tongued & long-tongued), butterflies, flies, and occasional wasps.

To the ecologist, however, they are very different. Purple prairie clover was natively widespread and abundant, from Denver all the way to Indianapolis, and despite habitat loss, is still globally secure. Leafy prairie clover is a microhabitat specialist, needing thin soil over limestone, with very elevated levels of magnesium that are toxic to most plants. No more than a few thousand of them are left in this world, thus why CITES and the Endangered Species act kick in.

If CITES kicks in, how can we at the Native Plant Superstore™ responsibly trade in it? Why are we not prohibited from selling it, if not legally, then at least ethically?

In the United States, there is a legal loophole.

We could try to get an exemption permit to sell the plant, by claiming that garden plantings assist in the conservation of the plant. Except that PhDs with specialization in rare plant conservation would rudely mock our idea that a residential garden planting has anything to do with the conservation of a microhabitat specialist. They are all about preservation of the habitat, not gardening.

But section 10 of the Endangered Species Act, as interpreted, allows us to claim that we should be able to trade in it, so long as we can show that our original source was on private land, and that if we didn't sell it, rare plant enthusiasts would just go dig it up:

>For plants in commerce, permits are available for interstate or international sale of artificially propagated plants, thus reducing the demand for wild-collected plants.

This is our loophole.

Compare to animals threatened with extinction.

Commercial outfits should be able to get permits to cultivate elephants, and sell them to people who want to raise the elephants in their backyards, thus reducing the demand for the elephants to be shot for their tusks.

Commercial outfits should be able to get permits to cultivate rare plants, and sell them to people who want to raise the rare plants in their backyards, thus reducing the demand for the rare plants to be dug up for their exotic appeal.

Makes perfect sense, no?

You have probably seen the post about the post by the homeowner in Iowa, who was alarmed that prairie was infringing on their well-manicured lawn.

Right there in r/lawncare, the highest rated comment says that all they see is a lawn infringing on a prairie. It's funny because it's true, right? OOP got it backwards.

No. That isn't prairie on the other side of the fence.

The closest thing to a prairie is on the r/lawncare side, under the trellis, where there looks to be an ornamental clump of a switchgrass nativar, maybe a couple Penstemon nativars, and maybe a couple milkweed seedlings. The r/lawncare poster is an r/NativePlantGardener, too.

On my side of the fence, I've got a legacy, economical, CP1 conservation planting. The CP1 mix is knowingly called "introduced grasses and legumes." This is through the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) of the Farm Service Agency.

If I could do it over again, with our highly increased awareness of the harm of invasive introduced plants, and the benefits of natives, I'd go with a high diversity native seeding, like for example CP42 "Pollinator Standard" mix, of at least ten native grasses and thirty native forbs.

As it is, all I had to plant was a low diversity mix of a couple introduced grasses. I'm allowed to hay or graze it one year in three.

It isn't prairie.

There's no tall native flowering forbs in my field, like prairie might have. It looks like continuous stands of cool season invasive grasses like smooth brome and reed canary grass. It's little different than what you'd see growing along roadsides around here, to be honest.

OK, so my manicured-lawn neighbor in exurban Iowa doesn't know what a prairie looks like. But native plant gardeners making fun of my neighbor don't know what a prairie looks like either. That's kind of funny, right?

Hello.

I have a big green utility box in my yard.

It's a pad-mounted step-down transformer. It changes voltage from higher levels, to the level I need to run my flat screen TV. It also serves my neighbors.

It's surrounded by underground electrical cables, including high voltage ones. I don't know precisely where.

I have a legal agreement with the utility company. I've granted them an easement. I've agreed to keep that box clear of obstruction, so utility workers can safely work on it.

Like let's say there was a problem with the box, and when utility workers opened it up to inspect it, it started throwing out sparks. They wouldn't want to be tripping over butterfly weed when they backed away.

Wait I'm sorry. They wouldn't want to be tripping over hostas when they backed away.

Of course they wouldn't mind tripping over natives.

Please give me ideas for deep-rooted natives I can plant around the high voltage electrical equipment, and over the underground high voltage cables.

I'll post photos, so you all can admire how great it looks.

I am Smooth Coneflower. Science knows me as Echinacea laevigata.

I am proud to say that I have never been confined to a garden.

I was born near Durham, and have not once in my life ventured more than a few hundred miles from there.

I am particular. I like a thin layer of mineral-rich soil over bedrock.

I am protected. The U.S. federal government classifies me as threatened. On government land, you can't touch me. You can't transport me across state lines.

Since some people see me as free natural medicine, and other people might want to dig me up and take me home to their garden, I am glad for the protection.

My life story is very different from my sister Purple Coneflower, who was born in Missouri, but traveled of her own free will as far east as Ohio.

Without her consent, Purple Coneflower has long been dug up and transported to such far away cities as Boston, and Brooklyn, and Bangor. Now you can easily buy Purple Coneflower on the internet, no questions asked about where you live.

Because of my protected status, I have been spared the indignity of being sold online.

The main threat to my existence is a loss of suitable habitat. The particular sorts of open woodlands and glades that I like have been converted to farms and residences and office parks.

But my sister Purple Coneflower is a bit of a threat to me too. My sister and I will occasionally, to use polite language, hybridize.

Purple Coneflower often runs away from gardens, and takes to the roadsides and fallow fields. A hard but freer life.

Compare my sister's extensive present day wanderings in North Carolina, to my own more limited. Hers are mostly runaways from internet trafficking. Mine are as native as can be.

If we should happen to meet up in some field, and hybridize, her cultivated citified ways can overwhelm my wildness. She just gets around more.

I am proud to say that I never had any garden to run away from. I was born east of the Blue Ridge, I stayed east of the Blue Ridge, and you can only find me in the remaining wild places there.

Restorationists often plant plugs on spaced out 18" centers. And the good folks at the Native Plant Superstore in Winona provide spacing recommendations for the plants they sell.

I am here to tell you that spacing out plants is bullshit. Spacing suggestions are dumb.

Native plants like being crowded together. It's what native plants crave.

Restorationists say that to achieve a 50/50 distribution of graminoids and forbs in mesic prairie, grasses like big bluestem and indiangass should be seeded at a considerably lower rate. Otherwise those grasses just take over.

That is, don't crowd in the grasses, if you want a natural community, they say. Don't take the stance that a dense seeding or planting will naturally space itself out. Think about optimal spacing more.

But understand where I am coming from. There are two main styles of native plant gardening.

The more widely spaced out ornamental style, and the more closely spaced naturalistic.

EPA ecoregions 16a and 16b, respectively.

By telling you that I am outright offended by the idea that plants might want spaced out, I am telling you that I identify with the second style.

Ecologists will say that plants must deal with competition, whether they like it or not.

I say that plants actually like competition. They always like being closely spaced. This is the smarter opinion than the nuanced one ecologists have.

Plants always like having insufficient sunlight. They always like having insufficient nutrients. They always like having to compete for these.

An essential fact here is that all native plants are the same.

This is why we will grow swamp milkweed right next to dry plains milkweed in our gardens.

This is why we can grow purple coneflower in Brooklyn, or anise hyssop in Atlanta, and call that native.

Native plants like having insufficient water. Not having enough water, by being all crowded together, is what native plants crave.

Consider what Dave Tilman says, that for example tall plants should be the superior competitors in fertile, high productivity communities (effectively reducing competition by stealing sunshine), but that superior competitors in less fertile communities should be able to reduce nutrient levels around them (effectively reducing competition by starving it).

Plants don't like competition. They don't actually like being crowded together. Instead, they manage to reduce competition around them, by various means, Tilman says.

I mean sure Tilman is basically the reason that we talk so much about diversity being healthy.

But dude probably also claims to be able to talk to plants.

Consider little bluestem. It's a bunchgrass.

In wetter climates, it is found bunched closer together. In drier climates, it is bunched further apart. It almost looks like it craves water, not competition, and can space itself out accordingly, but don't be fooled.

Open ground between clumps provides space for forb species that need both sunlight and bare ground for seeds to germinate on.

Open ground between clumps creates tunnels for birds and small mammals to run through, somewhat protected and hidden from predators.

Planting little bluestem too close together, so it starts sodding not clumping, would destroy this natural ecological service, of more forbs and more small animal habitat.

Or so it is claimed.

But blah blah blah, with a bunch of boring ecological bullshit.

Let me commensurate with you here.

Being crowded together is what native plants crave.

I know I have talked about this before.

But as a continual issue in native plant gardening, newcomers come in thinking they need to amend the soil.

They are thinking like gardeners, basically. Amending soil is oldthink.

Native plant gardeners are not gardeners, of course.

When we till up the soil, or prepare a garden bed, or peruse the seed catalogs, or chose what pretty flowers to plant where, we are different than the old gardening ways, and should not adopt their practices.

Restorationists have a different type of oldthink. They think you need to analyze soil as an initial site analysis step.

>Before selecting your seed and plant species, you must determine what kind of soil you have. The correct species selection can be made only when correct analysis of the soil is done. The Midwest prairie grew on all types of soils from mucks and clays of fens and potholes, to rich loams on broad plains, to dry sands on steep hill slopes. Consequently, there are wildflowers adapted to all types of soils, and they need only to be selected correctly.
--Restoring the Tallgrass Prairie, Shirley Shirley, p. 14

Surely Shirley Shirley jests here. She thinks that different plants are adapted to different soils and different habitats. But my soil is all soil types and all habitats all at once, and also all native plants are the same anyway, which is why all native plants are adapted to my soil. Which is why I never need to amend it.

The Xerces Society guide to site prep says the cardboard sheet mulching method should include a layer of green organics under the cardboard, amending to soil to improve it:

>Weed growth is suppressed by creating a barrier of layered carbon- and nitrogen-rich mulch (see Figure 5.1). If mulching materials are layered at a C:N ratio of 25–30:1, then natural soil conditions can be mimicked, resulting in improved plant and soil health, plus increased nutrient and water retention.

Why, as discussed, would I want to improve soil health, and increase nutrient and water retention? My soil is already perfect.

And mimic natural soil conditions?!!

If my turf lawn, which was rowcropped for a hundred years, with yearly tillage and cultivation, fundamentally destroying the natural soil structure, but was then entirely dug up and modified to create my residence, with the soil replaced with cheap fill, creating bulldozer-compacted soil conditions, with a thin six inches of imported topsoil to grow the turf grasses on top, which is all so compacted and disturbed and degraded that dandelion and plantain thrive there, does not already mimic natural soil conditions, I don't know what could.

I am common evening primrose. I am a night owl. I only start blossoming in the evening.

Sometimes I party all night with the pink primrose moth. Then we both sleep it off during the day, snuggled up together.

Aren't they gorgeous? I'm lucky I get to sleep with them.

Special, even. They won't sleep with anyone else but me.

But native plant gardeners seem to think I'm unattractive. Harmful and dangerous, even.

I recently overheard a gardener plotting to kill me, because they thought I was going to strangle their purple coneflower and their anise hyssop.

Both purple coneflower and anise hyssop are liars.

They both told the gardener they are native to the northeast.

Come on.

Don't be fooled by anise hyssop's fake Boston accent. That plant is from Fargo.

They don't party all night and sleep during the day, the way I do, back in North Dakota.

Here's what Illinois Wildflowers says about me:

>Moths pollinate the flowers, particularly Sphinx moths. Other occasional visitors include the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird, honeybees, bumblebees, and Anthedonia compta (Primrose Miner Bee), the latter being an oligolege. These insects seek nectar, although some of the bees collect pollen. The caterpillars of several moths feed on the foliage. This includes Endryas unio (Pearly Wood Nymph), Desmia funeralis (Grape Leaffolder Moth), Hyles lineata (White-Lined Sphinx), and Mompha eloisella (Momphid Moth; bores through stems). Various beetles feed on the foliage, including Popillia japonica (Japanese Beetle), Grahops pubescens (Leaf Beetle sp.), Altica fusconenea (Flea Beetle sp.), and several Curculio beetles. The seeds are eaten by goldfinches.

I'm pretty. Just not in the extra showy way of the plants that native plant gardeners will grow 500 miles outside their native range.

You can come admire me in the evening.

Why am I so unloved?

Hello.

I bought a cheap plastic hummingbird feeder on Amazon, because I wanted to attract ruby-throated hummingbirds to my suburban yard.

My neighbor grows a scarlet bee balm, for the same purpose.

The birds with a brain the size of a bb, smaller than pea brained, ignore my neighbor's native plant and head straight to my sugar water contraption.

I suspect they do this because they read Landscape and Urban Planning, volume 197, "Interacting with hummingbirds at home: Associations with supplemental feeding, plant diversity, plant origin, and landscape setting," by Timothy Meehan and coworkers at the National Audubon Society.

Hummingbirds like hummingbird feeders. Hummingbirds like species richness. But they like the feeders more.

>[R]elative occurrence of hummingbird sightings increased with the presence of a hummingbird feeder and increased with the number of plant taxa in a patch. The magnitude of the feeder effect was stronger than that of plant richness, but both appeared biologically meaningful.

And of course they do. The birds are not stupid.

They expend extraordinary amounts of energy to feed. They have a strong preference for revisiting reliable food sources, rather than foraging around.

My hummingbird feeder is reliable and always on. The scarlet bee balm is sucked dry very quick. The birds learn this.

And wait, did I say that my neighbor's scarlet bee balm, a plant that looks like a muppet alien exploding, is native.

My mistake. It is in fact a total alien to that yard. The plant is native hardly anywhere.

Just a very narrow specialist range on the western side of the Appalachians.

Creature with brains the size of a small watermelon often get confused about native plant ranges, though. They imagine nativeness far beyond where it actually exists.

Hello.

I live on the outskirts of Austin, Texas.

I've got a Texas-sized yard.

I've planted the yard in a generic Texas native seed mix.

It's very pretty.

Someone suggested that I need to light my lawn on fire.

I have reservations.

Is lighting a bone dry grassland on fire, when the grassland is surrounded by big expensive houses, all that smart a thing to do?

My neighbors already think I'm crazy.

Lighting your lawn on fire is expensive. You need to hire a big crew to guard against burning down the surrounding houses, and then the insurance in case they mess up.

Plus it's a health hazard.

I could just occasionally ride around my yard on a riding lawn mower, upping native-plant diversity as I ago, by creating disturbance. I'd wave at my neighbors, who might think I am not so crazy after all.

Yeah no I understand.

Where I live was once a fire dependant ecosystem. Summer lightning would have sometimes hit the bone dry grassland of my yard. The prairie grasses would have made for high intensity flames. Where my and my neighbors houses are now, would have every five years or so entirely burned down.

Someone suggested that I need to keep this natural pattern up.

A mosaic of recently lit on fire places, and not recently lit on fire places, has more biodiversity than either one alone.

But my reservation is that a mosaic of recently rider-mowered places, and not recently rider mowered, is nearly as good.

I'm not trying to do an authentic blackland prairie restoration. My seed mix was generic. Any old Texas native is good enough. Occasional lawn mowering should be fine for my goals.

And yet the karma.

The r/NativePlantGardening karma.

The community that loves prairie so much, that it plants purple coneflower in New England, also loves talking about prescribed burn in the suburbs.

Please talk me into burning up my lawn, so I can post dramatic pictures of it there.

Purple coneflower used to be an eccentric character, hanging out at the Hoof and Horn in frontier Missouri. A good looker, but a bit scruffy and homespun. Made it up to Chicago, and even over to Cincinnati, once.

Now it is more ubiquitous than McDonalds, and with all the individual personality.

It used to be the symbol of Tallgrass Prairie. Now it is the symbol of native plant garden homogenization.

Pre-European-settlement, the plant was not common, even in its prime range. Today, from how often it is planted, you'd get the idea that the continental United States was once a sea-to-sea purple sea of them.

Purple coneflower is the plant most likely to have to roll its eyes while its gardener lectures on the virtues of native plants, knowing that it has been planted very far from its native range.

It is among the plants on iNaturalist most likely to be tagged "Wild," when the observation is actually cultivated.

Gardeners in England have been growing the plant for its exotic qualities since at least the mid 1700s. Gardeners in New England, same.

In its natural environment, purple coneflower is intolerant of human disturbance, and mostly limited to high quality habitat. And yet it takes to the human disturbance of a garden very well, thus its popularity. This offends me a bit.

Today, the main gardening source for the plant, which has a primary native range of Arkansas to Illinois, is the Pacific Northwest. It is on the popular list at Prairie Moon in Minnesota, a state where it never natively grew.

On iNaturalist, I have found two Echinacea purpurea that I feel especially bad for.

One out in a pasture, in Gatzke, far northwest Minnesota. And the other in downtown Ely, far northeast Minnesota.

I bet they both hate the harshness of the winters up there.

They might feel like Lefty in the cold of Cleveland, except more betrayed than betraying, and much colder.

And yeah no really, look.

The total favorite native plant of native plant gardeners, the plant everyone grows, is mostly a native plant impostor.

The native plant favorite is usually a native plant fake.

Isn't that symbolic or emblematic of something?

Restorationist joke:

Q: What's the best way to prepare a lawn riddled with invasives, to be a native plant wildflower meadow?

A: Farm Roundup Ready soybeans on it for five years.

It's funny because it's true.