#if i saw nepenthes in the wild i would die immediately.......

[botanyshitposts]

How early in life do you realise you're interested in botany and want to be a botanist? I found your interest in it somewhat endearing to watch. - Love from Borneo...

omg to get this ask right after publishing that ask about stealing wisconsin fast plants in the 6th grade.... i know ive told this story before but its been a while since my last ‘how did i get into this’ ask so:

okay. always knew i wanted to get into biology. was dinosaur/paleontology kid, then veterinarian kid, then zoology-but-not-too-passionate-about-anything-but-wolves-kid, and then it was in like, early high school and they sent out this thing about an opportunity for unpaid internships through the local community college. like. ‘help out the community/check out various job opportunities’ type stuff. at this point i kind of half-heartedly told people i wanted to be a pharmacist and that was my vague future plan, but for this they had us pick 3 options and one of the openings was for a person to help at a family-run retail greenhouse in town. got the internship. cool. 

i mostly did manual labor around the greenhouse, but i also got taken behind the scenes where they showed me like, how they get these plants from corporations. the dude who ran the greenhouse showed me the catalogs they got from these giant companies and showed me seeds in test tubes sent to them and all this stuff, and plants started to unfold for me as a science. like. these companies were doing jurassic-park type stuff with these plants. it occured to me that the plants that were being sold were literally created to look pretty for us, or to grow big fruits and vegetables, etc etc, and it was like...it kind of freaked me out. this was also a little after when USDA APHIS and several related international government plant regulation branches found out about a ton of GMO petunias that were being sold to the public without the proper testing and documentation by several large seed companies; they let the retailers keep them, but ordered the companies to literally incinerate, bury, or destroy any and all illegal seed and plant matter. 

this was very fucked up, so of course i was fascinated and i started seeing plants as a whole in a very different way. i’d come home every day and tell my parents about whatever crazy shit i learned, which they got tired of pretty quickly, but i wasn’t stopping there. i wanted more plant information. i built a big wooden tray thing and started growing random plants in my room, not really with any sort of scientific goal aside from watching them and wondering about... whatever. eventually, this kind of general hyperfixation made me generate the question of whether or not plants generated heat, which i googled and was not satisfied at the answers for: they can, and plants that can are called thermogenic plants, but none of the pop science articles i read could explain exactly how it worked, and like, i was in it to see all the details, baybee, and i ended up reading scientific journal articles with absolutely no idea of how scientific journal articles are set up, how to read them, or what any of it meant. and i loved it. 

so that was my first dive into that, and it was around that time that i started this blog to contain my ongoing passion to stop boring my parents, and then i just...well i did more stuff and worked some other plant jobs that i’ve talked about before on here, some which involve more wild stuff than others, but long story short, that was how i ended up accidentally stumbling into this interest/career path via the very specific question of how plants that heat up Do That Thing. 

also: borneo! yall have some fantastic pitcher plants. some absolutely amazing carnivorous lads. like, congrats