#ohh and also within all of this I found out i was trans and Became A Man(tm) lmao

[botanyshitposts]

how did you know you wanted to be a botanist? did you ever consider doing something else?

(I’m going to write this one with proper capitalization because this is gonna be long and it’s easier to read)

Ohhh yeah. Like, to be honest, if I could do ANYTHING with my life I’d probably teach people about plants, write science fiction, or teach about plants through writing science fiction. I feel a lot like a journalist walking through botany conventions and stuff, like I just want to survey everything and learn it all and talk about it, and I’m not sure if I would be good at being like, a Real Plant Scientist, despite having some VERY niche botanical interests that i would absolutely dig deep and go through the literature for (isoetes and isoetes evolution, maize, lichens, carnivorous plants of the very specific nepenthes genus, hornworts, thermogenesis, etc, if you’ve been following this blog for a while you’ve probably seen me Go Off about a ton more). I do consider myself to be an aspiring botanist, but not a researcher looking to produce data and publish. That being said, going into academia isn’t completely out of the realm of possibilities for me.

Right now, I kind of have the pipe dream of trying for a science communication grad program, or a science fiction writing program. As it stands, I’m a biology major with a plant science concentration, I’m going into my junior year of undergrad, and i’m going to declare an english minor this year. I’ve been writing sci-fi since i was 10, and I’m currently in the process of buckling down to try to get something published (on a small scale to start) and increasing my stamina to work on some substantial projects, be it fiction or nonfiction or both. If I want to take writing seriously, I figure I have to start working hard for it now. 

As for like, HOW I got into botany, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about this on here, so I should start by answering a frequent question I get: most botanists stumble into botany. Like, they go down a path with animals or ecology or another biological field, and then accidentally fall in love with them. Not everybody is like, down for botany right in undergrad. Actually, a lot of people don’t think plants are very cool in undergrad. I started learning at 15, and I get asks sometimes that are like ‘I’m 17, am I too old to get into botany?’ like dude RARELY do you see botanists younger than 20 lmao you are NEVER too old for that shit. Plants have the disadvantage of being static beings in the peripheral of our everyday lives until you start paying attention to them (a phenomenon colloquially referred to as ‘plant blindness’ in the botany/horticulture communities), so they tend to get sidelined in K-12 education and are easily overlooked in general. 

I got into botany through an unpaid high school internship program. Fun fact, before all this I was passively thinking about becoming a zoologist, and what a disaster that would have been. I signed up to help out in a local greenhouse and was immediately blasted by how fucked up ornamental plants are. Specifically, I remember a time when my mentor was like, ‘do you want to see what $1,000 worth of plants looks like?’ and of COURSE I wanted to, so he brought me down to the back of the greenhouse. $1,000 worth of seeds turned out to be about 10-15 test tubes and blank white packets in a tupperware container. He took one of the test tubes out; it was filled with bulky, lumpy looking tan seeds. He said each one grew a pot of three different types of lettuce. They were bulky because each one was three separate seeds fused together with a rubbery substance that companies apply to make the seeds easier for robotic potting arms to pick up. It’s wild shit. I was a big fan of Jurassic Park at the time. As you can imagine, my third eye had been absolutely blasted open and I’ve never been the same.

From there I started volunteering in a community greenhouse, then I got obsessed with plants that heat up (thermogenic plants) and ended up teaching myself a ton off of wikipedia and from anything that wasn’t behind a paywall to understand what the hell I was reading about, then got some money from an extended learning program at my school to do a research project with it, and then my extended learning teacher had me submit my research to a science competition, and after that I got chosen to give a presentation at said competition and to be completely honest I completely blacked out for 15 minutes and can only remember crying on stage at the end about how much I loved Eastern Skunk Cabbages (my subject for the project), and THEN I went onto the National competition in San Diego and THAT was wild because in retrospect WOW my project sucked data and hypothesis-wise, and THEN I spent a summer doing manual labor for an industrial maize breeding facility which was wild, and after that I went to college and got invested in lichens and isoetes and all that wild shit and that’s where I am now. Last summer I went to the BSA conference in Manchester and the ICPS conference in California, both of which I liveblogged on here. They were awesome. Like holy shit. 

As for the history of this blog: I started this blog when I was...god, 15 or 16 I think, when I first was going hog wild getting obsessed with plant stuff I absorbed off the internet. My parents and friends got very tired of my infodumping very fast. I’d been a tumblr user for a couple years already, so I made this blog to talk about stuff so I wouldn’t annoy people irl, and now it’s turned into like, wow. This(tm). Which is wild. 

I get a lot of questions too about like, jobs in botany, and how to get further in botany, and I never really know how to answer them because I’m still figuring it out myself. My number one biggest source of botany information, to be completely honest, is asking people, and talking to people in horticulture and botany positions and bugging them with questions (I first learned about isoetes while talking to a couple grad students around a campfire on a BSA fern foray. One was wearing an isoetes convention hat, and they were all kind of struggling to explain them to me when I asked, which of course got me obsessed immediately because when a plant in general is difficult to explain you know it’s some cursed shit. It then took me a semester of college to begin to understand them, and yes, they are just That Cursed and also INCREDIBLY underrepresented and understudied in the literature). 

Idk how to end this but yeah thank you guys for asking me questions and supporting my shitposts and stuff all these years. It’s made me a better science communicator than I could have ever imagined it would make me, and I’m still learning a ton from it. I’m moving back to college tomorrow. I will finish this post with a picture of a hornwort (anthocerotophyta), the slimiest of the cursed lads: