Episode 145: Tyler Thrasher
Tyler Thrasher’s podcast Greenhouse Rants lives up to its name! Check it out here.
Transcript
Episode 145
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Jane: Hello and welcome to On The Ledge podcast! I am your host Jane Perrone, cut me and I bleed sap! Yes, this is the show about houseplants where we can all share our darkest secrets, whether that is quite how much of your pay cheque you spent on houseplants last month, or what happens to your heart rate when you see that reverse variegated Hindu rope Hoya on Instagram. In this episode, I talk to the wonderful human being that is Tyler Thrasher. He's an artist, he's a scientist, he's a plant breeder and he's the creator of plant podcast, Greenhouse Rants. Tyler joins me for a wide ranging chat about everything from why the internet is the wrong place to go for plant information, racism in the plant community, breeding new hybrid succulents and why following your passions is really the way to go if you want a happy and fulfilled life.
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Jane: Thanks to the ever-growing band of Patreons who support On The Ledge with a monthly donation. This week Sally, Rachel, Nicky and Elsie all became Ledge-ends, and Kay became a Super Fan, so Kay, your exclusive postcard will be winging its way to you shortly! Thanks to Olivay and Abjens in the US and SaraJoffo and FroctPastelen in Sweden for leaving reviews for On The Ledge. You all said lovely things that put a smile on my face. Leaving a review for On The Ledge is one of the free and easy ways you can support the show.
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Now, without any further ado, it's time for my interview with Tyler Thrasher. It's a long one, so get yourself a pot of Earl Grey, or a nice long dog walk to go on, or whatever is your podcast accompaniment of choice because you've got a treat in store. Do go and check out the show notes where you can see a picture of Crassula Thrashula, the wonderfully-named hybrid Crassula succulent that Tyler talks about and also links to all of Tyler's stuff, including his 'Grow A Damn' plant journal and those incredible crystallised insects. Intrigued? Well, let's get cracking and hear more from this fascinating guy.
Tyler: My name is Tyler Thrasher. I am a scientist, artist, grower, overall - I don't know - a mad man out here in Tulsa, Oklahoma!
Jane: It's really nice to have you on the show, Tyler! I've been following you for some time and dipping into your podcast. The events of the past few weeks have somewhat crystallised in my mind the fact that my show needs to be as diverse as possible, so it prompted me to reach out to you and ask you to come on On The Ledge. What's it like being black in the realm of botany/horticulture/plants at this very moment? What are you seeing that's pleasing you / displeasing you, in the world of plants?
Tyler: Oh man, I've never really been asked that. I would say my experience as a grower and with plants is different here in Oklahoma than it would be for say somebody on the West Coast. One of the biggest things that comes to mind is I grow and collect cacti and succulents and one of the interesting observations I've made is that a lot of people that grow and collect cacti and succulents can, by and large, be very Conservative. Historically down here in the South and in the Mid-West, those are always very, very touchy demographics for me to be around as a black American. I have encountered handfuls of racist comments and remarks, plenty of older white growers that are surprised to see a black man coming up to their greenhouse. I've even been told: "Oh man, there's not a whole lot of black people who grow cacti and succulents" and those seemingly innocent off-hand remarks can make one very nervous when you're alone in a greenhouse with somebody and you're just wondering what are they going to say next. That's been interesting, driving an hour-and-a-half out into the country to someone's greenhouse and really hoping you don't see a confederate flag or a big Trump sticker. Which I have and there have been plenty of times where I feel very uncomfortable for the sake of looking at really cool plants, which is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Other than that, there's a lot of diversity happening right now. Plant communities are popping up online here and there and so it seems to be a lot of space online and in these forums and online groups in the plant community for people of colour and black growers, and also on the other hand, I've seen a lot of racist remarks from people online because they have that internet screen and there are a handful of growers that I've had to cut out of my circle or add to a 'black list' of people I do not... these people are racist, stuff like that. There's a little bit of give and take and as a black grower I've had to learn how to navigate that and know who to buy my plants from and who to support and vice versa.
Jane: It's been interesting here, as a white person in the UK, navigating my response to what's happened has been interesting. My take has always been that, and I found myself quoting Meghan Markle of the Royal Family the other day, "The only bad thing to say is to say nothing," and I think that's what I've been getting from a lot of people on social media who are into plants and gardens saying, "Oh, I can't say anything because I don't want to say something wrong and I don't really have a view" and all of those cop-out type phrases, as if there was some kind of magic wall. They just want to talk about plants and therefore they are able to just remain silent on this issue and that has frustrated me, but at the same time, I've found it difficult to negotiate, so I do sympathise with them to some extent, but at the same time, it's not hard to say 'Black Lives Matter', that's not a hard thing to say, that's not a stretch. Surely we all understand enough and can see enough of what's been happening. It's been so interesting here in the UK as well, because we've had protests here and we've had a statue of a slave trader that was in Bristol that was taken down. Amazing things, so there's been some really positive responses. Again, some people would say that's vandalism, but as somebody pointed out, who lived in Bristol, the day after, they posted a picture of themselves sitting in the sunshine near to where this statue was, saying "As you can see, Bristol has now descended into a lawless state of chaos!" It's like 'Nope, everything is just exactly the same and actually it's better because we no longer have this statue!'. It's a very interesting time. I guess one of the things that you've done is release this "Raise some heck" T-shirt, which has raised tons of money. Tell us a bit about that.
Tyler: I've always been very vocal about some of this stuff and, like you mentioned earlier, people choosing willful ignorance, that is a magical wall where people can pretend that some issues don't exist, because realistically those issues don't exist for certain people. I've also found myself really frustrated with the plant community in its decisive silence and its overwhelming ability to pretend like human lives aren't all that important and lean more into plants. I'm thinking: "How do you get those plants?" and that's something I want to touch further on. The shirt came about because it was a design I had made during the 2016 election to try to get people excited about voting, about giving a damn. We go through life trying to avoid big, hard scary topics and those are the ones that we should be tackling together. I've always made these efforts to get people energised about important things and about changing the world and even during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings I brought the shirt back and then during the protests for George Floyd I was asked to bring the shirt back again. So, I did, not really thinking much was going to happen. A lot of people who followed me already had the shirt, so I thought I'm up to raise maybe $5,000 for a good cause, and I was really excited about that and I listed the shirts and within three hours I'd raised $25,000. By the next day, I'd raised $35,000! By the time three days had passed we had raised $75,000 to donate to various charities and causes on both the national level and a more local level. That blew my mind. I was not expecting that and I'm still trying to come down from the overwhelming joy and the feelings and anxiety of all of that happening in about three days.
Jane: Wow! Yes, that sounds amazing! It's a real achievement and it's heartwarming that there are that many people out there who were sympathetic to the cause and wanted to support you, which is absolutely brilliant. That's the wonderful thing about the plant community. It's been interesting seeing how the reaction has been differentiated in my community, the On The Ledge community. I have had not a single bit of negativity about what I've said in last week's episode about Black Lives Matter, but I've seen other podcasts try to tackle this subject and seen comments from their listeners saying: "Oh, just stick to gardening. We don't want to hear about that." I've been proud of my listeners, that, actually, they've taken this on board, and said: "Yes, of course, this is something we're concerned about," so that's made me really happy. Tell me a bit about the various aspects to your polymath - you're a polymath - I think we can describe you as that? There's so many different things we can talk about there. We can talk about hybridising succulents, we can talk about your incredible crystalline, I don't even know how to explain these crystallised insects, we can talk about some amazing Aroids that I've seen on your Instagram. How did this all start? Where did this all come from? Was there a childhood filled with plants and science?
Tyler: It comes from a few different places. As a kid, as most kids often are, I was very curious and I was enthralled with the world. My dad was a gardener, nursery owner, landscaper, and growing up he had this nursery called River Bin Nurseries and it was a wholesale nursery where you would see geraniums and flowers and landscape plants. I would oftentimes spend my weekends at the nursery, with completely free rein. I remember running through these giant, 60-foot greenhouses, just exploring and hiding in the flowers and trying to catch lizards and looking at something new every weekend, while my dad would be driving around the golf cart picking up flowers to load on the trucks. My dad brought all that home. We had a beautiful, beautiful garden, we had home and garden tours. I remember, as a kid, looking out my bedroom window one morning and seeing lines of people go up and down the block waiting to walk through my dad's garden and we'd be making cookies and lemonade to bring out to the people waiting in line. I was surrounded by plants and my dad had a deep love for plants, so I always carried that with me. In high school, you go through the school system where they want to take the cheese grater and chop off as much of your inspiration and passion as possible. I fought that, where I felt like I was being told to pick one thing, or two things at most, rather than all the things I'm in love with and so I had to learn to fight that and get back the things that I loved as a child, which included plants. There's even a point in my childhood where I lived in a greenhouse! My dad opened up a nursery that had this little back office area behind one of the large geranium houses, where there was a little bed. Oftentimes I would wake up at home, three in the morning, my dad would put me in the car still sleepy and I would continue my rest at the greenhouse only to wake up and water geraniums and then that weekend I would sleep there at the nursery. There is a part of my life where I lived in a greenhouse and plants have seemed to have been there my whole life, surrounding me. So that's where the plants come from. Some of my work that you mentioned, like the crystallised pieces, I synthesise and grow crystals on insects and different exoskeletons and organic matter. That comes from a deep love for chemistry and I'm also a caver, so I spend a lot of time crawling through caves and exploring caverns and stuff like that. My appreciation for geology and mineralogy gets pulled into my artistic practices as well. They all do stem from a childhood knack of being curious and being so in love with the natural world which I just feel so many people lose over time.
Jane: Yes, so true. I love the fact that you got to sleep in the greenhouse. Who can say that isn't their dream? The smell of geraniums is very, very evocative for me. I'm sure it is for you if you grew up surrounded by them. That smell takes me right back to my childhood, that very distinctive smell is very, very evocative for me. I can just picture you in there among all the plants. What a wonderful exposure to plants at an early age. I guess lots of people miss out on that and therefore they come to plants later in life when they get their own place and this whole explosion of interesting house plants that's happened over the last few years has caught them up and they've got into it. Have you found yourself talking to friends who've perhaps in the past been a bit dismissive of your plant collection in the last few years and now they're suddenly interested where they weren't before because houseplants are suddenly en vogue?
Tyler: Personally, no. Well, I guess I've had friends that know my obsession with plants and over time, yes, as plants have gotten more popular, I've had friends ask me so many questions. I'm their go-to plant guy! They'll just text me a question in the middle of the day, or a series of questions, and I am finding people around me who hadn't seemingly cared about plants, all of a sudden start wanting to fill their homes with plants and stuff like that. It has been interesting. We're watching plants blow up on Instagram, online and on Pinterest and I'm watching that happen in the circles around me as well. Every time we have friends come over or have a dinner party, my one rule is that I pull them into the greenhouse to show them one really cool plant, or something that's flowering in the greenhouse or something like that.
Jane: This leads us on to talking about your podcast, Greenhouse Rants, which is refreshing that you just unload, amongst lots of other things, you unload your frustration with the, because this is a non-sweary podcast, I'm going to call it the BS of the houseplant world, or the plant world more generally. I'm of this soft and fluffy illusion that we're all friends and this is all lovely and everyone's nice to each other. Clearly, having listened to Greenhouse Rants, that's not true. Is there anything you want to rant about on On The Ledge? Can you give us an example of something that's annoying you in the plant world right now?
Tyler: There's a list! For one, I've got to flip off the curse switch because I'll get going. The one of the first freaking things that got me really frustrated with the plant community was the fact that I learned really quick that not everyone who grows plants are good at heart. There are what I have coined Plant Vultures: people who understand the value of a plant based off its market appeal and they'll use that to prey on unsuspecting plant people. One of the beautiful things about plants is that they don't adhere to our rules entirely and they mutate, evolve, and change, sometimes spontaneously, and some of those changes have been very, very vital to making a plant of horticultural significance. Those spore mutations that we see, those things have gone into making landscaping plants or making some of the most beautiful Hostas that you see in gardens and so on. There has been ongoing with finding the freaks and the mutants in a seemingly normal batch and profiting on that change and that mutation. That sort of behaviour and that observation has not gone away.
So what you see is a bunch of new plant people coming into this hobby and then there are people who know what things are worth and what to look out for and they prey on the unsuspecting people. One of my first frustrations was when I had this Monstera that I had been growing, that randomly mutated and I posted it online and I didn't really know much about it and someone messaged me immediately and said: "That is very, very, very valuable. You need to be very careful." I was like, "What? It's just a plant! There's no problem here" and they told me: "You'll see." Then, sure enough, I got dozens of messages from people saying: "That thing looks sick, you should send it to me" or "Yes, your plant is not that special. I would buy a cutting from you for maybe $30, if you'd like?". When I started getting these messages from a bunch of very popular and very well-known plant people telling me a) It's not that special, but b) I want it, I started to make a map of certain behaviour in the plant community and sure enough, what I had was very, very special and some people knew it and they wanted to get it from me. I made the mistake of sending a plant to somebody who completely ripped me off. I've had people try to come into my shop and try to steal cuttings and stuff like this. I quickly learned that not everyone in the plant community has the best of intentions and some of them are here strictly to profit on this crazy, crazy, stupid plant trend. They're trying to profit off it at the expense of the people who are just here to grow and learn and have fun. So that's something I'm seeing happen all the time. I'll see somebody share some really cool mutation they've found at their local nursery and I'll see the same plant people, who are very notorious for scamming other people in the community, I'll see them pop up in little gaggles and they'll all try to get the plant from them and you'll see this happen back and forth. There is no shortage, you see people who are trying to get the most money they can out of the least plant that's available. So you see people selling rooted nodes from plants for $200-$300 dollars and that frustrated me into a term that I call 'wet sticks', when people are just selling stuff like that. Whereas before this, before the trends, people were growing and selling full plants with leaves and roots, a whole plant, not just a piece of a plant for $300.
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Jane: More from Tyler coming up but now let's hear about our other show sponsor this week. This week's On The Ledge is supported by Bite Away, the chemical-free device to treat your insect bites. I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical about Bite Away. This product uses nothing more than a short blast of heat to take the itch and the swelling out of bites from bees, horse flies, mosquitos and other insects, but I got bitten twice on the hand quite soon after my Bite Away arrived in the post, so I thought: "Okay, I'll give it a go." So I placed the tip of the device, which is about the size of a chunky marker pen, onto the bites and less than a minute after I'd used it the itch was gone and the swelling was already going down. How does it work? Well, the Bite Away uses a short spell of concentrated heat, 51C for three seconds to be precise. It does feel a little weird and uncomfortable but as soon as that three seconds is up, I started to feel better. My husband had an old bite on his leg, so I used the Bite Away on him too and it worked for him as well. The Bite Away is compact enough to stick in your first aid kit when travelling and it works on a couple of double A batteries, which is enough power for 300 applications. Bite Away costs £26.99 and is available from Amazon. Find out more at mybiteaway.co.uk
And now back to Tyler and I wanted to know if the world of cacti and succulents is quite as pressured as the world ofAroids.
Tyler: I would say before the Aroids blew up, the thing that was in were cacti and succulents. There was a huge cacti and succulent boom where every Pinterest board had a cacophony of just tacky succulent projects and DIY stuff and people were all about them. Then there's different sections of cacti and succulents and if you're in it long enough, you'll know which ones are popular with different demographics. I have growers that grow a lot of Caudiciform, so they grow a lot of Adenium. Adenium are really popular in Japan right now and in Taiwan, so there are a lot of growers from those areas that travel to the US to import just hundreds of these plants because they're so insanely expensive and popular over there. The Mesembs like Conophytum and Lithops, those are really popular in Japan, very, very popular in Japan and China, so a lot of those growers will buy them from Mesa Garden or from Steven Hammer and they'll bring them in and they'll pay whatever price they can for some of these. So that's still there, but one thing that the succulent and cacti community suffers is a beautiful, beautiful habitat in South Africa where all these succulents are endemic to and that habitat is plagued by humans that like to come in and pillage and they like to, what's the word I'm looking for?
Jane: Poach?
Tyler: Poach, yes, they like to pillage and poach. So you'll see, all the time, on some different news sources in South Africa, someone got into a state or national park and they took $5million worth of Conophytum or Lithops and this happens all the time. There are people on the inside that get paid to let these growers come in and do this. That's one thing that the succulent and cacti community is suffering, is that. These are very slow-growing plants, so when you poach an entire area, you might as well have written that little population off as extinct at that point and that hasn't stopped. Now, I have noticed prices drop because now everyone's moving to houseplants and Aroids, there are succulent people that I've bought from for years that are now asking me where they can get wholesale Aroids so that they can sell those now too. So to moving it more in the direction of Aroids in terms of where the prices are, but I think that's short-lived, I think in the next few years we're going to see a shift to another trend and I'm seeing people in the Aroid community now start posting about some "rare" succulents that they're now adding to their collection. So I am curious to see where this trend goes next.
Jane: I too am curious. I always advise people not to be driven by what they see on Instagram but buy the plants that really they feel passion about and that make their heart race. I speak as somebody who is probably a bit of an oddity in that one of the plant families that really excites me are the Gesneriads, which are not very popular at all and very untrendy, so I'm hoping they stay, in a way, that they stay unpopular because I fear the same kind of horrible situation where I can't buy a Primulina for five bucks that's suddenly got really expensive. It is a double-edged sword, the popularity thing, I think. The other thing I wanted to go back to picking up on - your point about terrible succulent projects on Pinterest. Oh my gosh, can we just rant about that for a minute?
Tyler: They're so bad!
Jane: I know you've talked in your podcast about succulent substrates and it was a very enlightening discussion of that and interestingly some of the materials that you mentioned are not ones that I'm familiar with. I think you talked about Turface which I've never heard of before, so I had to Google that one. It's interesting, it's so interesting how much poor information there is out there about succulents, oh my gosh. If I see another succulent in a glass terrarium, or another succulent that's in a pot with no drainage. Okay, yes, theoretically if you are very experienced with succulents you could probably make that thrive but these aren't being bought or done by people who have vast experience with succulents, are they?
Tyler: No.
Jane: I just feel sad for all the millions of succulents that turn to mush as a result of these Pinterest things.
Tyler: Yes, there is a lot of bad info out there and when I first started out growing cacti and succulents, that was a hard thing for me, as I ended up killing a lot of plants and I like to look for the things most people ignore. So, I found myself trying to find plants that weren't widely available which meant they were really hard to track down. I remember my first frustration with the info out there. I bought a Crassula plegmatoides, which is this beautiful, grey-leafed Crassulathat has these spherical structures. It's a very enticing plant. I got one for a really good price but I ended up killing it about three weeks later and I was devastated because I had to go on a bidding war for this plant. It was a beautiful plant and I felt like I let down not only myself but the plant and the grower. It really devastated me. So from there on, I thought "Screw it. There's no good info out there. I've got to make the good info. I have to do this through trial and error". I ended up finding other growers that do not use the internet for succulent information. They have books, they have documents from other growers that don't really use the internet because some of the best info comes from the older growers who aren't interested in putting their "how to" stuff on Pinterest.
Jane: That is truth, absolute truth. It's really tempting just to think the answers to everything lies on the internet, but with plants, it really doesn't, does it?
Tyler: No.
Jane: There's so much good information in books that you think: "I've never seen this online before, this information just isn't there." How do you go about tracking down the information that you needed? Was it sheer detective work of finding the right growers and talking to them?
Tyler: That part is tricky. One of the biggest strides I had to make was, nothing on the internet in terms of what I love to grow: Conophytum and Mesembs. Anyone who follows me knows that's one of my plants that makes my heart race. There's no good info on the internet. They're all mis-labeled, no-one knows what they're talking about, but there are a few people who really know what they're talking about and they're not on the internet, they're in their greenhouses and maybe they've put out a book or two, or they have journals. I had to find those people and, for me, it started with hitting up my local cacti and succulent dealers here in Oklahoma and hanging out with them and getting to know them. I have some good friends, Bill and Terry, and they're older growers and they've done this for decades and I would spend hours in the greenhouse with them, learning about the plants they loved and then they would learn about the plants I love and then what would happen is they would say: "Oh, if you're into Mesembs, you should look up this person, you should go to this person's greenhouse, they've been doing it for 60 years," or something like that and I made a list of people who aren't on the internet, they just have these big greenhouses out in the Mesas, or out in California, or out in the desert. They've been doing it for so long that they have just greenhouses overflowing with plants.
So, I got resources and I would call them and some of them would be like: "I don't have visitors any more. It's just me" or I'd have someone say "I haven't had a visitor in a very long time and you sound really young. Yes, this could be really fun!" so I'd go out and visit the grower who hasn't had young plant people come in their greenhouse, it's just all their fellow older growers and so what ends up happening is they share info with me because they want to see this knowledge and this plant experience get passed down. So I did have that advantage as younger, more excited, grower because people are almost eager to share what they know and share their plants with me because they haven't had a grower my age come through their greenhouse in a decade or so. So it was more of an in-person experience. Any time I travel for my art or travel for a show, I would tell my wife "While we're in Denver, or while we're in Albuquerque, I'm going to find a local grower and I'm going to go and hang out with them," that was a ritual that I had done. I always tried to find a local grower, or a local nursery and get to know the owner and then ask: "Hey, can I come and hang out and talk to you and pick your brain?" That's every time I travel, even when we went to Amsterdam a few years ago, it was the same thing. I've always got to find a local grower and pick their brain and see what crazy plants they have and what crazy things they know. So I spent less time on the internet and more time talking to actual people.
Jane: That is a very sound piece of advice for anyone, obviously aside from listening to both of our podcasts! It is a great thing to get away from the internet and see what you can learn from books and from people, that there is such a fountain of information. Having said that there's this cut-throat world out there. A lot of these growers are very generous at dispensing that knowledge to somebody who shows an interest. That is an amazing opportunity and let's use that because I certainly see here, in the UK, with the older members of the British Cactus and Succulent Society, where somebody dies and then they've got this huge collection and the family doesn't want to look after it and they end up having to give it away and there's always a struggle to find homes for these plants and I'm thinking that's crazy because cacti and succulents are really in but the mechanics for finding a home for a large collection is not easy. It's a great resource and it's wonderful to have these societies that can pass on that information and I know I've benefited from visiting different people.
Tyler: You guys have the Mesemb Study Group over there and that's also a really great resource for anyone who is in to cacti and succulents or mesembs. I believe they're based in the UK - they are - and they have a quarterly publication they do, in that they release info on habitat, plants and habitat, and new cultivars and hybrids that are being worked on, so that's always been a really fun resource and I've been trying to get seeds from them for a while and they stopped shipping internationally.
Jane: Yes, the seed schemes are a brilliant way of getting new plants and I love growing stuff from seed and we have an annual sowalong, so I'm always encouraging people to give that a try. I want to talk about Crassula Thrashula and your breeding. I love the fact that you called it that. Tell us about breeding succulents and what that adds to your own personal understanding and excitement of this group of plants.
Tyler: I think it's a disputed fact - it's a fact - that the universe operates on random, beautiful accidents and plants and hybridising is no exception to that rule. The way I've always seen it, is I like to tinker with nature. If you follow any of my art or any of my projects they do usually fall on the lines of nature has given us these tools that can be used as artistic mediums and I do plants that way. You can view plants like you could a palette, with a bunch of brushes and paints. They're there for us to experiment with. That is the beauty of humans, we can step back every now and then and look at the world and tinker with it, if we like. When I had a bunch of plants flowering in my greenhouse for the first time, I freaked out and I would go online and there was nothing online about cross-pollinating plants or making hybrids and there's nothing reliable. So, again, I talked to the older growers that would say: "About 20 years ago, I crossed these two and I made this," and I would learn how they did it. I would go to Mesa Garden where you would have these pots full of paint brushes and I would say: "What's up with the paint brushes?" and they go "That's to transfer pollen from one flower to the next," and I was like, "Oh, wow!" So I brought that into the greenhouse and I just started experimenting, I would have two Lithops flower or I'd have two Crassula flower and I'd go back and forth and cross-pollinate them, wait about six months and a seed pod would develop and I would cross my fingers. I would crush the seed pod and sow the seeds and see what happens. Crassula and succulents grow so slow that you never know if you've made a true hybrid when it takes about three years to be able to discern any distinct traits. I've been doing this for about four or five years now and that's one of the things, I started this early on, and now I have plants that are distinct enough that I'm like: "Wow, that actually kind of worked!" One of those was the Crassula Thrashula. This is a hybrid I made between a Crassula ausensis and a Crassula deceptor and I didn't know if it would work and I didn't know until this year and I could look at individual traits and go: "Wow, this is different," this is not like either parent. I went online to some Crassula experts and they went: "Yes, you've made a hybrid." I wanted, originally, to name it Crassula Nova after my son, but you can't use the Latin language when you name a hybridised plant, so they said you can't use Nova. Out of frustration I just named it Crassula Thrashula, as a joke and I loved it. I fell in love.
Jane: That's interesting. I'd forgotten that. That's an interesting one about the breeding - you can't use the Latin. Still, the world is your oyster. There's many ways that you can express yourself through the name of your hybrids, I think. What other qualities of Crassula Thrashula excite you?
Tyler: It propagates very easily. This is something I talk about in the podcast. One of the beauties of growing plants from seed is that you will end up with plants that are very strong in your zone or in your habitat. These Crassula Thrashula that had survived over the last three years, about 80% of them died, but there were three that survived and that usually indicates that they are very happy in Oklahoma. That means when you go to cut them and propagate them they root very quickly because genetically they're thriving in the area. So I've been propagating it and it propagates very nicely and it grows quickly. It was about to flower and then we had a heatwave come through and half of the plant got burned, so the flower got disintegrated, which was a little bit of a bummer. I don't know what the flower looks like yet, but some of my favourite traits, when this plant gets enough sun, it puts on this soft velvety red hue on the undersides of the leaves. This plant has these tiny little fuzzy hairs and that helps it give it this shimmering, velvety look that I really enjoy. That came from the Crassula ausensis, which was the seed parent for the hybrid.
Jane: It sounds like great fun! This is not something I've ever tried, but you're making me want to try because it sounds so cool. Basically, you've got to have the two flowers from the two parent plants and then be crossing pollen from one to the other using a paint brush and then presumably isolating that flower so it doesn't get pollenated by anything else if there might be other pollinators around, or is that not an issue if you're inside your greenhouse?
Tyler: My greenhouse, I do have pollinators come in every now and then. Fortunately, for something like the Crassulaflower, they're tiny. A paint brush doesn't work with the Crassula flower. I actually use my beard hairs!
Jane: Handy!
Tyler: Yes, or you can use a cat whisker, but I'll pluck off a beard hair and you stick it in the flower and there aren't any pollinators in Oklahoma that I've come across that are interested in the Crassula flower, so I rarely get any cross-contamination. However, with Lithops and some of the Conophytum, their flowers are much larger, so anything like a gust of wind can blow pollen across the bench or something like that. So you do have to be careful about cross-contamination and if you are going to make a hybrid, there's lots of rules, a handful of rules, when it comes to making hybrids and naming them. One of the big ones is to take a lot of notes and be very, very specific about what you're crossing because you want to be accurate. You don't want to have a hybrid and not know what one of the parents is. You have to know, for any society to take it seriously, you have to be able to show full documentation and note-taking of that hybrid and stuff like that. So there's a lot that goes into it if you want a hybrid to be registered as a new cultivar, or be registered as a new plant. There's a lot you have to do at your end to make sure you have the info you need.
Jane: I can imagine, and as a terrible record keeper, that strikes fear into my heart. I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, how could I actually manage to do that?" Talking of record-keeping, that brings us neatly on to your journal which, I have to say, I've tried many, many different systems of record keeping, - as I say, I'm a terrible record-keeper - and I think this is what drove you to create your very own publication devoted to recording plants? Tell us about how that came about and what your masterplan was?
Tyler: It all comes back to the fact that the internet sucks and everyone just spews whatever info they have. I got so tired of wading through, that I thought the only way I'm going to learn is to screw up myself and take notes. I had empty sketch books and this and that and it was always way too vague for me, and I thought if there was a neat way to organise all the different aspects of growing a plant because it's not just look at it and write stuff down. There are a lot of different things that go into growing a plant such as seasonable observations and what fertilisers do you use and your watering regiment. There's so much. I thought there's got to be a journal out there that breaks all this up and I couldn't find it. Every grower I talked to, growers that are 70 years old, have said: "We have wanted something like this but no one's making it. No one's making something that is made by growers for growers" so I have this habit where if there is a void or a vacuum somewhere, it has to be filled and so I thought "I'll make a journal!" That's what I sought out to do, was to make a journal that breaks up all the different observations you have while growing a plant so you can write them down separately. You need to be critical about those things separately and then when they all come together on that same page, it will paint a scientific image of the plant. You'll have a better understanding because you looked at all these different things separately.
Plus, I was done with killing plants. I needed something to track down all my failures and successes and I thought there's got to be other growers out there that can use something like this. Even for novice growers, they kill their plants regularly and they message me saying: "Tyler, I don't have a green thumb. I have a black thumb," and my whole thing is that there is no such thing as a green thumb or a black thumb, the only difference is there are people who pay attention and those who don't. You have to train yourself to pay attention and look at your plants critically so that they can be healthier and then you can sit back and relax once you have a better understanding of your plant. That's hopefully what this journal will do, as people fill out different prompts about a specific plant. At the end of the day, they can look at it and go: "Oh my God, it all makes sense! This plant now makes a lot of sense." They can stop worrying about it because they now have a better understanding of the plant as a whole. There's even things in the journal like tips from me on how to deal with pests and soil additives and fertilizer. I really want it just to be a pocket guide for your collection, so you don't have to go to on Pinterest and dig through acres of false information. The information you have is right here in your hands and that's the most valuable information when it comes to your own collection. So, I wanted to make a personal database for people and their plants.
Jane: I'm nodding so hard my head is about to fall off! I'm so with you on this idea, people's crazy idea they've either got the knack or they haven't. As you say, no, it's just you're either paying attention or you're not. That's so true. It should spur me on to take better records because I know that when I do, and when I look back at things and think: "Oh, yes, that plant has doubled in size since I repotted it last year" it actually really does help me to understand what's working and what's not working. Have you crowd-funded its publication?
Tyler: Yes, I did the Kickstarter before the pandemic took off here in the United States. My goal was about $15,000 and we ended up raising about $45,000 on the journals and this is something I've had a lot of people ask: was that Kickstarter my only chance to get the journal? And this is something I plan on having in my inventory for the foreseeable future, so I'm going to be carrying this thing and changing it and adapting it even after the Kickstarter, as people buy them and use them and they tell me: "This worked great, this didn't work that great, this was wonderful". I'm going to be taking a lot of notes from other people's note-takings, to try and design and tweak this thing over the next few years." I'm going to always have this thing on my shop and have it regularly stocked because I think it's something that's very important for growers. We Kickstarted and it blew up! It was funded in 30 minutes, or something like that, or two hours, I can't remember. It just blew up and it was terrifying!
Jane: That must be very gratifying though, that you've got such a following that people are prepared to invest in what you're doing?
Tyler: Yes, it's crazy, I've been doing this for five years and I've been fortunate enough to have a following that supports my work and I've just been able to make art and experiment full-time for five years and it sometimes it freaks me out and sometimes it really warms my heart to know that there's a huge swathe of people out there that are just saying: "Look, you just keep doing you and we'll support you!" and that's such a weird life! I never thought that I would have that opportunity, even when it comes to my plants, and knowing there's so many people out there that count on me for plant info, or count on me to be a voice for different stuff, I've found myself in a position where I don't think 20-year-old me, or 18-year-old me thought was possible.
Jane: That's a good message. If you could speak to yourself at 20, you might want to say to yourself "This is going to be okay!". I keep saying this to my children. You don't have to, necessarily have to think of the future in terms of a really traditional, set definition of a career. A career can be any number of different things. It doesn't have to go down traditional lines and involve you sitting at a desk nine-to-five in an office any more. Both of my children have got really into snakes during lockdown, and reptiles, and they've both decided they want to be snake breeders right now. I'm like: "Okay, the message has definitely got home! It's obviously working!" I think it's really interesting that there's a whole generation who have got into plants who are now seeing alternative futures for themselves, where they open a plant shop, or they open a nursery, or do all different kinds of things connected with plants that they never dreamed that they could do because perhaps no-one ever told them that they could.
Tyler: Another thing that's interesting too, is there are so many things that I'm fascinated by and I try to tell people, you don't have to pick one or two things, that's not how life works. This idea of picking a career, that idea is so much younger than the rest of humanity. So much more of human timeline existed without that necessity than did, and I think we forget that. We think that there's this new rule for humans that you've got to pick one thing, and like you've said, sit at a desk and do it over and over and over, that's now how this works. There's a generation of people, older than me, that are so perpetually miserable because they thought that's how life was meant to be lived. I won't settle for that. I forcibly will not settle for that, so I'm personally, too, always telling people you don't have to pick one thing. You can have a basket of fascinations and ideas and projects and make them work. Just do your best and keep falling in love with the world and these ideas you've been collecting, you don't have to dump out your basket and keep one really boring "profitable" thing. That's not how life was meant to be lived.
Jane: That is a brilliant thing to emphasise in this podcast. We don't necessarily always keep completely on the topic of houseplants, but I think that's a really good message for every listener, whether they're fifteen, as I know some of my listeners are, or whether they're 55 or 85. There's always more scope to do more interesting things. What's next for you? What other projects have you got on the go? Have you got any more plants that you're breeding? We haven't even talked about synthesising opals, which we could have another whole hour on. I'm not going to keep you too long! What's next for you?
Tyler: I have such a huge list of projects. One of my big focuses right now, it's a long-term goal - really hoping it's not too long - I want to open up a conservatory. I want a conservatory that makes plants accessible. I want to take some of these endangered plants, or some of these plants that I find so fascinating, and I want a big, glass home for them. I want to open it to the public, but my wife and I also want to double it as a venue, so we could still make some money, but during most of the month it's just this big open public space. That's a big project for me. After I did this T-shirt drop and we raised that much money, we started to coin this term called 'The Do Good Gang' which is a group of people who believe in using art and science and creativity to do good where they can, both on a national and local level. We're working on a series of shirts that both a) raises money for good causes and b) raises money for a future conservatory that I get to open, where people can come and listen to plant lectures, or just walk around and look at really cool plants and maybe catch me hunched over a bench with a beard hair, cross-pollinating, or something like that. So that's one of my big projects, is to keep doing good and to keep using art and science as a vessel for doing good and open this conservatory and there's so many.
Jane: That's just the top of the pile?
Tyler: Yes. I have a Dungeons and Dragons podcast. I love story-telling, so I like to tell stories through Dungeons and Dragons, so that's an ongoing project. I'm writing a book about a fictional botanist who comes across alchemical manuscripts on plants and she ventures out into the world for the first time, trying to explore and discover these plants. So there's so many projects.
Jane: Wow, that sounds amazing. Well, Dungeons and Dragons, my daughter got a Dungeons and Dragons starter kit for her birthday, which she hasn't been able to use because of lockdown. I need to be listening to that Dungeons and Dragons podcast because, I have to admit, beyond 80s movies, I know nothing about Dungeons and Dragons but I feel like I should. My daughter and I are going to have to go on a Dungeons and Dragons journey together.
Tyler: I will warn you, the podcast is riddled with foul language.
Jane: That's okay. I have to say, despite the fact that this podcast is swear-free, unfortunately my children have both inherited both my husband and I's terrible sweary-ness, so they're absolutely foul-mouthed as well!
Tyler: Nice!
Jane: They won't be bothered by that whatsoever. My daughter is completely unfazed by any level of swearing. It's absolutely fine! My belief is context: you've got to know when it's okay to drop the F bomb. Not in front of your headteacher, but it may be okay in front of your friends etc. Well, that sounds really interesting. I wanted to ask you about the collision / intersection between art and science. This is something that people put into boxes - much like they do with food growing versus recipes and cooking - this false division between art and science, which is obviously something you straddle. What's that all about? Why are people who are artists so afraid of science and why are scientists so afraid of artists, or am I getting that wrong?
Tyler: No, I don't think you are. We divide and break things up because some other human told us to. That's it! If left to our own devices, I think we will find ourselves blending the world together the way that it is naturally. I think that when it comes to art, traditionally speaking, it's more spur of the moment, there's a lot of creativity and spontaneity that can sometimes come with creating. Oftentimes, we'll hear artists are working on a piece of art and they don't even really know where the idea came from or they check out and then the piece is done. There's a lot of spontaneity and chaos behind art-making, whereas science, the idea of spontaneity and entropy exists within the things you're studying, but a scientist should not be spontaneous and entropic. They should be orderly and sterile and very rigid and analytical. The two would seemingly not go well together. You wouldn't want an artist coming in and trying to create the vaccine for a virus. You wouldn't want the artist coming in and performing a very intense surgery. Also, maybe, perhaps people don't want to go through a gallery made specifically and entirely by scientists, that consists of scholarly journals framed up on a wall. So people want to treat them separately but they both have a space in the middle. Science can use a bit of creativity. I think science could benefit from spontaneous thinking and wild ideas and that spontaneous energy that artists have. I think science could benefit from that. I think art could benefit from this keen, analytical observation that scientists have, where some really cool and very well-executed ideas can come from the sort of brain that can stop and look at the world analytically. I think there's a mixture in between and that's oftentimes my goal: how do I take the keen observation of a scientist and the spontaneous entropy and energy of an artist and put them together to make a mixture of the two.
Jane: That's fascinating. It's exciting to see what you're getting up to, Tyler. Given, in a way that it hasn't been before, the whole Black Lives Matter has been catapulted forward into areas that it perhaps never went before, what's your hope for that particular movement and for the plant world in general, in terms of better representation? I guess this ties into what we were saying earlier. On the internet, there's lots of positive stuff in social media communities of houseplant lovers. There's lots of people of colour who are doing amazing things. Perhaps off the internet, things are a bit less rosy - I'm rambling now - but I want you to get out your crystal ball and tell me where you think this is all going, and do we have hope that things are going to be better?
Tyler: Yes, entirely. I can't help but to be an optimist, even though I dwell and swim through the existential crisis. I have hope for a lot of reasons. For instance, my dad is a middle-aged white man who likes to tout, time and time again, the world is getting worse: "Look at everything! It's falling apart!". For me, I'm thinking, "Hey dad, your black son is married to a white woman and I'm not hanging from a tree right now, so things are definitely not getting worse, they're getting better." The world isn't getting worse. It's becoming more apparent to a lot of people who previously wanted to sleep through it. That's the only difference. There are a lot of people who are now coming to the realisation that the world is not getting worse, it's just really bad for some people and it's pretty nifty for me if I want it to be. I have hope because I went to a BLM protest and there were as many white people as there were black people. There were as many white Americans as there were black Americans. I sat there and I thought "This is not the image I saw in the civil rights movements in my history text books". What I saw were black Americans fighting for their lives, being hosed down by police and having German Shepherds unleashed on them, with very few white people to be seen. Now I'm seeing everybody. There were middle-aged, white moms handing out water bottles to protesters and stuff. It was a beautiful coming-together of humans.
I have hope because a lot of people will no longer accept living in a world full of oppression where only a small percentage benefit while everyone else is oppressed and tormented and killed and we're more vocal about this. I think things are changing because the number one rule to the universe is you adapt or you die. You have to change and that's true through and through, to every fibre and structure of humanity. The times you've seen civilisations collapse because they didn't adapt. Right now, you see a bunch of humans that are very pro-science, that are saying: "We've proven if we don't change and adapt, structures will collapse, populations will die off. It's how it works here on planet earth." It's an optimistic reality, I think. You've got to change, and that change is going to benefit everybody. I see a lot of white people who see this and say: "Yes, these things do not afflict me, they don't affect me directly, but if I stand up with my fellow humans and we make a world that's better for them, overall, the community will benefit." I think there's a lot of people realising that and they can no longer deny things like systemic racism. They can't deny the realities of life for some people that don't look like them. From that, I think there's going to be a lot of change. I am hoping at the end of this, at the end of this pandemic, we're more pro-science. Next time, we'll listen to the scientists. Maybe next time we'll listen to the environmentalists. Maybe next time we'll listen to the professionals and not mock them or think that this is some big conspiracy. Maybe next time we'll listen when a black American says, "This is wrong," because I think a lot of people are ready to listen now. I am on the side of that oppression and that hate and that historical mountain of brutality and I still maintain hope, personally.
Jane: That has given me hope, as well. I'm really glad to hear you say that because sometimes it can be, and I say this with no hint of irony as a white person, but I've felt overwhelmed this week with this, then you think: "Oh yes - this is how people of colour have been feeling for hundreds of years, so get over yourself" and you're right, and when I speak to my children, who are ten and thirteen, that gives me real hope because they are the most open-minded, accepting people that I know and the most wonderfully-informed about all these different issues that I was not informed about at their age, so I guess that's the future. The young people who are going to move forward and embrace lots of new realities which will be positive. That's a good point to end on. I'm wibbling now, I'm getting more into the idea of a bright, new future! This is what happens when somebody talks to you, Tyler, because you've got so many different things going on that you're taking us in so many different directions! It's been really nice to speak to you and I've found it really inspiring and I'm sure lots of my listeners have as well. Tell us, before you go, if anyone hasn't come across you before this interview, where is the best place to get Tyler central and to look at your journal and look at all of your cool projects.
Tyler: I would probably say my Instagram @tylerthrasherart or tylerthrasher.com. I post a lot of my projects and stuff up there, but my Instagram is where I'm most active for sure.
Jane: Awesome, and you have Patreon and all different ways of people supporting you, so I really hope that some of my listeners will get on board with that. As you say, it's great to be able to offer that support and I know that I benefit from that myself, from listeners supporting my Patreon, so it's a powerful thing and it's great. Tyler, thank you very much for your time and talking to me today!
[music]
Jane: Thank you to Tyler Thrasher for being such a wonderful guest this week. I'll be back next Friday, in the meantime, be kind to your plants, but most of all be kind to yourself and to other people. Bye!
[music]
Jane: The music you heard in this episode was Roll Jordan Roll by The Joy Drops and Endeavour by Jahzzar. The ad music was the tracks Dill Pickles and Whistling Rufus by the Heftone Banjo Orchestra. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons. See my website for details at janeperrone.com
Subscribe to On The Ledge via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Player FM, Stitcher, Overcast, RadioPublic and YouTube.
Tyler Thrasher is the host of podcast Greenhouse Rants and a brilliant polymath who breeds succulents, has designed and crowdfunded his own plant journal and much, much more.
He joins me to talk about racism and the plant community, why he loves creating Crassula hybrids and why some of the best plant info is not found on the internet!
Crassula ‘Thrashula’. Photograph: Tyler Thrasher.
Check out the links below as you listen…
Follow Tyler on Instagram where he’s @tylerthrasherart.
His website is tylerthrasher.com.
Crassula ‘Thrashula’ is pictured left! A little more about this hybrid created by Tyler here - looking forward to reading more in the BCSS journal!
His podcasts, Greenhouse Rants and The Lost Magic (which is about Dungeons and Dragons) are here.
Tyler’s crystallised insects and synthesised opal work are fascinating - take a look!
The crowdfunding page for his journal, Grow A Damn, is here.
Interested in Tyler’s journal? Full info here.
Check out Tyler’s mutant Monstera on his Insta stories.
Tyler’s Patreon is here: support him if you can!
This week’s sponsor
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CREDITS
This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops and Endeavour by Jahzzar. Ad music is Dill Pickles and Whistling Rufus, both by the Heftone Banjo Orchestra.
Logo design by Jacqueline Colley.