.png)
Planthropology
Planthropology
115. Native Landscapes, Lo-fi Dad Jazz, and the Rungs of the Ladder w/ Rooey
Roey, a music industry marketing professional and lo-fi producer, uses his "dad jazz" instrumental music to fund native plant installations across Nashville and beyond.
• Growing up in a family of avid gardeners and nature enthusiasts instilled a deep appreciation for native plants and natural spaces
• Names his songs after native plants and uses all proceeds to purchase seeds from Roundstone, a native plant seed farm in Kentucky
• Transformed his yard into a 4,000 square foot wildflower haven that serves as both beautiful habitat and practical barrier from busy streets
• Works with schools, city planners, and neighborhoods to create native plant installations that help reduce flooding and filter pollutants
• Explains how native plants require less maintenance than conventional landscaping while supporting local wildlife and ecosystems
• Demonstrates how urban wildflower installations can help reconnect people with nature and create community around conservation
• Emphasizes that "done is better than perfect" when it comes to conservation efforts and environmental projects
Check out Rooey's lo-fi music on Spotify, Apple Music, or at rooey.co and see how music and native plants can transform urban environments into thriving ecosystems.
As always, thanks so much for listening! Subscribe, rate, and review Planthropology on your favorite podcast app. It helps the show keep growing and reaching more people! As a bonus, if you review Planthropology on Apple Podcasts or Podchaser and send me a screenshot of it, I'll send you an awesome sticker pack!
Planthropology is written, hosted, and produced by Vikram Baliga. Our theme song is "If You Want to Love Me, Babe, by the talented and award-winning composer, Nick Scout.
Listen in on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Castbox, or wherever else you like to get your podcasts.
- Website: www.planthropologypodcast.com
- Podchaser: www.podchaser.com/Planthropology
- Facebook: Planthropology
- Facebook group: Planthropology's Cool Plant People
- Instagram: @PlanthropologyPod ...
What is up? Plant people. It's time once more for the Planthropology Podcast, the shore. We dive in the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do and what keeps them coming back for more.
Speaker 1:I'm Vikram Baliga, your host and humble guide in this journey through the sciences and, as always, my dearest friends. I am just so darn excited to be with you today and we have got a good one for you today. Do you know what lo-fi is? Think of like a cozy video game that you cuddle up on the couch with a blanket and grab a cup of tea or coffee and go to town on either pruning some roses or making an island and being forever beholden to a tanuki or something like that, and you're in the ballpark. Well, it's wonderful, it's jazzy, and my guest today is a producer of exactly that.
Speaker 1:So today you're going to hear from a musician and a music industry expert named Rui, and I would give you his government name, but I don't want to because Rui is such a great name. So Rui works again in the music industry and he produces great lo-fi and brings in his passion for native plants and for landscapes and for conservation into it, so he actually raises money to buy wildflower seed and remediate different pieces of land and do so much cool stuff through his music, and I want to let him tell you more about it. So I'm not going to talk too much more about it, but Rui and I have been friends for a little while. We met, I think, on Instagram and I think just have a lot of shared interests and a lot of shared life experience, and I had so much fun getting to talk to him today, so I don't want to ruin the surprise in this great conversation, so let's get into it.
Speaker 1:So, grab some headphones, turn on the dad jazz, cozy up on the couch and get ready for episode 115 of the Planthropology Podcast Native Landscapes, lo-fi, dad Jazz and the rungs on the ladder. All right? Well, rui, thanks for being on today. I'm so excited to get to talk to you. We've been sort of internet friends for a while and it's always fun getting to meet people that I enjoy talking to and actually get to talk, sort of face-to-face yeah thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:It's definitely weird to like or maybe weird's not the right word, but fun to like meet people that the algorithm for lack of a better term brought together right Like. I think the algorithm gets a lot of hate, but it also does some good stuff sometimes, so I'm glad to be friends and be talking in sort of real life, almost real life as close as it gets.
Speaker 1:Right, as close as it gets? Yeah, from a distance for sure. Well, tell us about yourself. Where'd you grow up? What'd you study? What are you into?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I grew up in Los Angeles and lived in you know what was at the time of essentially like a sheep herding town North of Los Angeles, Like we used to shut down main street for a couple of days every year and heard you know a couple, you know five, 10,000 head of sheep through town. And then over time, it, you know, continued to grow as California has, and I eventually found my way up to Northern California and I met my wife there. When did we meet? What year is it now? Where am I in time and space? I know we've been married for 13 years. So a minute ago, just like a short jaunt ago, we met in northern california and we met at a ministry school, okay, and then from there we moved to portland, oregon, and I worked in live sound and production things like that before slowly, you know, finding my way into music marketing and so for like the last 15 years I've worked for mostly major labels and like large entertainment companies doing marketing. Nothing exciting in marketing, it's mostly like ad buying and like data analysis stuff so nerdy stuff, but fun stuff for me.
Speaker 2:And then we moved here to Nashville in 2018. We have two kids and we have family out here and I work in the music industry and so I was constantly traveling out here and we just finally were like we're doing life on hard mode and so we moved from Portland Oregon, which we love Portland Oregon, but it's impossible to have a vegetable garden there because your growing season is very short and everything is dark all the time. So we I've really loved living in Nashville because we have a super long growing. I don't know how dissimilar it is to where you are, but our growing season is super long and we get lots of really heavy rainstorms, so there's not like a ton of need for irrigation and things like that. And you just kind of put it in the like if you don't plant something in the ground here, something will grow. It's usually stuff you don't want. So we do lots of gardening as a result and, yeah, that has. We've really loved gardening here. That being said, I've had a garden bed in my parents' garden since I was five. Right, we have always had huge gardens and whether it's ornamentals or vegetables or a mixture thereof, and even when my wife and I were young and married and living in apartments and we would rent community garden plots in Portland and try to grow stuff.
Speaker 2:So, like we've always been gardeners and I guess all this meandering intro to say is like what leads to the current iteration of Rui, if you will, is you know, a few years ago I realized I started working in the music industry because I want to make music and instead I was like a full on label suit, making spreadsheets and doing you know nothing. Hadn't picked up a guitar in a long time. And so I decided well, shoot, let me, I'll just start releasing music. And it feels a little bit like cheating when I, you know, I work for Universal Music Group and Sony and I know how the algorithms work. And so I just kind of like I was sitting with my dad one day and we were just father son rambling together and he was like why don't you use music to raise money to fund your gardening? I think I was talking about how expensive raised beds were with him or something. Yeah, and it planted the seed. If you will, Am I allowed to make puns and metaphors?
Speaker 1:The more the better, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And so the more I thought about it, the more I realized I should do that. And it just naturally evolved into like I have a very busy work life and I also have two kids and I would like to continue to stay married to my wife. So, like, all these things take time and so I don't have a ton of time to like, brand and market and think through stuff. So it naturally evolved into this like well, I love plants, I love native plants, I love ecology, I love environmental conservation. I grew up in Boy Scouts too.
Speaker 2:So like we're always like way out in the middle of nowhere, just like four days into the woods and starting to see and understand what untouched nature can be. And then you come back into urban environments and you're like well, there's still foxes and hawks and all of that still here is just struggling. And so it just became this like obvious thing to turn this Rui project into. You know, I name all of my songs for the most part, at least the ones that I own 100% of Right Into. You know we name them all after native plants generally. I think there are a couple that are like like a Zinnia. They're native to Texas, they're not native to.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, A couple of species are for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. You know, the longer the project's gone on, the more of a purist I've become about it, and so we're naming them after native plants. And then the fun thing is, all the money that I generate with the project either goes into helping the songs reach new listeners and then all the other. The difference is we're buying plants. Mostly I'm buying seeds from. There's a company up in Kentucky called Roundstone. That's like a native plant seed farm, that's. They're amazing and they're like a hour and a half drive around there for us, and so we'll go up all the time and just hang out in their farm and look at all the rose, mallow or whatever they've got. I think it's like 110 acres of native plants. Oh wow. It's not open to the public, but they also don't care if you show up. And well, I shouldn't say that I don't. I am, I don't speak for roundstone.
Speaker 2:You should like maybe call, call ahead but there is like an office there that you can go in. They have a little shop that you can go into. I don't think they want people just like showing up and wandering their farm. But every time I have shown up there's somebody there and I ask, hey, do you mind if I walk around? And they're nice. I mean, people in Kentucky are always nice. So it is generally speaking. Most people in Kentucky are really nice there. I mean, as always are exceptions, but generally speaking.
Speaker 1:This will play well with my Kentucky audience, which I think is about seven people.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe we can get you up to an even 10.
Speaker 1:I would love that. Round numbers are great. So just to take a little bit of a step back. That's so interesting. So like you don't have, like formal education in plants and ecology.
Speaker 2:That's sort of like a labor of love. Right, it is my ADHD hyperfixation, because I spend so much time online, the more opportunity I have to be offline I take. So that is either gardening or it's reading. Right, it's going to the library Now. That being said, I will say that we I ended up making friends with our local ag department because I registered as like a seed manufacturer, seed retailer, and we grew a bunch of plant starts and that opened us up into like.
Speaker 2:I went through the university of Tennessee's master gardener program and you know I, we've been kind of in relationship and connection with stuff like that, but no, I don't have formal training in any of it. It's all just like my parents were avid gardeners. My dad is, like you know, a really staunch conservationist and he wants to preserve natural spaces. We grew up, all our family vacations were like in the national parks all throughout California, and so it's like it's just who we are. But no, I went to a couple of years of Bible college that isn't accredited anymore. So, so great, you love that. And then, yeah, I've just ended up in marketing. You know, I think I started buying Facebook ads in 2009. And it.
Speaker 1:You know, Wow. Early adopter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was when the ads were only allowed in the right column.
Speaker 1:Right, I remember that well.
Speaker 2:So it's been a while. So I've you know, I just have experienced my way into a career and sometimes I question why I did that.
Speaker 1:There's nothing wrong with that. I'm like you know, I think that's interesting because I talked to a lot of people that get so like I don't know down again to use a pun down in the weeds with some of the like science stuff and I'm like, well, have you grown anything? And they're like no, I don't do that. The one thing that I think is really interesting, as I've been doing the show over the years, is there's so many ways to like get into nature right To experience it, to find the love for it, and I think we need all of that. Yeah, I think we need everyone that like comes to it in different ways, because all those perspectives are so helpful.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think too, like there's like a big thing about like the reason why I even picked lo-fi in the first place is because I'm a perfectionist, right, and the whole point of lo-fi is, like it's supposed to be kind of crappy, right. It's supposed to like, if it sounds a little warbly, if you didn't make it perfect, like that's just being authentic to the genre. And I've had to really push myself to accept this idea of done is better than perfect and that this, like the reality of life is that the bottom rungs of the ladder are just as important to get to the top, right. And so, yeah, have I had a formal education in stuff? No, but I think that you're right that I love connecting with people that have. I love like benefiting from the research and the science that's out there.
Speaker 2:I am a nerd. I do read research papers. I do cheat a little bit sometimes and ask chat GPT to explain it to me if I don't understand it. So you know, I think that the plant community is exactly that. It is a community of people that come from all different walks of life and experiences, and some of that experience is, you know, lived experience, like I've killed more plants than I've helped live and some of that is through. You know people who just read the books and write the papers and understand what xylem is.
Speaker 1:Well, that's it's. That's from my, I guess, experience. Explaining it to people with xylem is like 80 percent of my job. It's like talking. It's like they're like veins. It's like, so they have hearts. No, it's like a drolic system, yeah right is that it? Yeah, exactly much yeah yeah, basically, yeah, it's interesting. So for the uninitiated, tell if you could put lo-fi in a nutshell. How would you explain lo-fi to like an alien that showed up and was like, yeah, what am I listening to?
Speaker 2:lo-fi can. It can be a lot of things, right? What it's become in the modern era is kind of like bedroom pop made on a laptop without lyrics, right? Traditionally it's instrumental music, that's. You know. You're going to have lower tempos, it's calmer. The stuff that I make is more of what we would call dad jazz. You know I draw a lot of influences from Muzak, right?
Speaker 2:I don't know if maybe your listeners are old enough to remember Muzak, but Muzak, I think still to this day, is one of the most profitable music brands ever. Is it really? They have a whole like skyscraper in downtown LA. They like, if I'd have to look up some, I should have looked up some Muzak fun facts. I used to have a bunch of them on speed dial, but every shopping center in America used to have Muzak in it. Every Kmart, every Walmart, muzak used to provide it. So it was a brand and basically the idea of kind of what I put out. And Muzak is just like music that is not offensive to listen to. It's may not be an earworm in particular, but that's kind of the point. It is there so that we don't have to sit with the painful silence of what you know the room. But we also like. If I'm sitting at my desk and working or I'm reading a book, I might want some music on, because my mind is prone to wander. I don't know about you, but like.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2:Change the light bulb and oh, I need to oversee it Right. Whatever it's, there's always like some random thing that's happening in my brain. So having some music on is a little bit helpful, but if it has lyrics, now I'm thinking about what they're saying about. So lo-fi really sits in that space where it's like, it's enjoyable to listen to. It's not bad music by any stretch of the imagination. On the other side of it, you have guys like jay dilla, who really helped pioneer. How do we subdivide and like where the beats in hip-hop and things like that it?
Speaker 2:Lo-fi means low fidelity, though is ultimately what it is, and people would create lo-fi on little cassette players or they'd use Roland makes this thing called an SP-404. They're essentially like little beat machines that you can grab samples, which would be like a quick clip from a song, and then maybe you'd reverse it or maybe you'd affect it in some way and turn that into a rhythm or a groove or a melody or a beat. So lo-fi is essentially just instrumental music. Maybe you'd affect it in some way and turn that into a rhythm or a groove or a melody or a beat. So lo-fi is essentially just instrumental music. It can be. It's a pretty broad genre, like any genre ends up becoming, but it's generally just like soft, relaxing instrumental music that has some sort of jazz or hip hop influence involved in it.
Speaker 1:I dig it. So like it's interesting that you some of the things you said, because my son definitely has some like ADHD going on and he comes by it honestly, like it's he's inherited it is an inheritance from both his mom and I and so like sometimes when he's trying to go to bed, like he can't sleep because his brain will not shut up, like it just like goes a million miles an hour. So the past few weeks we got him a little speaker and he's just been listening to lo-fi when he goes to sleep and like it has revolutionized and I say this like completely honestly, like it's revolutionized his like sleep. Yeah, just because it, like I guess, fills that little spinning part in his brain.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now I'm thinking about what's the drum doing or what's the that you know, right, like it very much brings you into like that present moment, right when I'm, like I'm, it's just me here with that song and whatever I'm doing, whether it's sleeping, whether it's, you know, filling seed trays, whether whatever you know you name it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he likes Nintendo lo-fi, like Nintendo themed lo-fi, so like long playlists, it'll be like that's the Ocarina of Time.
Speaker 2:Yes, Honestly, that's some of my favorite as well. It feels like that wheelhouse is thoroughly cluttered with great artists making that stuff, so I've not ventured into it. But every now and again I'm like I should do like a bunch of Zelda songs or a bunch of we're big Nintendo fans in our house, so we are.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I don't think we've ever gotten as much mileage on a piece of tech that I've ever bought as our Switch. Yes, we have worn that thing out.
Speaker 2:We have worn it out. We eventually got a second one that we are currently wearing out, and I think we're playing our 14th or 15th playthrough of Luigi's Mansion right now. There you go, you know or Luigi's Mansion two if we're going to be specific. So I think we should be. My son is seven, so he's still like hasn't fully. It's starting to form, but like the like, what happens next part of the brain isn't there yet, so to him it's just like the first playthrough to me. I'm done ready?
Speaker 1:it's ready for a new game. The shine's worn off, hadn't it yeah?
Speaker 2:I mean it's a little bit, but yeah, I'm ready for something we did. We just did a donkey kong country, I think is the one that they just re-released for the switch, and that one was not my favorite until we were about two-thirds of the way. It's just hard. I'm not good at video games right, let's be, honest, I'm not. You know I make, but it's all in software and I do it one bar at a time and it takes a while. Right, we're not playing.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, if you're listening, this episode is not sponsored by Nintendo, but it could be. We would very much like that. That would not hurt my feelings. If, yeah, we'll work on that we played. One of our favorite games was Mario Odyssey. That's a winner.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is probably next in the rotation. If we're being honest, we just kind of cycle through our games until he earns enough lawnmower money to buy a new one.
Speaker 1:There you go, there you go, so interesting and that kind of just to think through some of this, like that space too, of like different things you can do, and some of these cozy games that fill that in my mind, a similar sort of niche in people's brains. Sometimes it's like lo-fi music. I had a guest last year on the show who actually produced a gardening game called Garden Life.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I have played that game.
Speaker 1:It's fun, yeah, and you just got prune roses and it's very kind of like mindless and great. Yes.
Speaker 2:That is 100% what I need video games to be yeah.
Speaker 1:So, thinking about some of the like wildflower work you do, it's really cool that you're finding different ways to fund this. Because I think that's a sticking point for a lot of people is I would love to be more into native plants and more into nature, but like I can't afford it, I can't like whatever. You found a really creative way. I don't want to say to fund your habit, but to fund your name, what it is yeah, that's really what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean gardening, mean gardening is expensive and I think, at least where we're at, like, we've taken I'm almost out of place to grow stuff because obviously, like I'm not a big fan of the lawn culture in the South I mean, it's kind of all of America and so I also, just if I have to do gardening in the South during August and July, I would rather not be pushing a lawnmower, I would rather be, you know, pruning something or harvesting hop. Like we have hops and we have lots of fruit trees. We just put in three pawpaws and I'm probably going to let I'm going to convince my wife to let me put in two more so we can have five. It just doesn't look even yet. So, yeah, but we have about 4,000 square feet of wildflower right now. We have 1,500 in the front and then the rest is in the back and some of it's just like we lucked out. We just have like a really sloping property, which is nice because we'll never flood, it will always run away from us, but I don't want to mow it and, like I said earlier, if you don't grow something, something will grow, whether you want it to or not in the South, and so we I. Just a couple of years ago it was like, well, we're going to do all wildflowers there, and so the benefit is I don't have much of a habit that needs to be fed in my own yard anymore.
Speaker 2:So the bonus now is we live in South Nashville here, and so it's a little bit of a rough community.
Speaker 2:We are literally on the wrong side of the tracks, we don't get a lot of resources and support from city infrastructure, and so there's a lot of just like hell strips and roadside stuff and ditches that are filled with trash and litter and they get bush hogged once or twice a month and it's gross and ugly.
Speaker 2:So we've been working with just reaching out to the city and asking, hey, can we plant something else there? And a lot of it gets pushed back and they're like, well, we don't have budget for it or who's going to maintain it. And then the neat thing about the native plant aspect is, well, I'll plant it, you don't have to pay for it, I'll plant it, and because it's native, you don't have to maintain it. It's what is supposed to grow there. And then you always get the pushback of, well, it's going to get long and tall and so you get to get into the dialogue of all the benefits that native plants have in terms of the phytoremediation, where they're actually helping to pull out all the runoff and the oil and the pollutants and stuff from getting further downstream. They're going to stop and stay there and the thing that I love about Nashville is that they actually listen.
Speaker 2:Oh that's cool yeah, and our little neighborhood that we live in. We're all very active in our community and we talk to each other and we set up meetings with our city council person and we do all that stuff and we kept having like flooding and things like that in our neighborhood because there's a big creek that runs through it, and so we actually were able to convince the city. There was like a bunch of like rundown rental homes A couple of years ago. We convinced the city to buy them all from their owners and just convert it into a riparian zone and so yeah and so, and that has like almost 100% alleviated flooding on the Creek like crazy, the floodplain, like I think people just don't understand we're on a rabbit trail but we're going to go there.
Speaker 2:I think that people don't understand that the point of a like the way that water gets into a Creek and gets into a river isn't by just rolling over the surface of the ground. It is by absorbing into the ground and then being filtered through the ground and gravity pulling it down into a creek or into a river. And so we put all this stuff on top of the part of the ground that's supposed to absorb the water and then it gets into the creek way faster than it should, and then that's where we end up with flooding issues. But then when we have these things, like you know, bluestem and gamma grass and these deep root you know coneflowers, all of these like prairie plants, they are designed to go super deep into the ground and then that creates a pathway for water to go in when it rains, and they do a really good job of catching that trash before it ends up in the creek, before it ends up down. You know we're on the Cumberland River and so you know all the having all those wildflowers on the side of the road or in that ditch.
Speaker 2:Yes, oh, somebody's going to have to mow it. If somebody's mowing it twice a month or once a week in the season anyways, why not mow it once a month and give it a nice Chelsea chop, right? Instead of cutting it all the way down to the ground, just cut it down to like six to 10 inches off the ground. It'll come back and it'll catch litter and debris and act as a filter, and then it's also bolstering the local ecosystem, right. It's giving birds and bees and wasps and ladybugs and fireflies and all of those things a place to live and eat and succeed, and that ends up being better for our community.
Speaker 1:That's and that's awesome. And you know you were talking about lawns and stuff earlier and like I think they they have their place to a certain extent, but you know I, we're, we are here, we're more Southwest than South, so you know we're up here on like a high elevation prairie essentially, but we get like 19 inches of rain, right Like it's. We're not, we're dry. This year it's going to be less than that, I'm pretty sure. Like I remember 2011 or so, we got like four inches of rain all year and it was awful and it was like 112 degrees all summer. Like it was bad, hard pass, real bad Hard pass. Yeah, no thanks. Like there's days that I'm like why do I live here? Why I could move, I could go anywhere, but I know.
Speaker 1:So when we think about like plants for the landscape, sometimes I think a lot of folks are like we should do our landscape more like Dallas, where they get rain and it's humid, than El Paso, where they don't get rain, when really we should be thinking, okay, what works in El Paso, where it's dry, maybe a better choice for us? And so, from an educational standpoint, like a lot of we do a lot of like, hey, here are the benefits of native plants and native wildflowers. They're beautiful. These grasses are great.
Speaker 1:You know you could do buffalo grass and curly mesquite and all of these different things Side oats, grandma, black, grandma, blue, grandma, there's so many and, like you're saying, you mow them a couple times a season, just because you whether they need it or not, I guess, and then you go on with your life and I think there's. You know, I've spent most of my career in water and landscape and I see a shift. It's just that ship turns so slowly. Sometimes we get into this idea of this is what a landscape is supposed to look like and then we get bogged down, you know.
Speaker 2:You know, it's fair to say that what we think is landscaping.
Speaker 2:I think oftentimes we like to think that we have curated this aesthetic, when corporate America has really done a lot of that, you know, and the lawn culture in America it's.
Speaker 2:It makes companies big money and ultimately, when you start getting in it like in my driveway I've got a huge heap of wildflowers that I cut down late fall, early winter that we you start to realize, like there is a point where this like abundance thing kicks in, where I don't, you know, like we are, we're three years into the Rui project. I'm starting to run out of things to spend money on, because the sites are providing enough to then create new sites and continue this cycle thing, whereas if we're doing a lawn or a traditional garden, we're doing, you know not, I definitely have a few annuals that are my favorite, but, like if I could plan a perennial, I would rather a perennial, have it come back year after year and get better and better over time. That's just not good business, right, if I've got a weed and feed my lawn instead of slowly converting it to some other, like I don't really have a specific turf in my front yard? Sure, obviously, is it Michael Pollan that said lawns should be an area rug, not wall-to-wall carpet? I'm not sure?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so it's like that's how we treat our lawns. Obviously, we need somewhere to like lay down and look at the clouds, and the dogs need somewhere to run and catch the ball, and the kids like we got a swing set. We have all that stuff, but like this idea of having edge to edge short turf grass that looks fine on a golf course because that's the purpose of it, right, you know I'm not a big golf fan, but I understand like that's a thing and people like it and whatever gets you outside. It is nice to start. I know a lot of the courses in our area are starting to incorporate native plants into them. That's always a nice.
Speaker 2:You're like, yes, I like that, yeah, super cool. But like you don't need to maintain stuff at the same level when you're investing into a long-term ecosystem, right, and that ultimately is just not good business for lawn care companies, for Scots, for all the things that we didn't feed, and so you know, maybe I'm showing that I'm a crunchy hippie. I'm not like a super crunchy hippie. I'm a really weird enigma, like we're all fully vaccinated. I'm not like a super crunchy hippie. I'm a really weird enigma Like we're all fully vaccinated.
Speaker 1:We believe in science.
Speaker 2:We contain multitudes, right, yeah, I'm an enigma, maybe. So, yeah, I think it's just like we have been taught to think that the particular aesthetic of American gardens is that that's the best way to do it, and the reality is that there's no one way to do it right. My garden some people come, like our front yard, our installation of wildflowers in the front doesn't like. We just took a big seed mix and I think there's something like 22 or 23 different natives and I just mixed up a pound of wildflower seeds and some sand and we just threw it. We just said whatever grows right and we're just gonna let nature do the thing. Not that nature really has 27 different seeds in one spot at one time. That's not really how it works, but like we pretend, yeah, it's closer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so we ended up with a lot like the bearded beggar ticks were really tall, yeah, and so we ended up with a lot like the bearded beggar ticks were really tall. The Illinois bundle flower really took off. We what else was? Partridge peas were insane and by July, seven feet tall, right, Wow, it was great. I mean, I loved it. My wife is ready for it to be like yaros and cone flowers and short stuff. But the reason we did it too is like we live on a pretty like it's a cut through street in our neighborhood. It's not like a main street, but it gets really busy and cars move really fast and we have young kids and so, like, how do we create a natural barrier between the street and our kids? Right, and so I just planted a, basically a moat of wildflowers.
Speaker 1:I like that actually a lot.
Speaker 2:I think that more people should do it. You know, by you know, late July it was just this like seven foot tall sea of yellow. That was just like when you walked up to it it almost sounded like there was an electrical problem nearby because it's just so active with bees and that's cool. Yeah, it's like such a cool sensory experience to like walk up to this little island of wildflowers in a you know otherwise, we have a lot of renters and there's not a lot of landscaping on our street. It's like cars on lawns and stuff like that, and then you just have this huge, you know, 14, 1500 square foot of seven foot tall yellow flowers. And to some people they don't like it, it's not their thing, right, and that's okay. I think that gardens get to look like however the gardener that is tending it wants to.
Speaker 2:And for me, my personal approach is that we are not apart from nature. We're a part of it, and so my, the space around my home isn't necessarily supposed to be an extension of that like super clean, tidy, homogenized thing that's on the inside right, like we vacuum, we don't. It's not like I have a bunch of bugs in my house and it's like it's clean and tidy in my house, but we also don't do pest control outside of our house and I enjoy the fact that there's a den of possums in my backyard right now and my dogs are having to go to the bathroom in the front yard right now and they don't like that. But that's what it is, because I get this opportunity to have this space to interface with nature and I don't have to go to, you know, the local state park to do that. I can do it right here in urban Nashville and we have foxes and possums and raccoons and, unfortunately, we saw a bear a couple weeks ago, which is really fascinating. But also like I don't want. I don't want to live where I have to like worry about bears in my trash can. Like I already look outside of my house for, like sketchy people before I go out there, I don't want to also now have to look for bears. But like we are a part of nature and nature it's all in our communities anyways, and so it's been really neat to like I don't care. We don't have an HOA, obviously in our neighborhood, so I don't care what it looks like to other people.
Speaker 2:I care what kind of things I get to find in my yard. I care, you know, our tomatoes and our vegetables always do amazing and we don't. I don't, like we don't spray anything at all. Every now and again I'll do neem Like. If we have powdery mildew, I may do. It depends on if I catch it at the right time, like spinosad on the blossoms of our fruit trees early on, to prevent, for you know, any kind of worms or moths. But generally we just let everything take care of everything and we don't. I don't have crazy big spiders in my house. I've never gotten bit or stung by a wasp. They're here but they're all so interested in what's happening in the patch.
Speaker 1:I think that's really interesting that you say that, because I think people freak out about stuff like bees. Oh, there's bees and wasps near my house. I'm like, yeah, but they don't have anything else to do, they're bored. So you go outside and you're an immediate threat, right Like to the hive, to the whatever.
Speaker 2:They're hungry. They're, you know, like they're in fight or flight mode because they don't have a thriving ecosystem that they're a part of. They're struggling in this desert of biodiversity in urban environments.
Speaker 1:And yeah, and so you give them essentially something to do. You let them exist like they're and they don't care about you, they don't want to bother you, they just want to go about their thing and find food and exist. Right, and I think you're right. It's interesting. I haven't really chased down this like thought process before, but it's really fascinating to me because we talk a lot about like talking about bear, right, and how urban sprawl and things. We tend to think about that in terms of like, oh, I saw a coyote, I saw a fox, I saw a bear, and they're not acting like they're supposed to because they're in the city and they don't know what to do with that. I don't think we extend that very often to insects and to smaller animals, when it's really the same concept, right, they're under stress, they're out of their native habitat. They don't, like evolutionarily, have the tools to handle that well, so if we give them something to I don't know, feel like home, essentially.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think a lot of instability in the world comes from food insecurity and housing insecurity. Right, If humans have that experience, why wouldn't the rest of the living organisms have that same experience too?
Speaker 1:We're all after the same thing, right yeah?
Speaker 2:I mean biologically, at a fundamental level, we are all trying to reproduce and survive, right? So whether you're a little tiny organism or a wasp or a human, there are needs that look different, but fundamentally they are the same thing we need to eat, we need to have a place to live that beautiful life full of meaningful connections, and if they don't have it, then they're stressed and that comes out in being a jerk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is really interesting. I tell you what this seems like a great place for a quick mid-roll. So let's go do that stuff and take a break, and when we come back we'll talk more about native plants and conservation and how all of this fits together. Well, hey there, welcome to the mid-roll. I'm so glad you're here. Tell your houseplants I love them, and give them just the tiniest little pat on the head.
Speaker 1:For me, if you're noticing that the mid-roll music is different this week, it's because it is. This is actually a song called Yarrow by Rui himself, and it's jazzy and it's awesome. I love it so much. So go check him out on Spotify and all the players and listen to more of his music. But I think we're going to start using some Rui originals for our mid-roll music instead of the jaunty elevator music that I normally go with. Hey, thanks so much for being a part of Plantthropology and for listening this far. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation. I know I have Thanks to the Texas Tech Department of Plant and Soil Science for supporting the show, letting me do the thing. Thanks to Rui for agreeing to be on, but mostly, as always, thanks to you for being part of the Plantthropology family.
Speaker 1:If you want to support Plantthropology, there's a lot of ways to do it. You can follow along on social media, all the places as Plantthropology or PlantthropologyPod. I am the plant prof all over the internet. If you want to ask questions, shoot me an email at plantthropologypod at gmailcom. Let me know your thoughts, episode ideas, all of that. Leaving a rating and review for the show wherever you can Apple podcasts or Spotify or pod chaser or anywhere else is a big help. It's great social proof and it lets me know that you're listening and that you're enjoying what you're hearing. But the best way to probably support the show is to tell a friend about it, tell them how much you enjoy it and get them interested in plants and nature. If you would like to financially support the show, you can go to planthropologypodcastcom, check out some merch or go to buymeacoffeecom slash planthropology and for the price of a cup of coffee you can pay for hosting fees, I guess, but mostly coffee.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to let you listen to this rad dad jazz for a couple more seconds and then we'll jump in to part two of the episode. Let's do it. Just to go back to a point you made earlier that you know you have a place to go experience all these things and your kids and your family. But also, I think a big theme of this season is going to be community, and just think about what you're doing for the community too, and whether or not you ever get the neighbor's kids that are like, hey, we love that you have giant fun flowers, yellow flowers. I think that they wouldn't get to see that, right, because, like you said, like there's this idea that we have to go to find nature and in a lot of communities people don't have the means for that. Yeah, so having access to nature is sort of like this radical community building that I think is so cool.
Speaker 2:It really is. I think so much about just the way. I don't know, I'm not saying it's on purpose, but like it does feel like we are taught to feel so separate from nature, like we are taught to feel so separate from nature. And so, you know, a lot of the installations that we do with the Ruby project are at schools. Those are the easiest people to get to say yes, right, because it's like hey, can I come and, do you know, over the weekend I'll put in.
Speaker 2:Usually I try not to do installations that are smaller than 10 by 10 square foot it seems to be anything smaller than that. It's like I'll send you some seeds and you can plant them and that's nice. A pollinator habitat needs to have a bit of a footprint for it to really make an impact and draw in any kind of ecosystem to it, and so. But schools are, you know, there's always 10 or 20 square feet on the side of a building somewhere that they're cool with. Yeah, you can do whatever, and so. But then I, you know you followed up with like I will come regularly throughout the season and we can meet with as many or as few of your students as you want and talk about what's happening here and notice what's happening here. About what's happening here and notice what's happening here and it. I think it's so crazy to me to, you know, meet kids who are in Nashville who had no idea like even what ends up inevitably what ends up happening. As a teacher or two, we'll put a like bell pepper or a tomato or something in there and I love that. But what's always crazy to me is meeting these kids that have no idea what a bell pepper on a plant looks like and being flabbergasted. That's wait, I eat, like that's the gross stuff that my parents put on my plate and it's right there on the ground. And then having that like aha, moment of like connecting, like this is all connected right, like the bell peppers are going to taste better if I grow myself. They're going to grow better if I have a diverse ecosystem, and I can't have a diverse ecosystem if we just plant invasive species from Home Depot and Bradford, pears and privet and all of that nonsense stuff that is profitable for big box stores but isn't really connected with the reality and the lived experience of people in those communities. So it's like these are super cool.
Speaker 2:All of our neighbors end up. I think a couple of them were a little like what are you doing with your front yard at first and again by the end of it. They're all like they. All of them were sad to see us cut it short at the end of the season. We didn't completely pull everything down to the ground. Basically, what we did with our front yard at least, is we cut everything down to about six or seven inches tall, so it's short still and it's caught a bunch of leaves in there and it's cool. And then we piled all of the stems and stuff in the back under a tarp and there's stuff living in there for sure and then we'll process it for seeds any weekend. Now I'm just looking for a free one. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Those are kind of a precious commodity, aren't they? Free weekends, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't really know if I know what those are.
Speaker 1:It's been a while, yeah, yeah, it's been a minute. A question just sort of related to all this Talking about, I don't know, the community and the public adoption and perspectives on some of these things. You know you do a lot on social media and online One getting your music out there and all that but talking about some of these issues and talking about native plants, Do you get pushback? Are there people? Because people on the internet are jerks? Right, there's bad people on the internet. But like, how do you deal with?
Speaker 2:that I mean. I think first you have to accept the fact that, like there are people out there that don't like pizza and golden retrievers and they're wrong, they're objectively wrong, they're wrong and that is part of our mental health crisis in America. I'm just kidding, I don't mean to make light of mental health issues. You can leave this part of the podcast. No, I think there's something called context collapse. That happens online a lot, where people just lose sight of, they may not fully understand what it is you meant by what you said, and they may decide that you meant something different and completely take it out of context. And just the hide for everyone button is your friend, right?
Speaker 2:oh my goodness, yes, like at the end of the day, you know, being in music, for sure, right, like no one, you can't please all the people all the time, right? And and then, being in marketing, part of my job is to figure out who does and who does not like stuff, right, and so I think for me I've just come to be fine with people who aren't interested in it. There definitely are, you know, there's definitely Redditors that are really dead set on having their very weird turf grass that is more expensive than it needs to be to grow in that place in the first place, and you know they're just dead set on it and that's fine. I don't think I am of the belief that I'm going to convince everybody to grow native wildflowers and get rid of their front lawn. I don't think that's the point of it. The point is that, again, do the bottom rungs of the ladder get you to the top or not? And so, but if you can, if I can convince somebody to put in a little patch of cone flowers or to grow, I mean, honestly, I'm a big fan of yarrow right. If you're in the Southeast, at least yarrow's rad you want. If you want ladybugs in your garden, you should plant yarrow, right, absolutely Is you can eat it, it is nitrogen fixing, it is middle of winter or I guess the end of winter. Thankfully it's still green in our yard, right, it never died back, it's just out there doing its thing. If I can convince people to put some native plants in their yard, that's a win, right?
Speaker 2:And most of the time I think that from a like, if you sit down and you break down the logic of it, right, we can talk about the aesthetics and the beauty, and that is the logic for some people, right. Well, I, you know, I, my yard looks like a wildflower meadow in the middle of nowhere. It's, that's my yard, that's what I like, right? I don't think that native plants have to look seven feet tall and monstrous and buzzing with bees and wasps and insects. That's not everybody's cup of tea, but they might like a blazing weed in the back of a bed to give some height and some visual interest. They might like. You know, native plants can be really beautiful and really well done and still kind of fit that weird propagandized, you know American landscape culture that I don't fully understand.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, do people get mad? Sure, no-transcript somebody? Hey, I noticed you've got a planter outside, do you mind if I plant it for you? And they may say no and like that's the worst that happens. The worst that happens is someone goes nope, sorry, please leave. All right, see ya, good luck. Some guerrilla gardening, but I find that it's like a little bit of a wasted effort because, number one, there are always unintended consequences of what you're doing and again, I'm not a studied academic on it. My goal is to help, not to harm, and I think that oftentimes guerrilla gardening is really well intended. But just asking somebody if you could plant something where something isn't growing is almost always a better strategy than like. I mean, seed bombs don't even work anyways, right.
Speaker 1:No, not really.
Speaker 2:Seeds did not evolve to be wrapped up in clay and hucked over a fence. Most native seeds they want to have I'm going to cuss, you're going to have to cut this out they want to have their ass to the ground and their face to the sky, and that's just how plants evolved. They didn't. Most things didn't evolve to like get buried several inches in the ground evolve to like get buried several inches in the ground. Vegetables and produce and things like that is a little bit different, because it wants to be eaten and then pooped out, but like native wildflowers and grasses are going to get blown in the wind or they're going to catch on something's fur or a combination thereof, and so just need a little soil contact and that's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's it, and so you just throw them and walk away.
Speaker 1:Well, and it's this concept too I think of, like giving a man a fish or teaching a man to fish, right, like if, yeah, you could go throw some wildflower seeds in an empty lot and that's fine. Or you could, like you're doing, talk to the city, talk to people in the neighborhood and be like here's why we're doing this, and I think we get into this. Oh, I just have to do it. It's this almost like savior complex sometimes, instead of I want to build community and I want to like and I like, and again I agree with you. I think like guerrilla gardening, seed bombs, all that it's really well intentioned, but I think we're not like that. That next step of how do I use this to make not just the environment but the people in that environment like happier and healthier, and there's so much research that shows that greener spaces and urban environments has better education outcomes.
Speaker 2:It has a reduction of crime rate, right, like there's so many reasons why, like I just made this huge argument with city Nashville and that they're putting in 180 trees near our house because crime rate is super high in this part of town and there are no trees that are acting as heat sinks. Planting plants makes the world a better place and it is wild to me that is a hot take. It is wild to me that we haven't figured this out. It is like did nobody? Like where are all the millennials that grew up on captain planet? What happened? So it's.
Speaker 2:But yeah, if you just ask and you make, especially if you want to get involved at the like city level, there are city planners out there and beautification directors and people in your community that are looking for easy wins. Take your ADHD hyper fixation and make a plan and go to them and say, hey, I made this plan. I think that we should put a bunch of trees here and here and I think that we should use these trees because they're the state tree or they're the native tree, or they're I like this tree, or they're not Bradford pears, and this is my plan. These are the locations. I think that these would be great Nine times out of 10, they'll just look at it and go. As long as your math is right, they'll go. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, cool, yes, done.
Speaker 1:You've made something easy for them. Submit it.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's how it works in, like when I'm marketing music. If I'm trying to get somebody to do a write-up on an artist or get an ad to work or whatever, you just have to make a win for them. And so people I don't think people don't want more wildflowers. I don't think people don't want a better, safer community. I don't think they don't want their kids to have better outcomes at school.
Speaker 1:I just think that they forget or don't realize that plants and the community aspect of that is what actually creates that. Yeah, super cool. Wow, like this is such a great conversation, I have a couple of questions, as we sort of just wrap up, that I like to try to get from my guests. The first is like where do you see this going? What do you want to do with this? I mean, I know you're it seems like you've had a lot of success with the Rooey project and, like you said, you're running out of space to plant stuff Going forward. Do you have like step two, phase two, or just to kind of keep doing what you're doing? I haven't.
Speaker 2:I didn't think it would work this well, so I haven't really thought about it of like, what is the next step here with the project? I mean, there are always going to be places to to do plans. Obviously we've got all the schools within a radius of us have stuff. You know, all the schools within a radius of us have stuff. You know. I think maybe the next step is just to start putting stuff on. You know we were, my wife and I were talking about the day. Maybe I start posting on next door and saying, hey, do you want me to come do an install in your house? You know, I don't know. I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2:I'm, you know, to those that are listening, if you have an idea, let me know, find me on the internet, give me your thoughts. Right now we're just going to kind of keep on keeping on. I'm trying to put on a song every six to eight weeks, as I can, and I'm delivering a song, hopefully, fingers crossed, by the end of the day. Today it's all done, I just have to upload it. I know I get it that final. The top rung of the ladder is sometimes hard to reach.
Speaker 1:I get it. That's show notes. That's writing show notes for me. I'll do all this stuff and I'm like I'm done, I don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 2:I think I have like six songs that are done and five of them need artwork and names and that's it and that's probably like a 20 or 30 minute job. When that's probably like the 20 or 30 minute job, when am I going to find that?
Speaker 1:But yeah, the dopamine is not in it yet. I understand. I understand Very well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very well, so I don't know what's next. To be honest, okay, no, that's cool though we're just going to keep playing plants Love it. Maybe we'll do trees next. Yeah, more pawpaws. Yeah, pawpaw is actually the next song. Oh, great yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a flower on the tree.
Speaker 2:right yeah, it's like a purple triangular kind of stinky flower.
Speaker 1:A little bit, but it could be worse.
Speaker 2:It could yeah, it could be a bread for pear. It could be stinkhorn mushrooms oh God, we have those in our garden.
Speaker 1:Y'all have. This is a total aside. Do you have a buffalo gourd there, or stink?
Speaker 2:gourd. We don't have stink gourd, but I know what stink gourd is and I'm so glad we don't have to deal with it.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of it out here, like it's native out here and so in a lot of our native spaces, like it's there, which is great, it's a perennial cucurbit. Those are rare, neat.
Speaker 2:No thanks, I'm out not all nature is enjoyable. Yeah, yeah, you yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know. Last question I have if there was like one piece of advice, one thing you'd like our listeners to take from this episode, what would that be? If, like you, had a and it can be about what we've been talking about or anything- I think that done is better than perfect is probably the thing.
Speaker 2:right that there are a lot of projects or things or ideas or hopes that you might have and ultimately, don't let this perfect version of it prevent you from even trying and figuring it out, because whether it's music or whether it's native gardening or whether it's local conservation, 99% of success is just consistently doing the most obvious thing for an uncommonly long period of time, without assuming you're smarter than you are.
Speaker 1:That's really good advice yeah.
Speaker 2:And so just do it. Just do it, even if it's not perfect. Cool, that's just the bottom rung of the ladder and you just keep climbing until you get to the top. You'll get there eventually, but don't let being really you know, we say this to our kids all the time is because my kids are like, they're like that, you know, when they try a new sport or they. We went to a skate park the other day. My son had never been to a skate park, sent him there and he kept falling. Being bad at stuff is the number one way to get really good, and so you just done is better than perfect. Just do it. Fail at it. Take all that failure, use it as feedback and keep going.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Well, Rui, this has been a lot of fun. I just looked up and it's been almost an hour. That's a great conversation. I know when can we find you. Where should we send people?
Speaker 2:You can find me on. I'm usually on instagram, I'm almost always on threads or you can just go to my website.
Speaker 1:It's rueyco r-o-o-e-yco okay, very cool, and you're on spotify, I'm on spotify, I'm on apple music, I'm on title, I'm on yandex.
Speaker 2:That's a thing. Yandex is like a russian streaming platform. I I think Okay, I didn't know that until I got a royalty check from them. So that's great. So the only place I'm not is like normal radio yet. So I guess, call your local radio station and request a movie song.
Speaker 1:It's more lo-fi dad jazz. Yes.
Speaker 2:Who doesn't yeah?
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, it was a lot of fun. Thanks for being on. I keep doing what you do and I love it. Yeah, thanks for having me Y'all. If there's one thing I took away from this episode, I think it's that we can find such cool intersections and ways to make the world better through our passions, whether that's a love of music, a love of plants, a love of nature or the conjunction of all those things. Rui does such a good job of using his gifts and using his talents and using the things he loves to make the world around him better, and I think that's something we could all really do with some more of right now and really take to heart. Thanks again to Rui for being a part of this, and I hope you'll go check out his music all over the places. Thanks again for listening to Plantapology. You know I do this for you and I'm just so grateful that you're a part of it. Thanks again to the Texas Tech Department of Plant and Soil Science.
Speaker 1:Plantthropology is hosted, written, produced all of those things by yours truly. Our intro and outro music is by the award-winning composer, nick Scout, and our mid-roll music now is by my buddy, rui. I hope that you are well, I hope that you're enjoying spring and, by the way, happy spring. We're just now getting into it and I hope that you're being kind to one another. If you have not, to this point, been kind to one another, it's getting to be more and more of a radical act and I think that you should give it a shot. Be good, be safe, keep being really cool, plant people, and I will talk to you real soon, thank you.
