00:00While Rajuta and Rahul's yard transformation continues, we make the 30-minute drive to
00:07Soldier's Delight Natural Area, which is home to 39 rare, threatened, and endangered
00:12plant species.
00:13And let me tell you, as soon as we get there, the horticultural travesties are clear as
00:18day.
00:19This is f***ing nuts, man.
00:21I can't believe this grass right here is Miscanthus.
00:24That's the invasive s*** we just pulled out of their yard.
00:29Invading the surrounding countryside.
00:31What?
00:32Could be the first step of what ends up being a larger invasion.
00:37Miscanthus.
00:38On the woods, escaping captivity.
00:41Yeah, they got people planting s*** with no regard to ecology.
00:44It's that mindset that like nothing you do actually matters, it's just like how it looks.
00:49Yeah, none of this matters, it's just greenery.
00:52But that's because we're raised in a society that views plants as nothing more than pretty.
00:57It's either pretty or it's not.
00:59There's no context for ecology and that's what we're trying to change here at Kill Your
01:01Lawn.
01:02Get people to stop being nimrods and pay attention to the context of the world that they live
01:06in.
01:07Start observing it, you know?
01:08Though it sounds like it'd be a reference to some horrible venereal disease, it was
01:12actually observations by British soldiers patrolling this area in the late 1600s that
01:17led to its name.
01:19And Soldier's Delight doesn't need invasive plants moving in.
01:22It's got enough problems with native Smilax rotundifolia, known as common greenbrier,
01:27which, due to fire suppression and poor land management, seems to be crowding out everything
01:31else.
01:32It's so weird that this is, just from an ecological standpoint, that the Smilax is so dominant.
01:39Greenbrier stems can photosynthesize like leaves, crazy.
01:43So it has a longer growing season than other nearby plants, and its thorns protect it from
01:47getting totally devoured by forest animals.
01:50Ah, this f***ing greenbrier, what a pain in the a**.
01:56It's evolved to grow in all kinds of habitats along the east coast.
01:59But out here, in what's known as the Serpentine Barrens, native plants are uniquely adapted
02:04to survive in soil infused with minerals from serpentine rock.
02:09You can see a paucity of forest here, it's because the soil is quite toxic.
02:15Okay, so turns out, excess amounts of magnesium and iron and low amounts of essential nutrients
02:22like nitrogen inhibit plant growth in many species.
02:26Now serpentine got here via an ancient subduction zone.
02:31A subduction zone is what happens when a piece of oceanic crust dips back down towards the
02:37mantle to be recycled, but on its descent, little pieces of that oceanic crust get scraped
02:45off, such as serpentine, and that's exactly what happened here.
02:50This is all serpentine rock.
02:52That's the geological piece of the puzzle.
02:54The botanical piece comes from the power of native plants to adapt and survive.
03:00Evolution being what it is, some plants have evolved to tolerate this chemical toxicity,
03:08and not only have they evolved to tolerate it, they've evolved to outcompete other plants
03:14which may not.
03:19So this solidago, this goldenrod, this is a different species of goldenrod, of solidago
03:24grown in Juta and Rahul's yard.
03:28Because we're on this serpentine kind of meadow, prairie, and this is like a hardy little b****
03:34right here who's just hanging on.
03:36It's a different species of rad.
03:40It doesn't get that tall because the soil's kind of toxic.
03:43Serpentine basically causes speciation in plants.
03:47If you've got, say, a solidago that grows on non-serpentine soil that abuts a patch
03:52of serpentine soil, it's just continuously dumping seed onto that serpentine soil.
03:57Most of the seed that lands there and germinates is not going to be able to tolerate that serpentine
04:01soil, but eventually, one out of however many thousands of seeds that do germinate on that
04:06serpentine soil will have a mutation that enables them to deal with the innate soil
04:10toxicity.
04:11That image is blowing my mind, man, of the border of serpentine and a different kind
04:16of soil and those solidagos on one side on the non-serpentine soil just doing their thing,
04:21throwing seeds down, and it's just generational after generational adaption.
04:27To tie all this back to the yard, we hear that a lot from our producers.
04:32It's great that Aaron and his crew are planting native plants that are local ecotypes, meaning
04:37they were grown from local seeds and plant material.
04:41This preserves local biodiversity and gives these newly planted natives a better chance
04:45of thriving where there was once only the bland uniformity of the lawn.
04:51Make it look a little random so it doesn't look all cookie cutter, and that's going to
04:56be better for how they end up growing in, too.
04:58If you offset them a little bit, they get more root space to grow in.
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