Ep100: Jim Folsom, Botany In Context
Jim Folsom is the creator and host of @BotanyInContext, a fun and fascinating channel on TikTok about the plants we engage with and see in our daily lives. Jim is a teacher, a gardener, a botanist, and a cook who enjoys talking about plants. He is also Director Emeritus of the botanical gardens at The Huntington, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in Southern California. In this episode, Jim tells us about his TikTok channel, the 1,000-page botanical book he wrote, and what he would like the public to understand about plants.
LINKS
Botany In Context (website)
@BotanyInContext (TikTok)
A Botanical Reader (Apple Books)
Nesocodon (Gecko-pollinated flower)
Tale of the Bean (TikTok)
Tale of the Bean (PDF download)
TRANSCRIPT
Tania Marien:
Welcome to Talaterra, a podcast about freelance educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. Who are these educators? What do they do? Join me and let's find out together. This is your host, Tania Marien.
Tania Marien:
Today. My guest is Jim Folsom. Jim is the creator and host of @BotanyInContext, a fun and fascinating channel on TikTok. That brings attention to the plants we engage with and rely on every day. Jim is a teacher, a gardener, a botanist, and a cook who enjoys talking about plants. He is also the Director Emeritus of the botanical gardens at the Huntington Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. Whether you're a teacher wanting to incorporate more botanical themes into your lessons, or are a casual gardener who just simply loves plants, this episode is for you. Let's join the conversation.
Tania Marien:
Jim, thank you so much for being on the show today. It is a thrill to spend time with you again, and it was really exciting for me to learn about your TikTok channel. And I didn't know that you had one. I think it's a clever use of TikTok. There is a lot of examples about how TikTok can be used in environmental education, and I just love the way that you use it. So thank you so much for being here today. @BotanyInContext is the name of your channel. How did you decide to use TikTok and how did you decide on the format?
Jim Folsom:
Yeah, well, as you can see from looking at my numbers, the fact that I'm using TikTok doesn't mean that I am a standard TikTok creator because I still linger in the lower numbers with 3,600 followers instead of 3.6 million followers. But what happened was I had written, I still write a big book, it's so big, and it's in Apple Books and it's called A Botanical Reader. What it was, was a compilation of things I was interested in, things I had written over the years and I rewrote. Well, the Apple Reader got huge, over a thousand pages. I don't know if you've ever seen that. It's free, it's in Apple Reader, but a lot of people couldn't get to it because it's only in Apple Reader. So I thought, well, I need to transfer it to a new medium.
Jim Folsom:
So I was thinking one day I would put it in a blog, and so I started looking at different website creators and the one called WordPress just showed up on my computer one day and I thought, well, I will explore this. And before I knew it, I was signing up to have a WordPress website. I didn't even understand was doing that, all of a sudden they were asking me for money and a name. And I was, oh my God, what am I going to name it? I want a name that doesn't have a bunch of numbers in it. And so I thought, well, it's about botany in context. So I named it Botany in Context and I got that URL. And so what I did was I started loading chunks of the book into that website and reformatting them, and of course like with you, with Squadcast, all of a sudden I'm learning skills that I had never, ever had to deal with and calling the people at WordPress and saying, how do I make this happen?
Jim Folsom:
So I started building that and continued to add to it and built a whole bunch of blogs in that, that I thought were kind of fun. At least fun to me. I don't know if anybody cares, but it allowed me to organize my thoughts. So then my daughter is in social media marketing and she came home one day and she was talking to me about TikTok and she showed me a bunch of them. Well then Deb and I both, I retired and we moved to Missouri, as we live in Florida right now. We live in Florida, but we have a place in Missouri, and we were there and we got COVID from the move. So we're sitting there for three weeks and the TV's not turned on. And the books are in boxes, there's 1500 shelf feet of books still in boxes because we're moving. And so I took my cell phone and started watching TikTok and I became a TikTok addict.
Jim Folsom:
And I was watching it for hours, because really we couldn't do much. We were really sick. So I started looking at all the plant people and I thought, you know, the voices on the plant channels and the cooking channels are about personalities. That's what they are. TikTok is all about personalities. And that's how you get a lot of viewers. You are a personality. And I decided what I would be is I would be the quiet personality, not in the foreground, that I would talk about plants, just like I talk about plants to volunteers or groups I walk through the garden, and I decided that someone on TikTok needed to just present the story of plants from the viewpoint of botany, but how they relate to everyday life.
Jim Folsom:
And so what TikTok has become, and I didn't really quite plan it this way, but I planned from the start that I would not be visually present in the TikToks. It's all about the plant. Well, that's not a very TikTok-y thing, first off. Secondly, what evolved is that TikTok has become like a video log of my daily life. I walk out and I see a plant and here's what I'm thinking. So TikTok has become three things for me. One, it's become a way to connect to a new audience. Two, it has become a way to just relate everyday thoughts about plants from the viewpoint of a botanist. And three, it's become an archive of information that I hope to plunder for other kinds of applications. So that's a long-winded way to say that's how I fell into TikTok.
Tania Marien:
What I love about your channel is that it is about everyday botany. In environmental education, there's of course, a lot of emphasis, a lot of focus on all the ways you encounter nature in everyday, but your format, your approach is so casual and so inviting. It really has that feel of everyday. It isn't an intentional lesson, it isn't an intentional message or something that is pre-planned, and that's what I love about it.
Jim Folsom:
You're so generous because basically it is totally ad hoc.
Tania Marien:
Yeah.
Jim Folsom:
And the worst part is I think I've published around a thousand of these little videos, and of those thousand, I have edited like five. So I am just lazy. In that regard, I don't want to spend my evening doing what I could do, learning more about those tools and cutting out the little uhs and the pauses which most people would do, and I would do if I were a little bit more organized, but if I ever start doing that, then I will be embarrassed about all the old ones and I'll have to take them down. So I stick to my guns in that it is totally casual and it catches me sometimes in moments ...
Jim Folsom:
[Recording from TikTok segment about Orthosiphon]
Look at this pretty mint and look how gorgeous the buds are. They almost look like a chandelier or something. They're so sculpted, the way they unfurl. But look at the great flower structure and the leaves. It's a mint, of course, look at the cassette leaf arrangement. The leaves are ovate with large dentations. It's called cats whiskers, Orthosiphon.
Jim Folsom:
I will have to say that the payback for that is that sometimes I have to refilm something a couple of times, just because I said something stupid or wrong, because I say it, and I think that's not right. I have to refilm the whole thing.
Tania Marien:
No, I wouldn't change a thing. And editing can just take over and you don't, yeah. I love your approach. It is very casual. Like I said, it's like going on a walk with you. And when I discovered it earlier this summer, it was just a nice way to learn something about plants. And so I love the topics that you cover from what you see on the side of the road to something that you're keying out, to there's a recent post about the market, about corn, a series about fruits and vegetables. I mean, there's so much there. And something that I saw that I did not know about was the obedient plant on how you could move the flower and the inflorescence. And that was wonderful.
Jim Folsom:
Yeah. And that's a plant from my childhood, because we were, at that point, we were at my brother-in-law, Rick and Jan, we were at their garden and Jan does the garden, and she's a naturalist and Rick's a naturalist, and she's more of a geologist. Rick is a biology, a naturalist that works for his whole life for the state of New Jersey in the pine barrens, and so they both are interested in plant, and that plant, I knew as a child and we called it obedient plant. It wasn't until many years later that I understood why we called it obedient plant, and that is because it's just this funny thing, the flowers kind of in these ranks, but if you push it to the side, it'll just stay there. And so that was a neat morning because Rick took Deb and me to a bunch of bogs and places that we would never know about. And so really, it's fun when you're in a situation like at the Huntington, when I go back there, there's just thousands of stories around me and, and it's an embarrassment of riches.
Tania Marien:
Oh, another thing that was exciting to me was the flower that is pollinated by a gecko.
Jim Folsom:
Is that cool?
Tania Marien:
That is wild.
Jim Folsom:
Oh, well, and see, I had written a blog on that because everything about that flower is unbelievable.
Jim Folsom:
[Recording from TikTok segment about Nesocodon]
Curator of tropical plants that the Huntington, Dylan Hammond, has a knack for growing almost anything, and certainly has a comprehensive knowledge of tropical plants, particularly the most curious and rare. One of the plants he was able to get many years ago, get the seed to, is a fairly recently discovered species that's now in the trade. And its name means island bell. The genus is Nesocodon, and it's named after the island of Mauritius to which it is endemic. And it's one of a few species on that island known for the most particular characteristic or behavior. Here's the flower, it's in the Campanulaceae which is nice, because it looks like a bell, right? But what is amazing about it is if you look inside the flower, see that red color? Let me see if I can find one that's not as perturbed. Yeah. The nectar is red. Do you see those nectar glands at the base? They make droplets of red nectar and it was discovered that it pollinated by geckos. Here's one that's intact. Is that miraculous? So the look at the size of the flower, it's a big ...
Jim Folsom:
What's most fun of course is not to know what you're looking at and to turn the flower up and see these beautiful Jello red, that clear Jello red color, Jello red drops, and then when you shake it, they drop down and it's one of those things, and I think this is true of most plants, the more you look into the science of it, the more phenomenal it is. Yo start out thinking that's neat. And the more you learn about it, the neater it is. Knowledge does not destroy the wonder. Knowledge magnifies the wonder. And so then you find out and here's this island and in this weird little place geckos have become pollinators of like 15 or 20 different kinds of plants. Well, when you've got lizard pollination, you've got a totally different set of what we call syndrome points there, where everything, I mean, butterflies make sense, bats, make sense, hummingbirds make sense. But what is associated with lizard pollination? Really neat. Really, really fun.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. No, that was exciting to see. I did not know that.
Jim Folsom:
But the crazy, I'm going to hog your time here.
Tania Marien:
Absolutely. Go ahead.
Jim Folsom:
The great thing was then I started saying, well, why did they name it Nesocodon? And what the heck does that mean? And so then I started, I always look up the etymology because the etymology does two things. One, it makes it easy to remember the name. If you understand where the name came from, it's a lot easier to remember. But two, it tells you something about what the person who named it was thinking. Like why did they choose that name? Who did they name it for? What patron was that? But Nesocodon, and it took a while because I couldn't easily get the roots to work out, but I finally found out that codon refers to bells and a lot of the campanulaceae have codon on there, it has to do with the bell shape of the flower, and neso is island. So it's the island bell. And all of a sudden the name, instead of being this weird name, like what does that mean? It rings beautifully. Oh, it's the island bell, how neat?
Tania Marien:
Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. You have taught botany for many, many years and to many, many people and to the public, and what do you wish people knew about plants?
Jim Folsom:
Well, you know, the simplest things. I think plants are a great biological model, a simple model. Something, some people will even wince at this, but I have no hesitation in taking a plant apart or cutting it up. I'm not at all of the opinion that plants have real emotions or sentiments. Plants do respond to things, but I don't feel bad about cutting a plant up or taking it apart. We cook them all the time and tear them up and still consider ourselves vegetarians, right? But if you do that, then you can gain awareness of other forms of life. And the simplest thing I wish people understood was the cellular basis of life.
Jim Folsom:
It is amazing to think that I'm sitting here and I'm not only made of 30 trillion cells, right? 30 trillion cells cooperating somehow and another, each of which has to maintain its own little balance to stay alive, but then somehow or another making me function or misfunction in other ways, I host another 30 to a hundred trillion bacterial cells. So I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, trying to think, and do all these things and all of these functions are working and they're working because each of those cells is independently alive, at some level independent, and at another level, totally organized. And if people understood that, I don't think people who know what a cell is. And at the basic level, I wish there were a few things people understood about themselves and about the world around them and plants provide a wonderful laboratory to learn that. A wonderful learning place. Because even I don't like to dissect frogs and cats and all that stuff we had do in college. And I'm squeamish about blood and stuff like that. I'm just not into, I don't even eat really raw meat, you know?
Jim Folsom:
So plants are just a great place, and if you can understand the plant life around you, you can understand many things. You can understand more about your own life, what life is. One thing you can understand that I think is lost in the modern world totally is the evolution and the civilizing nature of our own species. I spend a lot of time, every time I encounter something weird or something new, I will sometimes just sit and think, how did that feel to someone 10,000 years ago? I was sitting on the beach, we live on an island and it's really pretty, it's gorgeous. And I wish I could show you outside. We sit 12 feet above the ground in our house. And it feels like we live in a tree house. There are pine trees all around me and I'm looking into the trees. It's nice, okay.
Jim Folsom:
But I was on the beach the other day and I was just sitting there and thought, this has been settled, this was settled by indigenous peoples at least 8,000 years ago. And somebody might have been sitting on that beach, looking at those clouds, looking at the ocean, what were their thoughts? They had to think it was beautiful. I can't imagine someones sitting there and not thinking how overwhelming nature is and how beautiful it's. So what other thoughts did they have? And then at night, we've lost the night's sky, but here it's gorgeous, and it's clear. And those people, they didn't have electric lights, they didn't have any of that stuff. They spent a lot more time looking at the night sky and wondering about it and how beautiful it was. And day night meant things differently for them. But the same is true of plants.
Jim Folsom:
I'm interested in everything about how plants, like there are trees right around our house that were gashed for turpentine. We forget it that at one time, those are called naval stores, and at one time all those ships were big leaky, nasty riding wooden structures. They had to constantly be re caulked with water and pervious substances taken from trees that were built from trees. It took X number, were trees to make a big ship, and then all that cordage, think of the sails and the rope, and they're all plant materials. That the early sails believe it or not were may of flax because cotton's later in mass production. So someone had to make all that linen to make those sails. And then you go into the art gallery and Blue Boy is painted on a linen fabric. And so people, it just, I go back and I think plants are still important today as precursors, as raw materials. But at one time everybody knew that. Everybody somehow or another benefited from the fibers and the materials that plants bring to us. And I wish people understood more of how their lives, what is that phrase from the marketing world, the fabric of our lives? Plants truly are the fabric of our lives. And I wish people gave them more consideration.
Tania Marien:
How might that be accomplished, you think in today's world besides your wonderful TikTok channel?
Jim Folsom:
There is nothing. I mean, one of the fall outs of COVID has been, there've been two almost opposing fall outs that are both valid. One is we've learned better how to use things like this, our media to communicate and to teach and to expound. But the other is we've realized how important it is, that firsthand experience. And to me, the most important way for people to learn these things is to go out and touch plants and be among plants, to grow plants. You haven't seen it yet, but I worked with a wonderful artist named Ed Lum. I don't know if you know of Ed,. Ed does sort of poster work. He so talented. He turns out things that reminiscent of the WPA and Ed and I just turned out a pamphlet on the tale of the bean. And it's for kids to see if we can cause kids to be interested in just planting a bean, just plant a seed. Oh my gosh. The magic of planting a seed and watching it grow, not for every kid, but some kids will find that compelling, and it will change their lives. So I'm hoping, as much as I appreciate all of the potential of this virtual world, there is nothing like hands on experience.
Tania Marien:
Well, this channel that you've created here is a wealth of information, and I can imagine so many people using it in so many different ways. I will absolutely, definitely have links to it and links to specific episodes, specific posts in the show notes.
Jim Folsom:
Okay.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. And it is just exciting to see. And I had to share it. I had to let people know about it. And so thank you so much for stopping by to talk about it.
Jim Folsom:
You're very generous. You're very kind and generous. I do it because first off, it's not like I need something to do, but I so enjoyed teaching the volunteers, the docents, the groups like the botanical artists. I mean, I didn't do those classes and training sessions because I had to, because I could have avoided all of that. I did it because it's a really fun thing. It's a fun thing to come to understand something a little bit and then to relate that to somebody else and see them interested and excited. And what I learned in college of course is if you get to the point on a topic that you can explain it well to somebody else, then you've learned it better. So the best way to learn something yourself is to pass it on to somebody else in an intelligent and cogent way, and all of the sudden, your own personal understanding has grown. So don't just be a learner, be a teacher, because that will constantly re inform you as to your understanding of the world around you.
Tania Marien:
You have embarked on a new chapter of your life having served 36 years at the Huntington Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. When you look over your shoulder, back at the trail you've left behind, what do you see?
Jim Folsom:
Well, I see a lot of unfinished business. I'm glad Nicole-
Tania Marien:
Jim is referring to Nicole Cavender. The current Director of the Botanical Gardens at the Huntington.
Jim Folsom:
-has taken in hand the idea of making the garden's activities more professional in how they're approached and more organized and more regular because, I'm not going to say I shoot from the hip, but when I got to the garden, I inherited a remarkable garden. And just as the head of the garden, and a remarkable audience of people and a remarkable community. A lot of gardens in the country are out in smaller populated places. And they really work hard to get an audience. Well at the Huntington in Los Angeles County, you can just reach out and the audience is there. There are audiences that need you, there are audiences that just want to be around, there are audiences that are out for edu-tainment. There are audiences that are themselves educators, and they're hoping to increase their understanding of the world around them.
Jim Folsom:
So the nice thing, it's almost scary and daunting is that when you're in LA county, there's what 8 million people in the population, you're overwhelmed with audiences. So picking and choosing how you serve those audiences to increase diversity of audience, to reach out to as many people, underserved audiences, specialized audiences, people who will most benefit from what you have to offer. That's almost too much. But what I decided when I arrived there and I talked to the trustees is that the Huntington collection, given where it was and what we had and the history we had, really could be one of the great teaching collections in the world. I don't know if you've had the chance to see the glass flowers at Harvard.
Jim Folsom:
One of the world's botanical wonders, okay. Is the glass flowers at Harvard University. Everyone should make a trip there. Back in the, it's in my timeline, I've got a hundred page timeline of botanical history in my book, and I copied parts of it in my website. Back in the 19th century, Harvard's botanist hired German glass blowers who made beautiful, realistic animals, bugs. And they made, I think there's 200 life science specimens of plants that are so realistic in glass, that you would be sometimes you're stunned to realize that they're not living. They are unbelievable. Well, they went to all that effort to create a collection that they could teach in winter, because it was cold in Harvard. And I've been there in December, in January, so I know that was true. At the Huntington, we have all that stuff alive, real, living. And so I said, let's make this into the greatest teaching garden we can as a primary goal.
Jim Folsom:
And that meant building the facilities we built, which we have two teaching laboratories, I think you've been in those. We built botanical center, we built a conservatory that is all about learning about plants and experimenting with plants. The last thing I was able to put together was a teaching garden that is a vegetable garden, and Nicole has bought into that full boar and she's moving ahead and we've gotten some endowments to support that. And part of the message of the teaching garden is that plants support us in many regards, but for food mainly. And 200 different kinds of plants feed the world. And my goal was to have all those 200 there and talk about them and let people see them. So what I think I left behind was the framework and the structure and the physical resources and quite a bit of endowment that means that the gardens activities are underwritten to some extent. Special programs have endowments that weren't there. The whole Chinese garden is endowed.
Jim Folsom:
So that I hope what I left behind was a platform that, that Nicole and her successors can continue to build on. And that the Huntington gardens will be a beacon and a place where people can come and get excited about plants, learn about plants, learn about the culture that evolves around plants and become more sympathetic with the natural world. Because in the end, the critical thing right now is we're destroying the world around us. That's the horrible thing is that the world that you and I were born into is not the world that succeeding generations inherit. It's stripped of natural biodiversity, it's stripped of natural areas. And the only way to reverse that to some extent or halt it is if people in the world find the plants and nature important and will buy into changing their lifestyles to allow the others to live also. So I'm, I'm hoping that the garden in the end becomes a place that people learn to love nature, love it enough to learn something about it, love it enough to be willing to alter some of how they live and behave and such that it doesn't destroy the rest of the world.
Tania Marien:
What's next for you?
Jim Folsom:
Oh, well, I'm still not, I'm retired officially, but we're still moving. We still have a container of debris, French material, that we have to move out personally, I'm too much of a collector and a hoarder. We've got way too much material possessions, and I still have research to finish. We still have new friends there and even family. So we'll be back to California if for no other reason than to try to disarticulate our stuff from the rest. The place we live now is a former life because we all live many lives, I just happened to have a 36 year life at the Huntington. But before that, I grew up in Alabama and then I went to college at Auburn. And then I went into the Air Force as a Lieutenant. Those are all different lives to me, different books, chapters.
Jim Folsom:
Then I went to Vanderbilt for my masters and were when I was there. I did my master's research in the forest right near this island. So I spent three summers working on native orchids here near Apalachicola, and that's unfinished work. I mean, I did that work, but there's still a lot more. So I'm sort of going back, maybe I'm working my way back, wouldn't it be funny if I kind of worked my way back through Indiana and everything, and ended up back where I was sort of a kind of a symmetrical life and then you just kind of pass away where you started. But there's so much to learn about, the wonderful thing about being in the plants is you will never run out of fascinating things to explore, to interpret, to relate to people, just to sit and drop your jaw and say, wow, that's a so neat. So I'm hoping that I can contribute some to the understanding of the plants in this area.
Jim Folsom:
I've gotten myself already on two different committees to pay attention to native plants and wildflowers. And we have tree frogs, like every morning, there are tree frogs crawling over the windows. We got 75 inches of rain this year.
Tania Marien:
Oh my goodness.
Jim Folsom:
It's a very, very ecologically active, wet world. And so there's plenty here, and what's really fun is having gained the knowledge of being in California and that habitat, and then coming back to Southeastern and having lived, I lived in Columbia, I lived in Costa Rica, I lived in Panama. So how do I explain those different climates and ecologies to people in context of where I am now? So there's a lot, there's no shortage, plenty to do. As long as the brain holds out.
Tania Marien:
Yeah. Planning to do. And then we have so much more to learn from you and that's exciting, and that's also comforting, because you are really an excellent teacher. When you talk about plants so easily, so naturally, and you make them so easy to understand and from photosynthesis to morphological structures, I mean, everything is, it's always been one big, fascinating story when you tell it. So thank you for that. And I'm really excited to be able to point people in the direction of @BotanyInContext on TikTok.
Jim Folsom:
Okay.
Tania Marien:
That's fantastic.
Jim Folsom:
And they can ask questions and people do ask questions and sometimes I'll go back and refilm something or make a new addendum because it was clear that there was more to be said or something to explain or to be clarified.
Tania Marien:
To learn more about @BotanyInContext, see the links in the show notes. Here you'll find a link to Jim's channel on TikTok and a link to Jim's segment about the flower that is pollinated by a gecko. You'll find a link to Jim's botanical reader in Apple Books and a link to a conversation that Jim had about why plants and gardens matter. If you have a gardener, botanist, or plant enthusiast in your life, please share this episode with them. Thank you for joining us today. See you next time.
Tania Marien:
Talaterra is a podcast for and about independent educators working in natural resource fields and environmental education. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues. Thank you so much for joining us today. This is Tania Marien.