Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Roses

Episode Date: September 11, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why roses are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Roses. Known for being flowery. Famous for being rosy. Non-gardeners don't think much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why roses are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of the topic of roses? Roses. I like them. They're pretty. What do you want me to say, Alex? They're nice. Powerful anti-rose statements from someone in the world, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I hate them. I hate beauty in the world. No, they're nice. I like them. I like the smell.

I like the flavor to some extent. I think if it's too heavy, like I've had rose ice cream before that I didn't really like because I felt like the floral flavor was too strong and I felt like I was eating ice cream made out of perfume. But then my other, my other rose related thing is when I was a kid, I had a pet grasshopper for a minute. I, he, it actually lived for about a week, which I think is pretty impressive. And I would keep it on my shoulder and to keep it pacified so it wouldn't go away, I would feed it rose petals and it really loved them. So I never felt more like a little fairy than I did then where I had a little grasshopper on my shoulder and I was feeding it rose petals and occasionally clovers. Oh my gosh. It's like if Pinocchio could already be human and just the story is Pinocchio gains a cricket friend.

Right. And that's it. Like there's no angst or trouble about becoming human. Except my grasshopper kept telling me to do naughty things and I want to be turned into wood because that sounds great. We came up with reverse Indiana Jones the other week. His name is out, Deanna Jones. He wants stuff out of museums. And now we have come up with reverse Pinocchio. Pineschio. The reverse would be it's a girl who wants to be turned into wood and has a rambunctious cricket friend. I love it. Grasshopper. That sounds more fun. A grasshopper that's giving her bad advice all the time. Telling her to call her ex all the time.

I did turn your grasshopper into a cricket. I guess that is... How dare you, Alex? Erasing the diversity of those insects. Sorry, guys. But let's talk about roses. Yeah, and I picked this topic partly because so many of us are surrounded by roses all the time. And then also news I think I can share with listeners.

I am moving. Yay. I'm moving. Does that mean you're turning into a cow? Because you're saying I'm moving. Yeah. Why did I say it like that? I don't know.

It sounds like you're setting it up for a cow pun, but it's like there's no not talking about cows. Doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I a human, definitely human. We're moving from our current place in Brooklyn, New York, and we're moving a short distance to Beacon, New York, which is in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and many other peoples such as the Mohegans and the Skadagook people. I'm feeling really joyful about where we're going to live. And that place has rose bushes. I am now responsible for rose bushes that I want to learn to take care of. And so I thought partly, why don't I pick some stuff up working on the podcast? I mostly just learned amazing things about them and still need to learn some basic cultivation, but it's good. I'm more connected to them.

Next week on the podcast, the topic is Alex's taxes. Let's learn about Alex's taxes. On every episode, our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week, that's in a segment called... Every stat has Its Count. Just like every count has its stats. Every number counts up one, two, three.

Every stat has its count. You couldn't see it, but Alex sprouted sideburns. It was frankly disgusting. That was only some of the hair I sprouted. This was a very hair metal song. It's a song by the band Poison called Every Rose Has Its Thorn. And for some reason, it sounds like kind of a country song, even though they were fully a hair metal band. It's weird.

It's a weird 80s thing. They didn't say where the hair was. And that name was submitted by Willow Tanager. Thank you, Willow. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Massillion Wacky and Bad as possible. Submit through Discord or just hit pod at gmail.com. And the first number about this topic, the rose, is 35 million years.

35 million years. That is the age of the oldest known fossils of roses. Wow. So like what? Roses got a bunch of bones or something? What do you mean rose fossils, Alex? roses got a bunch of bones or something? What do you mean rose fossils, Alex? Yeah, apparently the fossils are super rare, especially because roses tend to grow in drier places especially well, and fossils tend to form in wetter places especially well,

and also no bones. So the fossil specimens are really prized. But this was found in the U.S. state of Colorado today, a 35 million year old rose fossil. So I know that fossils can be made in different ways. It's not always just bones, but there's usually some kind of mineralization process or process by which there's like an imprint of the organic matter. In what way was this rose preserved? It seems to be an imprint. Like you said, it's hard to get a super strong dinosaur fossil of a rose. And one key source this week is a book called Rose by social historian Catherine Horwood.

She says that these rose fossils are rare, but we have 35 million year old specimens from Colorado, fossils from about 25 million years ago in China, and then tens of millions of year old rose fossils in Europe. And these are primarily a northern hemisphere plant. So we think that the first roses evolved before the major northern hemisphere land masses separated. They're that old. Wow. So they've been around for a while. Yeah. Do we know if early humans were using these or appreciating them? Do we have any shared history with roses? There was active garden cultivation starting about 5,000 years ago,

in particular in China. So for many millions of years of history, it seems like these were just a beautiful plant happening around people. It took some time to kind of figure out the cultivation of them for ornamental purposes and also for using the petals for making oils and food flavorings and things like that. I think it's really interesting because I understand why we like the smell of roses or other flowers because it smells kind of sweet and sweetness is something that we would be attracted to to eat because sugars are very good sources of energy. But it's really interesting to me that we like how they look, like we're attracted to their beauty because flowers aren't

something that we typically eat it's not typically in our diet although some flowers you can are edible yeah but they're they're beautiful to us uh and it it just it's a it's a really interesting thing it's like why are they pretty to us like i understand why they might be beautiful to like a bee because a bee needs to pollinate them and needs to get the nectar for it. Well, it doesn't need to pollinate them, but the flowers like the bees to pollinate them. And then the bees collect the nectar for the hive and such. So the flowers are attractive to bees. But like for us, like, why do you think we're so we find roses so pretty?

you think we find roses so pretty? I wish I had research on it, because I think we don't quite know. But it's probably some combination of the smell and the appearance. And then also, some of those early records of Chinese cultivation are in imperial gardens for emperors. And the lack of them being like a staple crop has probably helped make them a luxury. We can make syrups and jams out of the rose hip fruit, and we can make lots of flavoring out of the petals. There's ways of eating roses and consuming them, but nobody needs to live on them. So I think the niceness and the luxuriousness, people said, this is great. And also, it turns out they're relatively easy plants to grow. The rose bushes and shrubs and other plants are pretty tough.

So I think people just kind of let them happen in some cases. Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting to me. I mean, because it seems like universally people like roses, people like flowers. We find them. And roses seem to be particularly evocative for people, like the smell and what they look like. It's very, you know, it's maybe like when you think of a flower, like a rose is kind of one of the first things that comes to mind, at least for me.

Same. Very default flower. And for a whole bunch of reasons that we'll talk about kind of throughout the episode. But there's also two things going on here. The next number this week is two, because with the topic of roses, we're sort of talking about two things at once. Like the flowers, you cut off the plant, and then this plant itself, this bush or shrub or climbing rose. And gardeners know this, people know this, but there's both those things going on at once. It's a perennial plant that is always growing year round, and then you get rounds of rose flowers from it. And we just kind of call all of that roses. Like the plant is called a rose, even if it's not this bloom that you're giving to a bachelor contestant. this bloom that you're giving to a bachelor contestant.

Are they always like bushes? Is it always a rose bush? Like what is what is sort of the structure of the rose plant? Yeah, it's usually a bush. And then when you have something called a climbing rose, that's a bush that just does well growing on top of stuff. People will put up trellises for them or they'll grow on the sides of buildings. But in general, this is a shrub. It's not quite a tree, but it's an extensive shrub. I see. So it's not, even though you can grow it on trellises and things, it's not like technically a vine or anything. It doesn't need something like a trellis to grow on, but it is, but it can, it can be shaped by the trellis and it's like a shrub or a bush. That's right. And there was also a big surprise about the plants in here because takeaway number one.

Roses don't technically have thorns. Huh. They have prickles. Prickles? What? Yeah. Alex. Trick.

This seems semantic. It's pretty semantic, yeah. It's a little bit biological and a lot semantic. Okay, so what's the difference between a thorn and a prickle, other than one sounding like Beatrix Potter is naming a hedgehog? like Beatrix Potter is naming a hedgehog. Yeah, it turns out many plants do have thorns in the world, but a thorn, for it to qualify as a thorn botanically, it needs to be a modified branch. One example is the hawthorn tree. That's a tree that has branches. And then it has a lot of small modified branches that are hard points. And that qualifies as a thorn. But the things we call thorns on roses are just

modified skin cells. Ah, I see. They only go a few layers deep in the rose plant's skin. They're very easy to break off, unlike thorns. Oh, yeah. And so technical literature calls them prickles. Another memory I just had as a kid, I would snap the thorns off of roses and then like put them between my knuckles and pretend I was a cat because they looked like little cat claws. Some kind of like little like, like pussy Wolverine, like meow, meow. The sweetest X-Man. Wow.

Great. Making biscuits on Magneto. How can he how can Magneto be bad and evil when someone a mutant's making biscuits on him? You know? someone a mutant's making biscuits on them you know yeah it's amazing that none of the mutants in the series are ever just really cute to all of the other mutants and they all agree i know we have this mutant civil war but that one's just cool and gets to sit in our laps okay we fight everybody else yeah yeah yeah and these these rose quote-un unquote thorns that I've only ever heard called thorns. And people even talk about the thorn as a powerful symbol of the downside of pain and blah, blah, blah.

It's actually just a prickle. And it turns out thorns are super botanically specific. It has to be a really specific, really wooden structure in a branch. a really specific, really wooden structure in a branch. I assume that the prickles of a rose play a similar role to the thorns of other plants, which is to deter herbivores from eating them. Yeah, apparently it's that for most species. And also they think that in some climbing species, it helps them hold in place.

Oh, interesting. And a number about that is maybe my favorite number about the plants. It's about 1,200 years. So another long time, 1,200 years. That is the approximate age of a rosebush in Germany. Whoa. That is nicknamed the thousand-year rose, even though it is older than that. It's like 200 years older than that. And it's believed to be the oldest living rose in the world.

I like to think that the Rose's publicist is like, no, no, she's only a thousand years old. Like getting that on IMDB, getting that on Wikipedia. It's like, really? Only a thousand years old, you say. Still being cast with a 2,000-year-old male rosebush. Yeah, and then this plant in Germany, we'll link Atlas Obscura for pictures of it in the story. It's on the side of a cathedral in Hildesheim, Germany.

And it was planted in the early 800s AD. We have church records and can figure that out. It still blooms every year. It has pale pink flowers. A lot of rose plants are pretty tough. And this one was destroyed by a bomb in World War II. Oh no. There was aerial bombardment of the city that destroyed the entire church and the entire above ground portion of the rosebush. And then there was just enough of the root system left for a new bush to sprout and grow. So that's how tough this plant is. Yeah.

Wow. So as long as the rosebush itself wasn't a Nazi, I'm glad that it came back after the bombing. We're looking into its records and letters and statements. Yeah, we'll figure it out. But yeah, so how are they certain that this is like over a thousand years old? Is it just based on the records of the bush? Like, how do we know that they didn't sort of subtly switch out the rose with another rose at some period of time? Oh, I guess we can't be 100% sure. But yeah, we're trusting people's descriptions.

Yeah. They don't want you to know the truth. Yeah, some wily churchgoers in Germany. You're puffing this rose up. It's brand new. They planted it last year. And yeah, apparently caretakers have mapped and cataloged each of the roots of this plant

because they want to really try to make it last as long as possible. And they can be really hardy. They also grow in a lot of places that are relatively dry, especially the Mideast and West Asia. They just do well in a lot of climates, a lot of places. And that's part of why they're all over the world. Yeah, that's amazing. And I assume there's different species of roses, right? Like this isn't all the same species of rose that like, it's not like with dogs where you have the same species, which is dogs. And then you have a bunch of different breeds of dogs. Are these like

different breeds of the same species of rose or are there different species of roses? Yes, both as they're apparently there are over 100 species in the rose genus of plants. And then all of those are hybridized and turned into new varieties all of the time. It's a very easy to experiment with plant. Yeah, I mean, I assume that they try to achieve different things with roses to get different color combinations and petal formations, etc. I don't know that much about botany, to be honest. I'm literally just learning how not to kill plants. Every time I've read new stuff about roses and researching this, the flexibility and

variety is amazing. There's so many ways to do all the rose stuff. And it's interesting. Can I put a rose in a blender, pour it out, and then have it grow a new rose tree or something? Because this seems to be what you're saying. I'm just like, that's how they make the Grimace shake at McDonald's. Put a purple rose in a blender and then make a TikTok about it. It's amazing. I thought it was made out of dead Grimaces. Well, that's the other way, yeah.

That's how you make a vegan grimace shake, just a rose. And also, rose gardens are a long-running tradition, and it turns out there's super specific origins of that. Because takeaway number two, the origin of rose gardens is an ancient Persian military victory.

Oh, that seems more violent than I would have assumed. Yeah, and there's kind of other people having the idea of gardening roses and even maybe having a garden that's mostly roses, but there was a specific Persian ruler who won a military victory, built his new capital near it, and then built an iconic rose garden in that new capital. And that was a big influence on the whole rest of the world. Oh. Because when I think of rose gardens, I think of tea parties, teddy bears.

Yeah. Little elves, maybe., little elves maybe. I don't know. Little teddy bears drinking, sipping tea politely together. But really it's like big military bears, freshly coated in blood from their victory, sipping tea together. It's the over the credits images and shots for the movie 300.

Like after the battle battle there's just those sweaty glistening guys planting some roses and putting up trellises for some of them you know putting little names on their varieties yeah yeah just like just washing off the blood of the all the spartans being like well time to have a tea party the year number here would be around the year 550 BC. So a little more than 2,500 years ago, the Persian ruler Cyrus II, who would later be called Cyrus the Great, he defeated a king named Astyages of the kingdom of Media, which is not a well-known kingdom today, but the Persians conquered the Medians. I know, I've only heard of the mainstream media.

And the Medians had a lamestream result in the battle, causing them to be absorbed by the Persians and just part of it. And once Cyrus did this, he said, I need a whole new capital city for my new bigger empire. And so near the site of the battle, he built a city called Pasargadeh. And that's located in what's now Iran. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And when they built it pretty much from scratch,

one key element was a large rectangular garden with a central pond, almost exclusively planting roses, just as many amazing roses as they could do. And Iran is generally a great climate for roses. It was a really successful garden. This influenced the entire region, was also a huge influence on the whole Muslim world centuries later. In Arabic, they called it the Chahar Bagh. And this became a very standard quadrilateral central pond rose garden style that influenced the whole world. That's really interesting. I mean, so did the roses have a symbolism to them? Or was it just that they're sort of rare and shows off your wealth, like your ability to maintain the roses? Or was it just because they liked them because they were they're beautiful?

It's the answer is both and kind of globally. I was trying to piece together a takeaway about roses culturally, and they're just everything to everybody across all sorts of different eras. And apparently they were a favorite flower of the Prophet Muhammad, but that doesn't influence the Persians many centuries earlier. And they're an icon to cultures basically because they're beautiful and because people in various places find something about them that is meaningful to them. It seems like they are, I mean, not maybe by every individual person, but pretty universally across cultures, just loved. Like we see it and we're like, this arrangement of vegetable matter pleases me.

Yeah. It's just like, look at those petals. They're a color. I can't make stuff that's colors very easily. Great. And it smells good and it's thriving without much work from me as a gardener. Cool. This is great. And it's pink a lot. A lot of times it's pink. Pink is nice. Yeah. You can do it. Yeah. Yeah. Roses are even one of these things we especially talked about with graveyards recently and some other topics where pagan people like them and then Christian people absorb them in some ways.

One source this week is the book Rose by social historian Catherine Horwood. There were various pagan peoples excited about roses. There's a line early in the Bible in the Song of Solomon where they criticize non-believers for silly activity like wearing roses but then pretty quickly roses came around to be a symbol of Mary and a favorite Christian thing and then another number here is 59 because 59 is the common number of prayer beads in a Roman Catholic rosary Oh, rosary.

So it's that the name sounds like rose. Are they connected? Yeah, it comes from the Latin word for a rose garden. Ah, interesting. So when you're doing the rosary, you're supposed to be, in particular, thinking about Mary. There's a lot of Hail Marys in it, And it's sort of an overall Mother of Jesus symbol. Basically, just because it's a lovely flower. They would also occasionally call Mary a rose without a thorn was the symbol.

That like, she's a lady, but with none of the lady problems, I guess. And so that is how this flower in particular became a key symbol of a key person in Catholicism. She doesn't get PMS is what they say that what they're saying. Yeah, sure. The highest virtue. The rose without a thorn is going to get eaten by deer. So I don't know if that's so much a compliment. I do like that Christianity's first impulse was to say, like, roses are stupid. You should listen to us about Jesus instead. And then people are like, we love roses. It's like, well, actually, Jesus's mom really likes roses, too.

So you should. It's cool. We like we like roses, too. We never said they were dumb. Right. It's like that early zealot thing of stop having fun, be Christian. And then later people are like, I think it can be fun. I think it's okay.

Yeah. Like they skateboard in. They're like, hey, Jesus can get down with roses too, y'all. Yeah. Another surprisingly specific history here is about those long stemmed roses that you usually get from a florist or a bouquet, because not all of them grow that way. A lot of rose bushes, there's not that big foot long straight stem, right? That's not how they all grow. because it turns out that employees of the British East India Company brought four kinds of roses from China to Europe. All four of these Chinese roses go on to become the foundation of a whole kind of roses called hybrid tea roses.

And all of those are known for blooming consistently and budding on the end of a very long stem. And so when the British East India Company's employees brought these back in the 1790s, that began and launched the entire florist industry version of a bouquet rose. Wow. And you said they're called hybrid tea roses. Does that mean they can also be used for tea? The name is apparently mysterious. We don't remember exactly where it came from, but it's probably a tea garden concept. I see. I see.

Because there is rose tea. Because I actually have some. If I use just too much, a little bit goes a long way for those. But I can use a little bit in some tea, and it's very nice. Yeah, we'll talk later a lot more about rose flavor because it, it's especially big in West Asia and in East Asia. And then these hybrid tea roses are mainly British and French horticulturalists going for a visual image and going for a visual style and really, really not making the most out of the flavor, I feel like. But so where, I mean, we've talked a lot about how roses kind of became a global phenomenon. Do you know where they originated from? Like, were they always kind of a cosmopolitan plant or were they really just localized to a very specific region and then spread out? I love that question because I really thought there would be a strong answer. The rose is just so prehistoric that it's just kind of from all over the Northern Hemisphere from tens of millions

of years ago. Now I almost think of them like ferns, where I'm like, ferns are a dinosaur plant. That's cool. Roses are kind of a dinosaur plant, even though dinosaurs died before that. But you know what I mean? Now I'm imagining a velociraptor like nestled amongst the roses, like hiding. I love it. That's like a Jurassic Park Valentine's Day. And I'm into it. Like the guy says, clever girl. And then they connect the kiss, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And then they mouth kiss. Yeah. They mouth kiss. Yeah. We all wanted that in the movie, but no, we were deprived. I really thought I really, I had my hopes on that ship and that ship sank really fast in that movie. really fast in that movie. Yeah, and the floral industry to this day, roses are huge business for them. I also,

in researching this, found probably my favorite story about a florist. Kind of like now I have a favorite story about a German rose bush that can survive a bomb from above. This florist story, the number is nearly 3,000. And that's not a coincidence. That's the number of folks who died officially in the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center. It turns out a downtown Manhattan florist named Mikey Calarone donates a white rose to be placed on the name of each person on their birthday each year. So he's donating nearly 3,000 white roses every year. Oh, that's really sweet. And he's very integral to the event. It turns out he works nearby. And when there was an attack in 1993 on the World Trade Center, he ran over to try to help and then felt self-conscious because

he had the thought, I have no medical training. I don't know what I would do now that I'm just here. This is not helpful. And so then he learned to be a volunteer EMT. And in 2001, he ran over with his medical bag when the first plane hit and did as much as he could to help people there. Suffered a lot of stress and trauma from it. And then a counselor said, find a new way to contribute to this. And it became birthday flowers for the people who passed. That's wonderful.

Yeah. Roses are a powerful symbol and a white one, you know, roses can be so many colors, a white one feels like the thing he wants it to feel like. And so it's specifically white roses for all the people. like the thing he wants it to feel like. And so it's specifically white roses for all the people. Yeah. It is kind of an interesting universal language of being able to understand what someone's trying to communicate, like through flowers, which is an amazing thing that humans can do. Like we find so many different methods of communication and one of them is flowers and we can communicate a very deep message with them. Yeah. And just good for us. I love it. And on that very positive feeling, I think we're going to take a short break before we come back with some more takeaways about this just really good

topic. Really cool thing. Folks, this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating is brought to you by Wild Grain. And Wild Grain is awesome. They're the first ever Bake From Frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, fresh pastas, and artisanal pastries. And the baking process is so easy. Every item bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less. So as soon as you have the inkling, you just turn your oven on, and once that's ready to go, less than half an hour to just have suddenly a bakery in your house. My latest box of wild grain had maybe my favorite item yet. It was a loaf of sourdough bread with

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to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests

as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And we are back with many more takeaways about the wonderful rose. And we are back with many more takeaways about the wonderful rose. This next takeaway is a sort of different direction about the floral industry.

We just had a very upbeat, lovely memorial story about it. This is more about U.S. foreign policy and global flowers. Because takeaway number three. The 1990s and 2000s U.S. war on drugs accidentally built up the flower industry in South America. Huh. Okay, wait, let me guess. Good for the farmers. Fields where they grew drugs got turned into fields where they grew flowers, question mark? Yeah, that was our goal.

And not growing like poppy flowers that are their own drug. The goal was to take farmers in Colombia and Ecuador and say, instead of growing coca leaf that gets turned into cocaine, please grow flowers that can be sold as flowers. Interesting. I mean, I don't have positive feelings about the war on drugs because from what I have read, it's not super effective and caused a lot of problems. But I do like flowers. So tell me more, Alex. research in terms of the take on it because most of them kind of said isn't it stupid that we got Colombians and Ecuadorians to grow flowers even though it didn't end the war on drugs and my

feeling on it is we just helped people find another crop they could grow and it's not necessarily terrible that it didn't end cocaine production you know like I think it's it's broadly positive cocaine production, you know? Like, I think it's broadly positive. Yeah, it's funny to me where it's like, we need to have some excuse to grow roses and it has to be war. Like, originally it's like, well, when we win a war, we can have a rose garden or like,

we declare war on drugs and we can grow some roses. And it's like, guys, dudes, it's okay to like roses. You don't need to start a war just because you want to grow some roses. Like, guys, dudes, it's okay to like roses. You don't need to start a war just because you want to grow some roses. It's really fine. No one's going to think you're less of a man just because you want to grow some roses. Yeah, it's like fine that the upshot is cocaine still exists and some farmers have a flower business. That's not a win in some kind of drug war we invented. But, you know, it's okay. So that's how I feel about it.

Make it a rose garden where you do your cocaine. You and me, we're going to hybridize something. We're going to hybridize something, right? Pruning at like 60 miles per hour. Yeah. Edward Scissorhandsick around the place. Yeah, yeah. So the coca leaf is a traditional Andean plant, and it's been grown, harvested, chewed as a stimulant for centuries.

And then in modern times, cartels and drug dealers have figured out how to make coca leaves into cocaine. Since the 1990s, the U.S. said we need to crush cocaine production. And cocaine's bad for you. But they've funded large programs to incentivize farmers to switch crops. So the U.S. spent money paying farmers to grow cacao or coffee or honey or flowers are the big alternatives. Yeah. You say cocaine's not good for you, Alex, but

you're not a doctor. Oh, no, I'm not. What if I'm wrong? Okay. We'll try it. We'll come back. We'll try it. We'll come back. We'll try it. We'll come back. And one of my favorite sources on this is Professor Iban de Rimenteria of the Universidad Central de Chile. And he writes about how this crop replacement strategy didn't end coca leaf growing. And one of the main reasons is that South American farmers struggle to receive a living wage for most crops. They would go broke if they grew food in a lot of cases, because they don't get the right trade deal from the rest of the world on those crops. But one crop they do seem to get a decent deal on is flowers. So this program did not end cocaine production, but it did massively build up Colombian and

Ecuadorian flower farming. So it didn't really displace any of coca leaf production or did it like simply not end it or did it, you know, drive down the production of coca leaves? Apparently it's driven it down some, but then there are waves when it comes back up. Like especially from 2014 to 2016, there was a big negotiation between warring sides in Colombia's civil wars and drug wars. And then people took that opportunity to ramp up coca leaf production in kind of the interim. So yeah, they've never eliminated it because it just is too profitable. Right. Is it still used sort of in the traditional way by indigenous people where, you know, they like chew on it for a little bit of energy, but it's not developed into the sort of powder form? Yeah, apparently, especially in the Andes Mountains, like more toward Bolivia.

And so there is kind of this blurry line to where there are definitely farms just growing it for the drug trade and to make cocaine, but there are also people growing it for their own thing. And this coca leaf growing is also somewhat hard to monitor because in a lot of places it's being grown secretly and illegally and like by militant cartels. But the flower industry is above board. And we know that from the year 2000 to the year 2019, Colombian flour exports more than doubled and Ecuadorian flour exports tripled. And it's partly because the U.S. funded farmers to switch to it. And then almost all those sales go to the U.S. Apparently about 800 of U.S. flower imports are from Colombia and Ecuador.

The result is that U.S. flower prices plummeted. Even if you think flowers are expensive, that makes sense, but they would be more expensive without all these Colombian and Ecuadorian flowers. And also a lot of U.S. flower farms have closed because they can't compete with the South American flowers being grown there. And the reason is basically U.S. attempts to end the drug trade. So that's too bad. It's the one U.S. coup in South America that did not involve gallons of bloodshed. Oh, yeah.

Or maybe it did. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Or maybe it did. I don't know. I don't know if there were any wars that happened as a result of the rose growing coup. But yeah, I guess lost jobs in the U.S., but you know. did not think about with trying to keep people from getting so addicted to cocaine and so on, but also interfering in another country's agriculture and government. There's a lot of shades of gray. Yeah. You're saying that the U.S. may have overstepped in a geopolitical issue? Wow. Alex. Especially in one of the americas can't imagine it and in south america in the southern america and yeah and so to this day bringing it a little bit specific to roses too a lot of recent

u.s flower farming focuses on hey you can get your flowers very locally with a low carbon footprint and we're growing all these various local flowers. Colombia and Ecuador remain particularly dominant recently in stuff like large scale roses. We need a bajillion roses for Valentine's Day. It's probably coming from Colombia and Ecuador. And National Geographic says those growers do a huge trim in October specifically so that their bushes will generate new roses in a timing that works for Valentine's Day. And they do similar timing for Mother's Day. And it's really the rose industry down in Colombia and Ecuador if you're buying them in the U.S. in Colombia and Ecuador if you're buying them in the U.S. It is really interesting, the economics of roses and the commercialization, how you have these sort of influx times of roses for specific holidays where we're just like, this is what

you do. You give your mom a pile of dead roses is what you do. I love roses. I love bouquets. But it is a little odd in some ways, isn't it? Where it's like, well, I got you some flowers. They are dead and actively dying. They won't last.

But enjoy for now, I guess. Here's maybe a takeaway where flowers get a little more masculine. Here we go. Because Terminator stuff. Takeaway number four. Science is trying to genetically engineer the smell of roses and invent bionic roses. Bionic roses, Alex. Yeah, there's a team of scientists in Sweden who have created full electronic circuits inside the body of roses.

You can't see me at home, but I'm squinting. I'm trying to look very skeptical, because I am. Why do you need a bionic rose, Alex? What is this? Are we going to, is this going to be some kind of rose matrix where we're inside of a rose matrix? And then like all humans just kind of like are like bees somehow. I feel like we would just be human bees in the rose matrix being brainwashed into pollinating flowers. I guess that's vaguely better. We get some exercise. We're not just in vats, you know.

That's okay, I guess. It's not okay, but we get some exercise. We have to help roses in their perverted pollination scheme. But what's with a bionic rose? pollination scheme. But what's with the bionic rose? There's apparently a whole field of science that wants to figure out if we can put circuits or machinery inside of plants. I mean, we can. Obviously we can. What do you mean, like, can we? We can. But why? To what end? why so to what end one lab doing this is the laboratory of organic electronics at linkoping university in sweden and in 2015 they developed a polymer that roses can uptake through their vascular system that sucks up water and the idea is as the rose grows, it keeps sucking up polymers

that will be throughout the structure of the rose. And they successfully created a whole digital circuit through a rose. They also created a rose where if you apply voltage to the circuit, it changes the color of the leaves. Not the petals on the top, but like the leaves on the stem and on the plant.

From what to what? Between green and blue. Oh. Just to do that. That's, hmm. My favorite part of the Scientific American article about this is the following quote, the idea of bionic plants is not new. Great.

Yeah, it is. But they go on to explain. Great. Yeah, it is. But they go on to explain. As we've all thought about turning plants into robots, into something that spits in the face of God. We think about that constantly, don't we, folks? Yeah, because apparently the general idea is to enhance plants.

This Swedish team tried other plants before roses. The first idea back in the 90s was trees. They were like, how do we get machine parts into trees? And then there's another team at MIT where a chemical engineer showed that you can make spinach chloroplasts take up carbon nanotubes. And I know that just all sounds like nonsense, but engineer Michael Strano says that the nanotubes improve the spinach's rate of photosynthesis. Can we then eat the nanotubes and be okay? They don't say, and that was my first question. Because yeah, like, are we doing this just to make a huge spinach that is impressive? I want to eat spinach. I want to cream it. a huge spinach that is impressive. I want to eat spinach. I want to cream it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I like science and I like the weird science where it just doesn't seem like it's doing anything productive because it's fun. So I'm not anti turning roses and spinach

into weird computers, but I still don't understand how they're getting the grant money, right? Like what is in their grant proposal? Like we're going to make roses change color because we're going to make their insides like artificial. Because I guess the idea would be if you increase the rate of photosynthesis, you could have a crop that grows faster. I think so, yeah. I suppose is the idea or a crop that can grow. Maybe it's like something where the crop can grow in suboptimal conditions because if you increase the rate of photosynthesis, if it gets less sunlight or something, then it could still survive because

it's making more out of the time it does get sunlight. It's interesting. Yeah, this story taught me that there is a, I guess, bleeding edge way where I'm suspicious of GMOs. Because in general, it's just breeding plants. But like, are you leaving machine parts inside of the plant where I can't eat it now? That is where I have questions. Like, is there plastic and metal in this? Am I going to crunch into a servo motor or something like when I'm trying to eat my spinach?

It sounds sort of superficially weird to eat a lot of nanotubes because I don't know that there's been a lot of research on what eating nanotubes does to your body. But I guess in theory, like carbon is, carbon can be relatively neutral, at least in your body, obviously not in, not in an environment or like when you inhale carbonized burning stuff and things. But yeah, I don't know. Some forms of carbon are harmless.

Exactly. And this is all kind of what I would call the stunt stage from what I'm reading about. Like people have not figured out. And now the spinach with tubes is in the stores is very far away. This is people saying, I built a bionic plant. And apparently you can just get a grant for saying the phrase bionic plant. People are like Terminator. Great. Cool. Cool. Cool. Maybe Popeye was from the future. And the reason he's super strong and his arms are so weird because like his arms are very strange because it's not like he's just got muscles. His forearms, like the front part of his arms are huge like drumsticks. And then near his shoulders, his upper arms are really skinny and he's got like huge drumstick forearms that's it's unusual right so and he eats spinach

all the time so if it's this bionic spinach like is it turning him into a bionicle answer yes adds okay i think popeye is a bionicle confirmed. I'm realizing if anybody has seen the latest round of the very funny YouTube show Monster Factory by the McElroy brothers where they make horrible video game characters. I love that show. I love that so much. Yeah. God, I love Monster Factory so much. They made a Street Fighter guy recently with those Popeye arms, and it's because

they're freak arms. Popeye arms, yes! They're not okay. Can I stop the podcast to watch that video? Sure. I mean, it's a good idea. Everyone should. And we're back, and I had a great time. Shout out Prince Legday, their new character. Alex just sat there

silently for 20 minutes while I watched Monster Factory. And speaking of freaky engineering, the other thing in this takeaway is the smell of roses, right? Because we all just figure roses smell like roses. It turns out in a general way, a lot of commercial rose breeding has accidentally made roses that don't smell like anything. Yes. Okay. So this is not a surprise to me. I've totally noticed this, like with bouquets of roses, like first thing I do, shove my nose right in there, like I'm a little bee. And there's nothing, it's like, it's, it's like, I'm not smelling anything and it's confusing to me. Whereas for like wild roses or not wild, but you know, other roses that I've seen around,

they're often much more, they open up more, they're a little messier looking and they smell better because there's more of a smell. And they're not always that like super deep, deep red. They can be, go from like white to yellow to sort of a reddish color and anything in between, but usually not that like blood red, that commercial roses, the one that you see on The Bachelor and Bachelorette is. I'll bet a bunch of listeners are like, now I'm not weird or my sense of smell works. Like I've had the experience purchasing them where I'm like, I think these are broken, but they look good. So here we go. And yeah. And one key source this week is a really amazing book about lots of stuff. It's called Orwell's

Roses. It's by nonfiction writer Rebecca Solnit. And she says that commercial growers have achieved roses where there's higher numbers of them, a consistent look, mass producible. They look like that tattoo or cartoon where it's red. And then not on purpose, but accidentally, they've just bred roses that don't smell like anything in the pursuit of all that visual variety and consistency. Yeah. consistency. So that's led to a situation where there's a new study in May of 2023 where a joint French and U.S. research team published their findings on, they hope, unlocking the enzyme that causes a rose to smell. A team at the French National Center for Scientific Research and at Purdue University says that they isolated an enzyme called farnesyl diphosphate synthase.

Mmm, delicious. They say that that enzyme causes other chemicals to happen that causes a rose's smell. They did several versions of tests, including at one point engineering tobacco leaves that would produce it, to see what that did. They literally did the Simpsons tobacco thing, where it's like tomatoes that taste like tobacco, but it's tobacco that smells like roses. Right. That's where we're at with roses. There's quietly an entire scientific community saying,

a lot of roses don't smell like anything anymore. Can we do anything to bring the smell back by understanding chemistry and genetic engineering effectively? And so that's just going on in the world. It's amazing. I mean, this is the complexity of genetics. You see this with like the domestication of animals where it's like you domesticate an animal, like a wolf to a dog or like a wild boar to a pig and your goal is to make that animal more docile something that's not afraid of humans and not aggressive towards humans and then what happens is then you get the ears fold down and a spotty patchy coat and you weren't trying to do that even though it's adorable but that's just like a it is an impact that happens because of genetics in terms of like these same cells that control like cartilage production and melanin production are tied to this neural crest cells that develop the brain. And so these two things are linked, even though it doesn't seem like they should be linked. And so I assume something similar is happening with these roses. Is the

goal like to bring smell back to these perfect rose, like the stereotypical looking commercial roses or like bringing the smell back at whatever cost? Because for me, I'll take a sloppy looking stinky rose over, you know, a perfect looking odorless nightmare of a rose any day. The purpose is inquiry and commerce. Like they just want to understand to understand. And then also they're curious about, can we take these picture perfect roses and re-engineer them? Right.

And just induce the smell again after we accidentally messed up the rhythm of various enzymes and chemicals. Because to our surprise, it turns out it's several different chemicals and processes kind of all at once just to make one rose smell. Breeders just kind of didn't understand or think about that when they developed, oh, this looks perfect or looks yellow or looks like what we want. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting endeavor. I just feel like it's going to end in tears again because something's going to happen. We're going to figure, okay, we can bring the smell back with this enzyme by modifying this gene. But hey, now your rose has teeth and it bites you when you try to smell it. Worth it. Worth it. Worth it. Like I'm just

pushing through. That's how they're masculine again, right? They attack you and you still smell them. Proves you're tough. Roses do not have thorns, but now they have teeth. Uncanny little human teeth. One last super fast takeaway for the main show here, because we talked about rose flavor a bit. And it turns out takeaway number five. Rose water was the top dessert flavor in the early United States until there was a revolution in vanilla cultivation. Ah. And we've done a past episode, me and Katie and our friend Lydia Bug, we talked about vanilla and a revolution in the 1840s where a young boy discovered how to hand pollinate vanilla and made it available to everybody.

and made it available to everybody. But it turns out in the void before that, the early colonial United States loved rose water, which has been a flavor for thousands of years. Because like vanilla, we think of as like a very neutral flavor. We talked about this on the vanilla episode. It's definitely not neutral. It's just so common that we think of like, well, this is like a neutral sweet flavor.

But no, it is the flavor of vanilla that you're tasting. Um, but yeah, with roses, I've, I've never thought of it as like a neutral common flavor. It's, it's in fact, I feel like maybe my enjoyment of roses is somewhat diminished by the fact that it's so often used in fragrances like perfumes. In fact, like the chapstick I have right now is like rose flavored. So it's like, to me, I have this association with roses and non edible things. So I think that makes it harder for me to enjoy rose flavor in a dessert. Whereas I think if I grew up eating rose desserts all the time, I might associate it more with like a dessert food flavor. Like now I can't have it in dessert. It just has to be very faint because otherwise,

like I said, I feel like I'm eating some lotion or something. I'm the same. And I think we're like a lot of people in the modern United States where we have lost this heritage of being way into rosewater as a flavor. It's globally available. Especially in countries like Iran, it has been a dominant dessert flavor forever. And rosewater goes back at least 3,300 years. That's around when people in ancient Persia began extracting oils from rose petals, both to make fragrant oils, and then also the byproduct is a substance called rose water, which is a delicious flavoring from the steaming or distilling of rose petals. This spread worldwide from there, and England in

particular discovered it by doing a crusade. Boo, bad, not good. But by invading and attacking Muslim people, they said, oh, also, there's like this delicious dessert. Let's bring it back to England. This is such a funny, like this happened in a lot of like invasions, I feel like, where it's like, we're going to destroy your culture. Wait, actually, hmm, you've got a point there with your food. So this is ours now. This is our culture now. Yeah, you guys do have a good sandwich or something. So I'm going to take that, obviously. Yeah. And in this case, people in England got very into rose water, used it in all sorts of recipes,

and especially with just steep rose petals in water sometimes, which is kind of that tea approach. But since it was part of English culture, English people invaded North America, brought it over. Food historian Sandy Oliver says that the taste of America in the 1700s was, quote, rosewater cream and sherry. Those were our moves in the 1700s as colonizers. And apparently most cookbooks were full of rosewater-based recipes for desserts and drinks. President William Henry Harrison's favorite dessert was a rosewater flavored pound cake. He was inaugurated in 1841. Okay. That sounds like that slaps. That actually sounds really good. It sounds so good. Yeah. A pound cake with rosewater,

that sounds really good. Because it's dense. A pound cake with rose water, that sounds really good. Because it's dense. Yeah, it would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And basically the thing that disrupted this was vanilla cultivation takes off after a young boy on the southern hemisphere island of La Reunion named Edmund Albies discovers that we don't have to wait for pollinating insects to pollinate vanilla. We can do it by hand. And so vanilla becomes commonly available. And just American consumers went toward that. Other countries, they stuck with rose water, but it used to be

our favorite dessert flavor in the colonial version of the U.S. What if we mix vanilla and rose flavors? What happens? Oh, magic, I'm sure. I don't know why we don't, right? That just is probably great. It's just the experience is too good. Your brain actually liquefies. And that's how the bionic roses take over. That's how they do it.

Oh, no. Skymed is this double flavor dessert we thought it. Oh, no. Sky Med is this double flavor dessert we thought of. Oh, no. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, roses don't technically have thorns, they have prickles. Takeaway number two, the invention of the rose garden dates back to a Persian military victory Takeaway number three, the 1990s and 2000s United States war on drugs

accidentally built up the flower industry of South America Takeaway number four, science is trying to genetically engineer the smell of roses and invent bionic roses. Takeaway number five. Rose water was the top dessert flavor in the early United States until a revolution in vanilla cultivation. And on top of those five takeaways, a ton of numbers about everything from millions of years of rose evolution to a rose plant that survived a World War II bomber. Those are the takeaways.

Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the name origin and surprising mental health origin of England's Wars of the Roses. Visit SIFPod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 13 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It is just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation.

Additional fun thing, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Leaned on digital resources this week from UNESCO, National Geographic, the Smithsonian Gardens, Atlas Obscura. Also a few books, including the book Rose by historian Catherine Horwood, and the book Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas

and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There's a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. In addition to that, we're talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 34. That's about the topic of goats. Fun fact, there was an incident where a goat accidentally abducted the grandson of U.S. President Benjamin Harrison.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating.

So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.