TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEE: Bob Randall (BR)
INTERVIEWER: David Todd (DT)
DATE: October 4, 1999
LOCATION: Houston, Texas
TRANSCRIBER: Robin Johnson
REEL: 2035

Please note that video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recording. Numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: My name’s David Todd. I’m here for the Conservation History Association of Texas on October 4, 1999 and we’re down in South Houston with Dr. Bob Randall who’s a Ph.D. in anthropology but also a gardening expert and one of the leading proponents for community gardens in the Houston area. And I wanted to take this chance to thank Dr. Randall for joining us and talking about his work with gardens and for conservation in general.
0:01:15 – 2035
BR: Thank you David.
DT: Well it’s a pleasure. I wanted to start off by just trying to give us a sense of place, where we’re starting from. We’re in, I guess, what was originally a native prairie many, many years ago and since developed. And I was wondering if you would describe what was here at one time and how things have changed?
0:01:38 – 2035
BR: Well certainly can. There—there—there—at one time, this area was an abundant teaming life. It was a prairie filled with flowers and animals and birds and people who came through the area 150 years ago, 1840, describe it as—as just some of the most beautiful parkland they had ever seen. They—some of them said it was the most beautiful parks they had ever seen and yet nobody was tending them, nobody was taking care of them and those—anybody who has been in a natural area, has seen wildflower areas, has seen alpine meadows, has seen any of the really beautiful natural spots on this planet, knows what nature can do and how beautiful it can be and how full of life it can be if it is allowed to do its process.
DT: And what has happened in the intervening years between those first explorers’ visits and today?
0:02:58 – 2035
BR: Well I don’t know too much about what happened in this subdivision. My guess is that there might have been some rice farming here or something like this at one time. And then sometime in this subdivision, maybe 1950, it was cleared and graded and roads were put in and lawns were created, nice flat, flat, flat land was created. Builders’ trees were put in and people moved in.
DT: What do you mean by builders’ trees?
0:03:39 – 2035
BR: Trees that grow quickly, are attractive to people looking for houses and but may not be long-lived and usually aren’t and generally don’t support any of the kinds of natural processes that make—made that ecosystem originally so vibrant that was here.
DT: Do they tend not to be native trees or…
0:04:12 – 2035
BR: They’re not—they’re not generally native trees. We’ve got, on our property here, a couple of old trees, Arizona ashes. People, of course, brought in the Tallows and all sorts of other trees, some of which have become terrible weeds and then they had brought in all sorts of their favorites from—from the north, from Europe, from China, some of which do well here, some of which don’t do at all well here.
DT: And I understand you’ve taken a different tact towards gardening and landscaping.
0:04:57 – 2035
BR: I certainly have. I’ve certainly wanted to encourage people to reduce the amount of lawn they use to—to grow as many wildlife supporting, native to Harris County ornamentals as they can possibly do. And if they are going to grow imports, grow ones that are highly adapted and that have many uses in addition to simply being ornamental. Uses like edible fruits, supportative to butterflies or birds and, in general, more uses you can get out of a plant, the better, not just what.
DT: I see we’re at your garden now. Can you maybe take us on a tour?
0:05:55 – 2035
BR: Be glad to. We—this property—we moved here just about twenty years ago and, at that time, it was a—almost entirely lawn with a couple of the trees that we still have here. One or two crepe myrtles and otherwise it was a brown, ugly lawn. We went about, first of all, planting as many fruits as we could, trying to learn about these things and then gradually as we became more appreciative of the native plants of this area, we gradually put in as many ornamentals and habitat supporting plants as we could. First—first learned about that at Audubon and that was many, many years ago now.
DT: Can you tell about some of the people who taught you? I think we talked about Lynn Lowrey once before or…
0:07:06 – 2035
BR: Lynn Lowrey was certainly one person. Martha Henson at the Chickadee Nature Store who—which was originally at the Edith Moore Bird Sanctuary probably is the one who got me started in this direction and, though the years, I have been amazed at the number of different kinds of butterflies she can get at her yard. She has a—she has a yard in Bel Air that even—has even had herons in the pond which is, you know, Bel Air, you find that surprising.
DT: Was there anybody in your earlier history, any relatives or friends growing up who sort of taught you or inspired you to think about landscaping in different ways?
0:07:57 – 2035
BR: Well my—my grandfather, my father’s father, had been born on a farm in Vermont. And after a lifetime working in the court system in Brooklyn, New York he retired to a farm and when I knew him as a young kid, when I was a young kid, he had a huge farm where they grew virtually all the food they ate. And so I—and my parents were very appreciative of the—of quality produce. We grew a small garden where I grew up in—in central New Jersey and—but I spent a lot of time foraging particularly berries in—either at my grandfather’s farm or at my maternal grandmother’s shore place. So I—I grew up with a—a strong appreciation for those things as well as we spent many, many weeks in the summer times in the New England mountains. And so I—I grew up liking that sort of thing. My real changes in terms of my interest in ecology developed after—after I met my wife, after I moved to California, after I started reading Sierra Club stuff and hiking around in the mountains of—of—of the west. And that was also a time when we, I think, became fully aware of what pesticides were doing to wildlife and to people. I had spent several years working in malathion pesticide research back when I was a chemist and I think I had a better understanding of what people knew and didn’t know about pesticides than—than most people did.
DT: Well tell us a little bit about that. I’m probably as confused about that as anyone.
0:10:03 – 2035
BR: Well, when I was in college, I was a chemistry major for sometime. And three summers I had a job working as a research chemist in trying to stabilize malathion to keep it from rotting on tropical docks. And basically malathion’s—one of their main customers was the World Health Organization which was using malathion to kill malaria mosquitoes. And so I learned a lot about pesticides. I also now know that my—the symptoms—I mean, my eventually getting out of chemistry was strongly related to basically pesticide poisoning. I didn’t know it at that time but all these reasons like the headaches I used to get in the lab and stuff like that are just characteristic of malathion poisoning and bad vision and a number of other problems. But it was rather that later on when I became an anthropology graduate student that I began to learn more about ecology and I met my wife, Nancy Edwards, and—who had an undergraduate biology degree. And as I became more knowledgeable about ecology and eventually made it a doctoral spec—specialization at Berkeley, I—I began to see the superiority of ecological approaches to pest control and other things as compared with using chemistry.
DT: Maybe you can show us some of the ecological approaches used here.
0:11:47 – 2035
BR: Absolutely. Well we could walk over this way. The—one there are a lot of different things that we do here. One of them is try to create a—a strong diversity of plants. There’s essentially four—five rules of ecological pest control and one of them starts with using highly adapted plants. None of the plants in this yard have had any poisons on them in seven years. I haven’t put anything on them. You can see that this apricot, is Fairchild tangelo, these pumpkin honey mandarins up here, the lemon back there, the bananas, you can see up on the roof. All of these things are growing here without any real pest problems, partly because they’re being grown in the right place and because they’re varieties that are well adapted to our—our climate. But secondly, I do things to back this up. I create conditions that bring in predator organisms, things that like to eat insects.
DT: Can you describe some of the predator insects that you’ve got here?
0:13:48 – 2035
BR: One of the things we have—this may be hard to catch on camera but we have parasitic wasps. We have large numbers of them. This is probably one of the worst months of the year for trying to find them because they’re attracted mainly to the blooms of dill, fennel, cilantro and plants such as that. And those plants are basically beginning to come up right now and they go to seed and flower say in February, March, April, May, June. Sometimes I can find some fennel somewhere around the yard but there are plenty of other plants that—that do that kind of attraction. Salvia’s here. We look carefully we might find something. Might find some kinds of insects. They’re also—also, of course, birds, lizards, toads and so on and spiders. Each one requires a different kind of habitat to be there plentifully. So you basically set the thing up to attract birds, to attract lizards, to attract spiders and so on. There are many, many things you do past that level. But just these blocks here, I have no idea what will happen if I pull one out, what might—yeah there was a ground beetle just went for cover and you can see all sorts of insects, both pests and predators under there. And if I pull another one out, there goes a skink. And they’re hiding under this eight inches of concrete which is an artificial rock. We don’t live in a climate that has rocks. And so they’re hiding there and they will be out as soon as it cools down. I was watching the—the geckos eat bugs last night and they came out as soon as the sun started setting.
DT: Speaking of these blocks, I notice that you have them strung around your world, does that help keep water on the lot?
0:16:12 – 2035
BR: It certainly does. They’re—I—if you look over there, you’re looking at a—what’s left of our lawn which is not a whole lot but this is a very green lawn. We have had three inches total of rain in my rain gauge since the end of June. This is now October. As you can see, it’s a completely green lawn and that’s the case despite the fact that it hasn’t been water in at least seven years if not longer. That’s because all rain that comes off the roof here and everything else is prevented from exiting to the street and we cut the grass very rarely, only when it gets really unsightly. And we always compost the cuttings and leaves on site, right where they fall. So as to develop a soil food web. And if you—if you like, you can look at our—our property right out by our curb out there where there’s a steep slope heading down to the street and you’ll see that it’s brown and ugly. So that that’s the basic difference.
DT: You talked about mulching a little bit to encourage the soil food web. Can you talk a little bit about how you try to promote the soil in an organic way and…
0:17:36 – 2035
BR: Yeah, absolutely. The big thing that we do is put several inches of quality organic material on the surface of the soil as much as we possibly can. If we purchase stuff, we either purchase hay on vegetable gardens or we use something called native mulch which is a ground up tree branches and tree trunks that have been composted. These two materials are by far the highest quality mulches you can put on soil. They build humus very rapidly and they promote a highly diverse soil food web of—of creatures that eat creatures that eat creatures. Every time a creature eats a creature in the soil, the byproducts are undigested nitrogen and other—and phosphorous and potash and other things that trees nat—roots naturally like. It also promotes all sorts of beneficial fungi that acts symbiotically with the roots of plants to basically they get some energy from the—from the air and photosynthesis through the plant and, in return, they take minerals out of the soil and give it to the roots of the plant. So basically there is a fairly—beginning to be well understood soil food web ecology that you can create great success with if you simply build it. And native mulch, in particular, which if you put this on straight Houston clay which is some of the worst stuff there is—this is just ground up tree branches, it hasn’t been watered now in—this has not been watered in months and look at it. This is Houston clay folks. If you know this stuff, you’ll realize that—that—that’s a very odd fact. You wouldn’t think you could do that to clay in three years or so but this has been sitting here. But what’s happening is that this litter is decomposing and the soil organisms are breaking it down, bacteria and particularly fungi, in this case, and then protozoa and other things are eating this fungi which are then being eaten by nematodes and mites and the whole result of this is a soil that is loose and useable much the way a forest floor.
DT: You told us earlier about the native ecosystem of prairies that was here. Could you talk a little bit about the soils that are usually found here?
0:20:30 – 2035
BR: The soil—this is a geologically very young soil. It—I do not have any clear idea what the native prairie soil was like but my guess is that it had a fairly substantial litter of—of tall grasses that had fallen through the years on top of it. Perhaps there were fires that burned off some of this, I don’t know. But as long as the prairie was here, it no doubt had a thick—a thick mulch over the surface that promoted this kind of soil. What happens as soon as you start grazing it with cattle or you start mowing it or doing any number of other things to it, the organic matter is going to—doesn’t last long in—in hot, humid soil—conditions and so unless you keep adding it either manually or because plants drop it, you’re going to have basically a very hard clay. And this happens all over the world in the tropics.
DT: Maybe you can show us now some other plants that the soil is supported here in your yard.
0:21:55 – 2035
BR: Sure. Well there are thousands of plants. This time of year being October, there are few—are few fruits still left and they’re mainly the citrus of different sorts. But the citrus are truly, truly good. This Satsuma tangerine has been—this tree has been producing like this since 1980. Originally cost maybe $15.00. Was almost killed twice in the 1980 and ’89 freezes. It’s not really ripe till about Thanksgiving but for months in—for months at a time, say starting whenever we get ready for it, you can—not doing this very well because I just put my hands in that nice soil but this is going to be a little tart but I can tell you it takes five of these to make a glass of tangerine juice and last year, my wife and I had citrus juice from about middle October till May. And it’s not too bad and if you don’t mind soil, you’re welcome to try some.
(eating tangerine)
DT: Well I understood that when people were first promoting this area they said that it was a citrus haven. Why do you think it didn’t become that in the long run?
0:23:42 – 2035
BR: Well it’s a good question. We occasionally get some pretty serious freezes here and about one year in seven or one year in ten, most of these citrus trees will not bear. So from a mar—commercial point-of-view, one year in seven, one year in ten, you might lose your shirt. A—another problem is that most of the citrus that’s sold in this area are on the wrong root stock. They’re—are they come from—the cheap citrus comes out of the Rio Grande Valley and there they use root stock that is compatible with their very salty soils that they have there due to their mismanagement of the soils there. And that root stock is not very hardy in the Rio Grande Valley in terms of freezes but is even worse here. Basically we get temperatures that are 70º one day and 20 the next and that’s deadly on a sour orange root stock. But on the trifoliate orange root stocks which we use here which is a temperate hardy citrus, these things are quite dormant and generally have no trouble with temperatures until they get down below 15 or so.
DT: I understand that Harris County was a very productive agricultural area, one of the most in the state in the early years. Do you know what other things they tried to grow?
0:25:19 – 2035
BR: Well there’s—many things have been grown in our—our experience just about every kind of food that most people had ever eaten will grow here and grow here fairly easily. There’s a few things that are basically impossible or hard to grow like cranberries and artichokes and mangos but mostly most everything grows here. Why they stop—and, to this day, Harris County and the eight county area at least exports pecans, rice, soy beans, peanuts in excess of what it grows but more, by and large, except for those things, well under 10% of what we eat here has been—is grown in this area mainly because of I think the abandonment of the agricultural infrastructure here. No—nobody really teaches it or—or tries to support it since it’s an industry that has been allowed to decline.
DT: Any speculation about why that is?
0:26:39 – 2035
BR: I think that as people got more removed from farms themselves, the bankers and may others probably just didn’t see this as something that was a viable enterprise. And the farmers, by and large, were trying to compete in products that are basically much easier mass produced. The—also I think that America, in the ‘50’s, was a much more meat and potatoes oriented society than it is now and the produce that loses its value the quickest is—is basically fresh produce, greens and things like that and they didn’t have the market potential that they have now. So I—and of—of course, the ability to move stuff from great distances, I think had a—had a big effect that—that changed in the ‘50’s.
DT: I guess you’ve gone the other direction. You’ve decided to make use of your yard for growing all sort of vegetables. Maybe you can show us to that.
0:27:55 – 2035
BR: Yes and—and herbs, there’s plenty of different kinds of things. Basically because I aim at trying to have very small numbers of—of hours spent on this, we tend to grow things in many—what permaculturists call stacking. We tend to put things at different levels. This plant right here, you might not recognize this, this is a member of the ginger family called turmeric and the—both the leaves and root are edible and it’s a—it’s a substory species. And over in here there’s a hybrid passion fruit which—and there’s a variety of blueberries and raspberries and grapes and so on in this jungle here. Now this—at this point—and—and just as well this is a bog hardy hibiscus. And I guess what I would just say is that you—that this particular area is probably—it gets renovated about every year in January or so. And so it—it won’t be a jungle like this all the time. Just to say that we try to grow all sorts of different things. There’s a—a lantana, a bog—I mean, a bush cherry here and then, of course, we go to all sorts of vegetables, eight or ten blackberries, grapes, pomegranates, multiplying onions, there’s a dicon radish there. A subsurface irrigation system. Variety of tomatoes. There’s East Asian spinach there on your—on the bed and this is a whole set of fall brassicas. This bed right here which was set out a few days ago will produce enough cabbages, broccolis, brussels sprouts, kales, collards and so on, for us well into about May or June. And we got some lemon—a lemon basil over there. Corn. Beets coming up. Some cucumbers. Maybe you ought to take a look at some cucumbers or—got sweet potatoes here. Sweet potatoes are probably one of the most nutritious and easiest crops you can—you can grow. I should have
0:30:59 – 2035
looked around—usually digging one of these things usually can spot them fairly fast but…see what I can find here.
DT: Maybe while you’re looking you can tell us a little bit about a word you used earlier, permaculturist.
0:31:19 – 2035
BR: Sure. Permaculture is one of those terms, expressions that really is, I guess it’s way too complicated to try to explain quickly. Generally there’s a designer course that is taught for—ah you found one…there’s a designer course that—that we’re teaching over a ten month period at a site west of here. People take a lot of hours but the basic prime idea behind Bill Mollison’s theory is that the way you design human habitats should be based on the idea that this is sustainable through the generations. That that’s the basic concept. That’s what permaculture is about. Culture—permanent culture depends on not just permanent agriculture but sustainable approaches to living. And we cannot expect a reasonable way of life if we don’t adhere to that first principle. Then what goes on is a whole set of principles, designer principles as they’re called which tell you how to go about designing housing, how to go about designing gardens, how to go about dealing with all the basic needs. I guess that’s about as short a form as I can—can make. But it’s a—a—I believe it to be—I believe permaculture to be the most probably single, best, intellectual contribution of the 20th century.
DT: So permaculture has allowed you to grow sweet potatoes like this and how many other fruits and vegetables do you think you have in this yard?
0:33:22 – 2035
BR: I don’t really know. There are—last time about five years ago my son challenged me and we counted up the fruit varieties and there were in excess of 200 and this is in our lot that’s about 105 x 105 and, at that time, had a basketball court.
DT: What percentage of the amount of food that you eat here comes out of your garden?
0:33:50 – 2035
BR: We, virtually all the produce we eat comes out of this garden. We occasionally buy onions. We occasionally buy carrots. We don’t grow any of the grains we eat except for corn. And but we eat virtually no meat or sea food. In fact, we don’t eat meat at all so we buy oil. We buy flour.
DT: What has gardening and your other education taught you about diet and nutrition?
0:34:26 – 2035
BR: I guess the first thing I learned about diet was my dad died of a sudden heart attack at 55 which was a real major way to learn quickly about diet. And the combination of that, my wife is a nutritional anthropologist. She did doctoral work at Berkeley in nutritional anthropology. We pay a lot of attention to diet and we think it’s a really important thing to pay attention to. The heart, cancer, diabetes authorities all tell you that you should consume five to nine helpings per day of fruits and vegetables. That is hard to do unless they’re tasty and abundant, very hard to do. You also need exercise and gardening is probably the single best functional exercise you can do. It combines weights and aerobics and the only thing known to be a better combination than that is vigorous rowing.
DT: I’ve heard people say also that a meat diet is pretty hard on the environment. How is that?
0:35:42 – 2035
BR: Well, I mean, if we were trying—we could possibly raise quail or rabbits, some—on this site. I’ve seen it done in similar settings, smaller yards than this. And it might be—I think it could be doable without necessarily destroying the environment but—but cattle certainly is—as far as I understand it, cattle takes something like—a pound of beef takes something like 15 million calories of energy to produce and deliver. And poultry is around 13 million and most store bought produce is around one million. Probably what we do here is who knows what it is but it—it can’t be more than a few hundred calories per pound, if that.
DT: And the number of calories in a pound of beef for a person to eat, is it much less than what goes into it?
0:36:42 – 2035
BR: Oh much, much less but still way too much for most people to—to deal with in terms of their weight and their—their cardiovascular system. So it’s a bad—it’s a bad system. The—the—if we got into the question of long distance food supply, the—the main reason that fruits and vegetables—well fruits and vegetables are hard to consume fresh because they’re expensive and the varieties that are shipped across country and trans-nationally are all varieties that ship well and keep a long time rather than taste good or are nutritious. Farmer can’t really go for flavor and nutri—nutrition because they really need it to—to ship and pack well, harvest well and not—and not spoil. So the result is that most of the produce people eat are in—are heavily flavored with salts, sugars and fats to hide their terrible flavor. And so people eat pizza and jelly donuts and all this other stuff rather than say fresh tomatoes and fresh blackberries. So the result is a lot of diseases that people probably shouldn’t be getting. And we also, of course, in this area, are shipping a huge percentage of our income out of the area to buy all this food that we could be spending on people in the area growing the food and recycling the dollars around town. So everybody’s losing quite a bit by this system. Every single person in the metro areas is losing, even the supermarkets are losing money this way.
(cuts to new shot)
0:38:38 – 2035
BR: …beneficial attracter…this is button bush. This—I mean, the—I don’t know—it’s—it’s—virtually everything here has got a purpose of some sort. So…whatever you want to do…
DT: Well let’s go talk about some of your wildscape and your plans for the future…
0:39:03 – 2035
BR: The one—the one out the back window has got a lot of plants there that are aimed at butterflies and hummingbirds. They’re—that’s a—that’s fairly mature. One of the things that’s here that we didn’t talk about is that we’re—I’m growing quite a lot of relatively unknown food plants that most people never heard of in—in the Houston area unless they’re from some unusual country. I’ve got sorrel homeca(?) there and—which is Florida cranberry and tapioca root and stuff like that.
DT: Do you experiment here?
0:39:55 – 2035
BR: Experiment here and also just grow a lot of things that are adapted to the tropical summer.
DT: Why don’t you tell us about your experiments that you’re carrying on here before you introduce them to the community gardens.
0:40:10 – 2035
BR: Well I certainly try all sorts of things that both for my own curiosity and particularly to develop information about things that nobody seems to know too much about like, I mean, just this example, my growing goldenrod here. It was reported in—first of all it’s—it’s not allergenic but second of all, it was reported in several books that this is one of the best single attracters of beneficial insects around, attracting something like seventy-five different beneficial insects. Also very attractive to bumble bees as well. And so what we do is we grow this thing and see what happens. Now it hasn’t come out yet so you’re not going to see any of this. Texas wild tomato, I started growing here years ago to find out if it would keep birds off of my regular tomatoes which it does. And basically was involved along with a place called Peaceable Kingdom in popularizing this in this area. This is another interesting little experiment. Growing cattails and other things in a bird bath so that the red wasps and others can—can find the wet mud that they want here. This hamelia here is—is—is from Mexico and it’s—in the fall it’s the single best hummingbird plant we have although these coral salvia, scarlet salvia are also very effective. You won’t see any hummingbirds now because this late in the day these flowers are not open and they can’t get anything but earlier in the day that works. The turk’s cap here is another plant that does the same thing for hummingbirds. And there are basically all sorts of different plants here that—whose main purpose is to attract butterflies and hummingbirds that we can see right outside our—our back window. But there’s another purpose of this too and this is a year round cover for all sorts of creeping animals to hide out in. Creeping insects, creeping toads, creeping lizards where it doesn’t get cleared out so they have a reliable refuge.
DT: I see above you’ve got a birdhouse of some kind. Can you tell about that?
0:43:07 – 2035
BR: That’s a purple martin house. They are here from roughly the first of March to the end of July. They—they water here. They not only eat a lot of flying insects but they cover the area with song and you—you cannot fail to enjoy your summer here if you’ve got the song of the purple martins singing all the time. It makes a gigantic bit of difference here. We have water in many places around the yard. Bill Mollison says to put 15% of the landscape in water. We haven’t done that but we have enough water here so that the birds have plenty to drink.
DT: Can you show us one of your aquatic gardens?
0:43:53 – 2035
BR: There’s a variety of different ones out here. These two bird baths here are—go through water about once a day. I’ll fill this thing up every day in the summer almost no water anywhere to drink in the Houston area if you’re a bird. We have tremendous amounts of rainfall come off the roof. We average 46 inches a year and some years we get as much as 70 here. A roof will put out 55 gallons of water with one inch of rain in a ten square foot area. We have a much bigger than 7 square foot roof so you can easily see that a seven inch rainfall could put a lot of water here. At the same time, we lose an inch and a half a week in the summer so that in a typical summer, we’re short about a foot and a half of water by the end of the summer. And so you don’t want to let any water get in the streets. It has other bad results once it does but you want to do everything you can to keep it here yet you don’t want a bog out here everywhere where you can’t walk for—for months. And since mosquitoes breed in damp soil, if you have really damp soil for a long time it generally makes a lot of nuisance mosquitoes. So one of the things you do is you take that nice, flat area that the landscapers created and you turn it back into raised areas up and deeper areas down so you have ponds and bogs and what are called vernals and other things where plants that like more water will grow. And there are simply all sorts of plants in here that bloom really from generally early April till really right around now, different types of bog hibiscus. You can see there’s a bud about to open there. Different types of native amacrinums, rain lilies of different sorts, Louisiana Iris. There’s some lifrum over here that’s I guess has stopped blooming. Swamp rose and many other plants.
DT: Explain what a vernal is.
0:46:34 – 2035
BR: A vernal, as I understand it, is simply an area that gets full of water generally in the spring or whenever it gets heavy rains and then dries up in the summer. And there are a lot of plants that are native to the Gulf Coast that are used to that kind of climate. They don’t die because it doesn’t have water the way a—if you try to put a cattail in here or a pond—a lily pond, it would die if it didn’t have water over it. But these sort of plants absolutely do fine with this kind of situation.
(misc.)
End of interview with Bob Randall, afterward continuing with J.D. Green interview