Oh,

wow.

So I grew up being really into the outdoors and nature, but mostly fishing and birdwatching.

Those were kind of my ways, my natural history hobbies.

I grew up in the Northeast as well.

And then I went off to undergrad and I studied evolutionary biology, but really a pretty heavy focus on genetics.

And I was working on fruit flies, lab sort of model organism stuff.

But Ben, do you want to pick it up at that?

But first, I'd love to hear from you guys, like, what drew you into the world of botany and plants and kind of got you started in this whole adventure?

Yeah, great.

Maybe I'll go first.

I'm more circuitous.

Jacob's story makes more sense.

I didn't really become interested in plants until I got to grad school.

So I was 21 or 22 years old at that point.

you know,

animals.

But as I started getting into school and thinking about studying, I absolutely wanted to do biology.

That nature kid interest never left me.

And I became really interested in evolution.

I followed that interest.

I did not really start in plants at all.

And in undergrad and right after undergrad, I worked on fruit flies.

There's just not that many books i think kind of like the ones that you wrote or the ones like this one right i think we need more things like this out in the world so that some young person who doesn't know much about um botany right or or plants in general can pick something like this up and um and be like oh this is a thing i can go do this right i can sort of a spark a spark book you know

Okay.

Yeah, that's exactly the goal.

Sometimes we joke that what Let's Botanize is trying to do is be the unofficial PR department for this hobby of botanizing, which was really popular in the 19th century in England, especially.

But if you look at the Google word graph, the word botanize, we didn't make it up.

It was peaked in popularity in 1830 or something like that.

And it's been we're trying to we're trying to bring it back you know it's just uh the natural history hobby i think it you know we saw like bird watching have this huge boom in popularity during the pandemic especially and and a lot of plant hobbies uh had a boom at that time too gardening house plants foraging wild foods and botanizing we think is just this layer of of another hobby that can add it be added on top of of any of those

But do you have sort of a target demographic or age range?

It's a great question.