“Plants tell the story of a place,” says field botanist and native plant nursery owner Jared Rosenbaum. “If you want to be rooted on the earth you live on, you can look to plants to interpret that story.” 

With his friend, a filmmaker named Jared Flesher a.k.a. “the other Jared,” Jared Rosenbaum creates what they call “funky but highly cinematic 5-minute videos about the ecology of wild plants.” The second season of their series titled “Rooted” is debuting on YouTube Sept. 15 with a video on none other than the Eastern prickly pear cactus, the only hardy cactus of the region. Jared the botanist is here today to tell us about it and some other native plant stories. 

Jared Rosenbaum and his wife, Rachel Mackow, provide design inspiration and plants to clients to make their landscape ideas come true at Wild Ridge Plants, their nursery in rural New Jersey, which is also a mail-order source of distinctive native species. Jared is author the book “Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities.” 

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