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Cactuses are spiky and rough; foreboding and strange; gnarled, Seussian, and sometimes toxic. They remind us of nature’s irreverent brutality, and of its occasional inexplicability. They evoke places where people can’t survive. But when removed from those places—their native habitats—individually potted, and sold as decoration for a house, a garden, or an office, they are among the easiest plants a person can have, requiring little or no care and still looking good. More unusual species can be novelties, or prizes for collectors, or even significant investments. But many people never consider where their potted cactus or succulent originated, and what purpose its bizarre characteristics served. The magnificent landscapes and ecosystems in which the plant evolved are forgotten.

This bothered three cactus-crazed young men in Los Angeles—Jeff Kaplon, Max Martin, and Carlos Morera—who in 2014 opened the Cactus Store, a boutique featuring a large collection of unusual, interesting, and, in some cases, rare species of cactuses and succulents. (Cactuses are a family within the taxonomy of succulents.) Since California was well into a severe drought, many residents were switching to drought-resilient landscapes, and the timing of the opening, although coincidental, was fortunate. The store was a hit. Selling plants was not, however, its only goal. Kaplon, Martin, and Morera wanted to guide cactus and succulent neophytes beyond a simple aesthetic appreciation of each cactus in its pot. If a customer was admiring an Oreocereus celsianus (commonly known as the old man of the mountain), she would learn before leaving the store that it comes from the high Andes, and that its fluffy mop of white hair evolved to defend it from the sun and the snow.

As the three men expanded their cactus collection and their depth of knowledge, they became increasingly captivated by historic, documentary-style photographs of cactuses and succulents in the wild, most of which were the output of previous generations of devoted cactus hunters. These older obsessives had travelled the world, sometimes taking considerable physical risks, just to see certain species in their native habitats, or to see them in bloom, or to search for others more rare. Over decades, evidence of what these explorers discovered, and of the extreme journeys they took, has been stashed away in bargain bins at cactus shows, in shoe boxes in collectors’ garages, and in dusty old slide carousels that reside with the region’s many cactus-and-succulent clubs. Kaplon, Martin, and Morera gathered as much of this archival material as they could, and eventually decided to put several hundred pictures, drawn from twenty-two explorers’ archives and spanning eighty years, into a new book. They researched and edited the images, conducted interviews with some of the photographer-explorers, and now are preparing to publish the result, titled “Xerophile: Cactus Photographs from Expeditions of the Obsessed.”

In the same way that a bouquet of wildflowers is lovely but banal while an alpine meadow of blooming wildflowers is astonishing and sublime, these pictures demonstrate how arresting the sight of ancient, alien cactuses in the places they grow wild can be. What is immediately striking in the photos is the unimaginable sizes and shapes of various species, whether gigantic or minuscule, phallic or globose. In one image, several Ferocactus diguetii (giant barrel cactus), photographed in Baja California, Mexico, rise from a clearing, resembling the Jolly Green Giant’s extremities if he were standing underground and all you could see above ground were his fat fingertips (or perhaps another appendage) sticking up from the dry, rocky soil. Another shot of the same species shows a woman with a backpack staring up at a Ferocactus diguetii in disbelief. She is less than half its height and a fraction of its girth. In Chile, a species known as Copiapoa columna-alba is similarly huge, erect, and barrelled—if much harder and denser than Ferocactus. One plant in the book is estimated to be at least five hundred years old, “making it a juvenile at the time of Columbus,” the caption reads. Other clumps of Copiapoa depicted could be more than a thousand years old. One of my favorite photos, shot in Quebrada del Toro, in Argentina, shows many tall Trichocereus (sometimes called torch cactus) growing like menhirs among old gravestones in an abandoned cemetery.

While all of those large cactuses are most commonly seen in nurseries and plant shops as tiny nubs in petite terra-cotta pots, there are many rare, sought-after, mostly unknown species that never grow bigger than a nickel. The so-called belly plant, which lives on mudflats in Mexico, requires a searcher to be on her belly to find it. Rebutia schatzliana, in Bolivia, is smaller than a fingernail (as seen in a picture comparing the two) and grows a glorious miniature red flower. Then, there is the most lovable (and possibly the tiniest) tiny cactus in the world: Blossfeldia liliputana. Its mature size is ten millimetres, and its species name derives from the fictional country of Lilliput, created by Jonathan Swift, in “Gulliver’s Travels.” Native to northern Argentina and southern Bolivia, it often grows on sheer mudstone cliffs or tree bark, usually close to a waterfall. When it blooms, its nearly microscopic white-and-pink flowers are best seen with a magnifying glass.

Source: The New Yorker