Welcome to the Hot Cactus Sanctuary

MM: There’s a rich history and community of people who collect and trade, eat franks and beans and talk about the plants. There are weekly cactus and succulent meetings, generally in the Valley in the auditorium of a retirement home or something. Nobody was really selling these plants in a way that was accessible.

CC: At our store in New York we have all kinds of programming, from lectures to film screenings, events that all have to do with brokering a relationship between people and the natural world, which is something that we’ve always been passionate about. People come into our store wide-eyed, they’re seeing things that haven’t been in New York before. Jonas Mekas used to come in on Sundays just to see what was flowering. We had one woman bring in John Cage’s old cactus that he would hook up to contact mics and pluck like a musical instrument. It’s a different kind of a community, they have an appreciation, sometimes people [in L.A.] take for granted that these plants grow wild here.

MM: It’s become this clubhouse for people who are obsessed with plants to congregate around. This kid Marco, who ended up being an intern, would come from high school in Westchester every weekend to hang out at the store, and then go back to do his homework. It became this bizarre version of a skate shop or something, you know?

MM: Once you understand what makes the story behind it, it can change the way you see the plant. If you know it grows 2000 feet up in the Andes, where nothing else can grow, and it’s covered in fur because it protects it from snow...those learnings completely change the way you value it.

CC: We go out of our way to not treat plants like sculptural objects.

CC: I think it comes with connoisseurship, like the longer you appreciate something, you develop a taste for the ugly ones [Laughs].

MM: But also, most plant nurseries, the plants they have are all perfect little babies.

CC: Fat, rosy, flawless.

MM: Generally the plants we have have been through some things.

CC: We started treating it like an adoption agency, or a no kill shelter. We sometimes won’t sell a plant to someone if they don’t have a place for it to thrive.

CC: Max mentioned that most of what we sell comes from private collections, but even when we go to a commercial grower where all the other nurseries are buying stuff, we’ll go into the back dilapidated greenhouse and buy that one cactus that was kicked off the table 5 years ago, rerooted itself, and snaked around the table leg. They think we’re nuts. They’re not wrong, necessarily.

MM: If someone at a cactus club meeting mentions that this guy in Corona has been growing amazing Dioscorea, or is getting too old and is going to be selling off his collection, we’ll get in the truck the next day and head out and bring the guy coffee and donuts. There’s a whole social dance of trying to get access and meet these old time growers. Generally, they’re a little cagey at first, naturally, because they have plants that they’ve been growing since they were 25 years old, and they’re like 75! That’s one of the most amazing parts of this, to get intimate access to people’s lifelong passions and projects in their homes.

CC: Those relationships have bled into all kinds of other projects—like the shirt that Max is wearing. It’s designed by an old timer who’s been doing this for 40+ years. Last year he took us into the Atacama Desert in Chile and showed us some pretty secretive habitats of a very special genus of cactus that grows in the driest desert on earth. And he made us sandwiches and let us hold his pet lizards [Laughs].

CC: We don’t. We’re very strict about not disturbing the root of something in its habitat.

MM: Luckily now a lot of the habitats are protected. There’s been a pretty exponential rise in the global cactus and succulent trade and people really want habitat plants. A lot of plants, you grow them in a greenhouse and they end up looking really different than they do in habitat, and also it takes a really long time. People don’t want to wait 50 years for an Aztekium to be the size of a quarter, so they’ll pay some locals to poach it from its habitat.

MM: There’s a black market for it all over the world, huge in Asia and eastern Europe. It’s become a big issue. We strictly go to see and photograph.

CC: We acquired a collection from a fellow who spent his life studying rare Opuntias in Argentina. In the 70s, he field-collected, from nature, a plant from North of Lima called Haageocereus tenuis. There’s less than 130 left in habitat. It’s a really difficult thing to own a plant like that. We’re working with a friend of ours who has done a lot of work growing plants from stem cell tissue cultures in a lab, where you can boost up the population very quickly as opposed to growing them from seed. We’re hoping to be able to get a good culture. If we can, in a decade we can start to reverse the extinction of this plant.

MM: Kids will come in who have been really obviously into some Japanese guy’s Instagram, and be like, “Do you have Astrophytum?” They’ve seen the guy from Neighborhood really likes Astrophytum, so they want it. Plants are much more interesting than sneakers, so it’s understandable that people might get bored of collecting Nikes.

CC: We actually had an idea I’d like to do soon which is a bootleg bookstore where we print Xerox PDFs of out-of-print botanical books and people can buy just like stapled-together botanical books, or thumb drives with a bunch of them, a sort of anarchist-style plant bookstore.

CC: Today when people use the word environment, it doesn’t mean a local thing, it means the global weather, or the mass extinction of animals, or the expiration date for our oceans. Things that are absolutely impossible for a human mind to wrap around and comprehend, yet, we’re also conscious of the fact that much of what has happened in the natural world when it comes to climate change is our fault, and that’s really scary and sad. Having a relationship with a plant is a way for people to reconnect. We’ve had so many people ask us about the plant fad, and we always say the same thing: calling a plant a fad is like calling oxygen a trend. Without plants, there is no human life.