The succulent Dudleya pachyphytum is known as the Cedros Island live-forever. It has also been called the panda bear of plants, on account of being so cute. It has sweet, chubby leaves, is pale, and is powdered as if with confectioner’s sugar, and its shape is most often that of a rose. D. pachyphytum grows slowly, as succulents generally do, and many specimens would fit in your coat pocket. They look like they belong in a Miyazaki film, or, potted, in the window of a cool doughnut shop in Brooklyn. In the wild, D. pachyphytum grows in only one place: the Isla de Cedros, in the Pacific Ocean off Mexico, preferring the steep, foggy cliffs in the north. To see a D. pachyphytum in nature, you have to hike twelve miles through mountainous terrain, or you could arrive by boat or helicopter.
In May, 2017, at a military checkpoint in northern Baja, a van with a few men in it was inspected and some D. pachyphytum were found. Although it is illegal to take the island’s D. pachyphytum, it was a small amount. Not long afterward, a fifty-five-foot tractor-trailer arrived at the same checkpoint. In it were some five thousand D. pachyphytum. Four men were arrested. It was not an anomalous incident. Another Cedros Island cactus-theft attempt had happened not long before. A year later, thirty plastic containers that arrived by FedEx at the La Paz airport were found to contain multitudes of the cute and rare plants.
Cactus heists have become common. Consider the saguaro, that most classic of cacti, the one that looks like it has its hands up at gunpoint, near a fantasy version of Wild Bill Hickok or Jesse James. One night in 2007, two men went into Saguaro National Park, outside Tucson, and made off with seventeen of the cacti, which can grow to more than forty feet high, and weigh a few tons, though they can take years simply to grow an inch tall. The park has now microchipped about a thousand of its most accessible saguaros, to discourage theft. In another incident, an impatient customer in line at the post office in Mendocino noticed dirt coming from a batch of sixty boxes that a man in front of her had brought in to mail. When the woman asked him what he was shipping, he told her that it was very valuable. Worried that he was doing something illegal, she tipped off the authorities; customs officials discovered within many of them Dudleya farinosa, a relative of the D. pachyphytum which grows on California’s coastline. Thieves are known to rappel down cliffs to harvest them. In Big Bend National Park, in Texas, six people have been charged for their roles in trafficking between ten thousand and fifteen thousand specimens of rock cacti. In Italy, a police investigation named Operation Atacama led to the seizure of more than a thousand cacti so rare that it is estimated they could have sold for some fifteen hundred dollars each.
Jared Margulies, a professor of geography at the University of Alabama, writes about an international cast of cactus hunters and lovers in “The Cactus Hunters: Desire and Extinction in the Illicit Succulent Trade,” which was recently published. (There are differing ideas about how to define succulents. Margulies defines succulents as plants with a special method of retaining water; for the purposes of his book, he writes, all cacti are succulents, but “not all succulents are cacti.”) Margulies explains that, after writing his dissertation on wildlife-conservation politics, he had intended to study the illegal trade in tiger bones. He read about those stolen saguaros. He was seduced.
Not all cacti are cute or iconic. Some are shaped like sea anemones, some like giant phalluses; many are poky, and some are furry, and some bloom blue and some bloom white and some live most of their lives underground and some are as slight as coins and some weigh more than a ton. Their common names include Teddy bear, velvet, hedgehog, and buckhorn. For many people, they are enchanting. “I have seen the creeping devil cactus creep. . . . rode by towering cardons until I see spines in my sleep,” a cactus lover wrote in a letter in 1930. The three hundred or so pages of “Xerophile: Cactus Photographs from Expeditions of the Obsessed” (a revised edition was published in 2021) will remind you of how meagre even the wildest human imagination is in comparison with that of nature. We think of cacti as hardy, because they can survive and even flourish with very little water. But many kinds of cacti are in considerable peril: nearly a third of known species are in danger of extinction. As Margulies shows, these plants’ rarity often serves to increase their appeal among collectors—and that in turn hastens their extinction.
Yet many collectors see themselves as conservationists. “Because of my interest in conservation, I’ve had to break the law,” one collector (who refers to himself as the Indiana Jones of plants) tells Margulies, who is open to the charms of those who steal seeds and plants; like hunters, they are not infrequently experts on what they pursue. In one of the more illuminating sections of the book, Margulies travels to the Czech Republic. “Czech collectors have achieved a notorious status among North and South American conservation agencies,” he writes. One expert tells him that a scientist once estimated that “for every Mexican researcher that is in the field, there are twenty Czechs!” and complains that, often, as soon as a new species is described in the literature, it is being traded by Czechs and Germans.
The Czech collector A. V. Frič, who lived from 1882 to 1944, is considered the originator of the country’s enthusiasm for cacti, having brought over species from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Mexico. His fate and that of his plants were closely bound. At the start of the Second World War, when Frič could not obtain enough fuel to keep his greenhouses warm, some forty thousand cacti died from the cold. Near the end of the war, Frič was scratched by a rusty nail while tending to his rabbits, and he contracted tetanus and died the next month. Today, his image hangs in many Czech greenhouses.
Švejk, the protagonist of Jaroslav Hasek’s novel “The Good Soldier Svejk,” is Margulies’s pseudonym for a major Czech smuggler of cactus plants and seeds whom he describes as “one of the most knowledgeable people with whom I have ever spoken about cacti.” Švejk’s story is compelling: by the age of ten or eleven, he had assembled a greenhouse on his balcony, and by thirteen he and his father had begun building a larger one. Švejk tells Margulies that he connects his cactophilia in part to his youthful love of books by Karl May, the late-nineteenth-century German writer, whose characters Winnetou and Old Shatterhand made up the imagined American West for many German and Eastern European readers. Indeed, the cacti that most of us meet in our lives will be far from home, which is not irrelevant to their appeal. (I remember first becoming aware that cacti had become “cool” when a friend showed me a photograph of the cacti-covered wall of shelves of her taco restaurant in Moscow.) Švejk dreamed of travelling to Mexico but was prevented, first by army service and then by the Prague Spring, in 1968, and the subsequent Soviet occupation. He first visited Mexico only after 1989’s Velvet Revolution. He quickly became a smuggler, but he also described several new species of cacti.
Through conversations with Švejk and with other smugglers, conservationists, researchers, and collectors, Margulies discovers the prickly and complicated contours of how to preserve and protect a vulnerable cactus. Most people he speaks with see themselves as doing what is best for the species. During a trip that Margulies makes to Brazil, his group of a local guide and touring cactus lovers come upon a previously unknown locality where Uebelmannia buiningii was growing, often embedded in the quartz sand. U. buiningii, a small, spiny, maroon cactus that is found only in the Cerrado savanna, is critically endangered. When the guide is asked if he will bring one of the U. buiningii to an herbarium, to record the presence of the species in a new locality, he replies that, for its conservation, it will be better off unknown.
Some cactus smugglers steal seeds from the wild but leave the plant in place. This is illegal, but the logic is that taking seeds in order to sell them or nourish them in a nursery is the only way to keep enthusiasts from poaching the species. Even some conservationists and scientists think that legalizing the harvesting of seeds could be beneficial. A Czech collector tells Margulies that he and Švejk had stolen “just five seeds” of the Mexican cactus Turbinocarpus alonsoi, and then grafted them to other species at home, thereby generating more seeds quickly. Later, a professional horticulturist suggests that Švejk had, in fact, stolen hundreds or thousands of the same plants, which he says he saw stored in Švejk’s bathroom. And, naturally, some smugglers are motivated mostly by money.
A cactus grown from a seed in a greenhouse also looks different from one in the wild, which will be more irregular, a look that some connoisseurs consider superior. This is one of several unexpected tangles that Margulies finds, in which the goal of breeding more cacti fails to dull a cactus lover’s drive to take plants from their natural habitats. (Growing cacti is also slow, and that makes greenhouse growing a less-than-straightforward economic choice.) Margulies devotes many pages to analyses of desire, most of which do not seem specific to cacti or even to plants more broadly. Even a lover of magpie miscellany may find these descriptions tiring. But here and there he brings in the thinking of theorists in a way that gives the pleasures of poetic (or melodramatic?) precision, such as when he quotes the academics Simon Mackenzie and Donna Yates on the attitudes of collectors of rarities toward their targets: “Yet even if they did not need the collector to save them from potential destruction, there is a strong sense in the collecting narrative that they deserve to be appreciated—they deserve to be loved—and in this sense the collector offers salvation.”
The Mexican botanist Helia Bravo Hollis is considered the godmother of modern cactus research. Her father was killed during the Mexican Revolution, when Bravo Hollis was a schoolgirl. She was pressed to study medicine, but instead became a biologist, the first officially certified one in Mexico. Soon she was studying the country’s cacti, of which there are more than seven hundred species, many of which grow naturally nowhere else. She became a walker, photographing and studying and teaching until age ninety, when painful arthritis kept her from the trails. Photographs show a youthful Bravo Hollis standing next to fantastically plump and large cacti. (The curiosity of the scientist, amateur or otherwise, may hold more appeal than that of the curio-collector.) Not long before she died, at the age of ninety-nine, Bravo Hollis wrote, “When it touches me, death will be well-received. For me, it is purely a biological question.” ♦
