CACTI IN CAPTIVITY

One of the best things that happened to me while I was living in Los Angeles was that I became a lover of xerophiles – a xerophile-phile , if you like.  A xerophile is an organism that thrives in very dry environments.  This includes (though is by no means limited to) cacti, succulents and my particular favorite - euphorbia.

You see them everywhere as you walk around in Los Angeles.  LA is not by any standard a desert, but xerophiles like the climate there and grow very well indeed.  You see them in a great many gardens, and I got to the stage where I could hardly walk down the street, any street, without stopping staring, sometimes taking photographs, very occasionally making field notes.

Here in London it’s not hard to fine xerophile lovers, but they don’t grow their xerophiles outdoors in the earth.  They grow them in pots that they bring inside for the winter.  

So as I walk around London I don’t see any xerophiles growing in gardens but I see plenty in pots, especially in shop windows.

I’m told that this London cactus thing is a bit of a fad and may soon wear off, so I’ll enjoy it while I can.

But if you really want to walk among xerophiles in London you need to go down to Kew Gardens, to the Princess of Wales Conservatory.

Official Kew photograph.

It actually has ten climate zones, has two areas devoted to carnivorous plants, and contains a Titan Aurum which produces the stench of rotten flesh to attract insects. Hey, you won’t find me making distasteful jokes about England’s Rose. 

Also, as I walk around London I keep seeing signs for Cactus Security (above) who offer "end-to-end security project management."  I'm not sure that cacti make me feel secure, but I suppose the idea is that you wouldn't want to tangle with one:

WALKING WITH CACTI

As many readers will know by now, I really do like walking in the desert, for all kinds of reasons.  I’m not the world’s greatest animal lover and I certainly don’t go to the desert specifically to look at the wildlife, but even so, if you tread carefully and quietly it’s amazing what you can see. 

Still, it seems you rarely get close enough to take a really nice picture, unless as in the case below your faithful companion actually manages to (very, very gently) pick up the thing. 

That’s a horned toad, and certain species defend themselves by shooting blood from their eyes, but I guess this one was from another species, for which I was essentially grateful, though it must be quite a thing to see.

And recently I came across this from Popular Science, March 1931:

Arthur N. Pack, I discover, was a very serious and highly respected naturalist, but even so, I couldn't, still can't, believe that anybody could see him in this cactus costume without falling about laughing.  And in any case I wasn’t sure how it actually worked.  It struck me that both walking and seeing would be fairly difficult inside of that thing.  I assumed there had to be eyeholes but they’d surely give you a very limited view of the world.  And I had even less idea how you’d wield a camera.

Anyway, the Internet being what it is, I found this article (above and below) about Mr. Peck’s desert walking and photography, in an issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions, As with Popular Science, the magazine seems more interested in the apparatus than the end result: the cutaway image shows you more detail of how it supposedly worked. 

I still think it’d be pretty hard to take pictures from inside a fake cactus, especially since the camera looks to be fixed and immovable, though it does seem that Mr. Pack managed to take some pretty good, intimate photographs of desert critters.  But I absolutely don’t see how he could have taken those photographs at ground level.  Maybe he had a faithful companion, who perhaps dressed as a rock.