Man, the spines are as big as the pads.

You can't call them cuddly.

but they are collectable.

Right here, this is a golden barrel that I just put in.

Fierce-looking, spiny plants have a surprisingly large fan club and some of the most outrageous, the ugliest.

Medea Bronze Bust award and that's for the most.

and even the most feminine can earn bragging rights.

There's quite a few of them in here.

.or something that has characteristics we might think of as male.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.

When Europeans first arrived in the New World, they were struck by an odd plant that came to be called the cactus.

Even today cacti have an aura of other-worldliness.

It's a trait that many people find worthy of collecting and nurturing.

To see the best collection of collectors and nurturers, we travel to Pasadena, California, where each August a group of strange plants and not run-of-the-mill people come for a multi-day show.

I feel right at home.

Okay, so we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight plants involved, nine plants involved in this category.

I think that's gorgeous and that one's gorgeous.

You get what you deserve if you argue with Joyce.

This kind of plant is known as what we call a starfish flower but they're also known for their extremely bad odor.

Ooh.

What's that smell?

Is that you?

What kind of people?

Wackos.

Wackos.

You know, it takes somebody with dedication, somebody that's willing to spend hours picking the little tiny dead leaves off of these plants, picking off the wrong rocks in the soil.

I want this one to have a first.

Another first.

Why not?

Okay, how about this?

Yeah, I'm gonna go with that one.

Yep, me.

That one.

That's it?

Me too.

Yeah.

These collectors come from all walks of life.

Anything you can imagine we have here both showing and also buying plants.

I like to put them all in little bonsai pots and it has a little character, you know, like in a two-inch pot.

There are big collectors in Europe, particularly England and Germany and Czechoslovakia.

South Africa itself has many collectors, both of their own native succulents and cactus and even Russia and Japan and places you wouldn't expect, India and Pakistan and other places as well.

.then if you stretch it just right the plant gets bigger.

All cacti are succulents but not all succulents are cacti.

Succulent just means that the plant has a lot of tissue that holds big amounts of water.

What cacti have are these tiny little felty raised knobs called areole and from the areole come all of the spines.

Only cacti have that feature.

How many like this one for the best?

I do.

I do.

I do.

I do.

How many is that, four?

We give awards for best in show or best in different categories.

One is called the Medea Bronze Bust award and that's for the most feminine plant in the show that has some characteristic that exhibits femininity.

And Jason's Golden Fleece award, that's for the most masculine.

Obviously they're a tough looking plant or something that has characteristics we might think of as male.

It's really a pride and a bragging right that you're getting.

There is no monetary value attached.

It's just really the fun of it.

Hercules Hernia award and this is for usually the plant that's the biggest and heaviest and the hardest to lift up.

Hardest to move.

And there's a wonderful golden barrel over here that must weigh 150 pounds.

What do you want to do for second now?

I'd go for second over there.

Second over there?

Okay.

These plants take years to grow.

It takes years to learn how to grow them.

This is a big show and you're playing with the big boys in this show.

And so if you have a trophy, it's, you can go, "Oh, look.

I got this trophy for my plant."

This one right here was voted the best collection in show.

Right here.

There are no wild collected plants for sale and we discourage people from showing wild collected plants.

Protecting wild populations by using only plants grown from seed is good conservation.

But it takes a long time.

Fortunately there are specialists who know the technique and will sell us any sort of cactus we want, grown right here in the desert outside of Tucson.

We'll head back to Pasadena when the votes are tallied.

In the warmer southwest we can have a yard more or less like this.

That's true.

These plants, we don't take much care out here from the frost so we have 'em out here and we kind of throw 'em.

And we grow most of the plants we sell here from seed.

We produce our own seed where possible.

We buy in seed or trade for seed and we grow probably as many seeds as any cactus nursery in the country.

That's how we get most of our plants.

And then we do propagate some from cuttings and we do buy in some plants.

And the critical thing about our soil mix is if you try to squeeze this into a ball, you can't make it stick together and that's very critical.

Because for good cactus growing media, this has to be very loose and very pliable so the roots can get through it.

It has to drain well.

It smells like dirt, doesn't it?

You know what it smells like is desert dirt.

Desert dirt.

Well, there is no dirt in here.

I'm reminded of what my professor said in college was, "Dirt is something you track into your house, soil is what plant's grow in."

So, about 60 percent of our mix is pumice.

And this is of course of volcanic origin.

20 percent of our mix is this forest mulch.

You've got to be sure it's high quality mulch and even some of the most expensive bag mulches smell like a pine tree.

Nah, no pine smell there.

No pine smell there.

And then the third ingredient, about 20 percent of our mix, is peat moss.

Now to this we add Osmocote, which is a slow-release fertilizer.

Another nutrient that's very much underestimated for plant growth is potassium.

And then we stabilize all this with ground up limestone rock to a pH of about 7.0.

All the plants that we sell here are rooted in the container.

We sell nothing that's bare rooted.

And in that container is a soil that's as close to being perfect as we can make it in 35 years of experience.

The success of growing cacti from seed of course is having good quality seeds that we collect ourselves.

In this case, this is saguaro seeds.

They're that tiny?

You can see how tiny they are.

As a matter of fact they're so small it takes 400,000 of them to make a pound.

Our process begins with the soil that we talked about earlier and these flats have been filled and the next process is just to level it.

The texture of the soil here kind of looks like a sandy wash. Yeah, it looks just like you might find where saguaros like to grow.

Well, we're going to try and mimic the conditions that these plants would go through if it was in the summer after a summer rain.

And so we got the seeds and we use this little cheese shaker.

It makes it really handy.

You can do it with your hand or, there's no secret here, but this makes it a lot easier just to spread the seeds out uniformly on this tray.

We try to get them pretty uniform here and we're looking for 4,000 to 5,000 seeds on the surface here.

Once they're distributed uniformly, we'll go back to the pumice that we saw earlier.

We just put a light coating of pumice on top of the seeds.

Now of those 400 or 500 that you planted, how many of those do you think will germinate?

Well, we collected the seed ourselves and the seed is very good; we're gonna get 100 percent germination here?

You're gonna get 100 percent?

Absolutely.

Well, you're way ahead of nature on that one cause I suspect a very small percentage in nature.

Well, I think in nature very, very few of them make it.

But germination is the easy part of this process.

From there on it gets more difficult.

The biggest threat to the really endangered plants is illegal collecting.

Collectors need to know that the nursery grown plants are higher quality and will start to grow in their nurseries and in their home gardens much easier than the collected plants which are normally very difficult to re-establish.

By grafting we can put in some brightly colored plants in there to attract attention to the dish gardens.

So we graft for that reason.

The second reason, it's a very, very valuable tool for propagation.

It allows us to grow plants that we couldn't grow on their own roots or couldn't grow them quickly enough.

Every once in awhile a monstrosity will occur and when you see it, you grab it.

So it's a freak and you've propagated all these red caps.

Right.

This wouldn't be able to live on its own.

Okay.

It doesn't have enough chlorophyll.

All you do with this, you just cut the top off, you want to try to line up the vascular system right there, usually just a ring.

I have a feeling you've done this before.

Ah, a couple times.

Strap a rubber band on there, get it nice and centered, that's what you end up with.

That's it.

This is a golden barrel that I just put in.

This is a red grafted red cap and this is a, what we call 'da bird's nest and this is.

In the dish gardens we use a variety of plants.

We grow many plants that do well, that'll hold up well in lower light because most of these plants in the dish gardens are going to end up inside somebody's home on a well-lighted window sill for example.

They like to be in those shallow low bowls and they like to be crowded in there.

That's kind of the way they grow in the desert environment, between rocks and that sort of thing with limited soil.

And I like feeling them.

They're not hard to work with so I really like 'em.

You've got a, certainly a part of this that has to be your own garden in addition to the commercial operation.

You're growing plants here you would never dream of selling because they make a beautiful cactus heaven.

Well, that's true and what you're seeing here.

When I started this business people told me that we could not make a living here, we couldn't make this go and here I've put two kids through college and although I realize I probably could have selected a more prosperous career path, I really enjoy growing plants.

It's been a passion for me and I'm very lucky to have people that work here who feel the same way about plants.

They're also passionate about plants.

The Sonoran Desert extends to north of Scottsdale, Arizona, where one man with a passion for plants has put his money where his mouth his.

You have wonderful companions here.

They are wonderful.

It started out as a cactus collection and then I outgrew cacti because they only covered a couple of acres.

And so then we felt like we needed to get plants from other areas of the world and cacti only grow in the Americas.

And then it becomes a garden of desert plants rather than just cacti.

And that makes a much more interesting garden in the total sense.

Oh, we're always adding and we're also building a whole lot of new beds right over here next to us.

You've got euphorbias and aloes and a whole lot of things that are from other continents even and don't grow even in the Americas anywhere.

It gets into the thousands and then I lose track.

Macrocentra.

Well, that's well-named.

Man, the spines are as big as the pads.

There's many of the plants we have here are raised from seeds of course that people have brought into this country from other areas.

But I haven't gone to do any of the collecting myself.

When you enter this, you're entering into the portals of a world that doesn't exist in nature in the Northern Hemisphere.

This is my idea of heaven.

Lots and lots of columnar cacti.

They actually used to harvest this and stuff it in pillows, for pillow stuffing.

It is soft.

Yeah.

It's un-cactus like.

Yeah.

The pavilion is necessary because so many of the cacti are native to areas that are never subject to freeze and very sensitive to cold.

We had to have protection.

So some of the plants get so big here you, literally you have to cut off the tops?

Yeah.

The tops, as soon as they hit the ceiling, which is about twelve to fourteen feet high, well, then they have to be chopped off.

So we always have every year a certain number of them that do need to be decapitated.

That gives us cuttings then that you can start some new ones.

I have four full time men working with the plants.

In addition there's someone to work on keeping track of everything.

I'd never had anything to do with any cacti until I moved here from Iowa.

I was 62 years in Iowa and I figured that it was a bad place to live because I like to be outside the year round and so I came to Arizona and it was the ideal place.

So if there's anyone that's your favorite or you respect the most it would be this.

You have to say Stetsonia coryne.

Yeah, these old toothpicks ready to pierce right through your hand.

I got acquainted pretty quickly with handling them.

They have their characters that you've got to get acquainted with quickly.

Well, it's kind of hard to love them.

I respect and enjoy them but I don't have any love for 'em.

Oh this is a very healthy looking guy here.

I don't want to stick myself in the eye.

As long as they're interesting, I'm interested.

As nearly as I know, it's a unique collection to the world.

40 miles east of Scottsdale and more than 80 years ago, another passionate collector, Col. William Boyce Thompson, put together a plant collection that includes a renowned cactus garden.

It has become a state park.

And so our cactus garden was inter-planted in and amongst some of the native plants.

How old?

We're talking about the 1930s here.

Cactus was not.

It started out being a collection of plants from all the arid regions of the world excluding the continent of Antarctica, that means all the arid regions from six continents.

And what the Colonel really wanted to do is he wanted to try to gather together and grow everything that would possibly grow here representative of those areas.

Of course in those days, the 1920s and 30s, their focus was on utilitarian purposes.

So they were interested in using plants for decorative purposes in landscaping, also for their medicinal value, for their ethno-botanical value, anything that any kind of use whatsoever was really the star in those days.

The contrast between up here on this kind of arid, volcanic place and down on the bottom is dramatic and even more so when you see the little pond.

How did that get here?

Well, the lake was built in 1925 to serve as an irrigation reservoir and this is where all of our irrigation water for the arboretum is stored.

Most of the work that's being done in our research on plants these days is really being done in the laboratory at the molecular level.

And there aren't a lot of opportunities really to study whole plants or plants in ecosystems.

There's just no money for that these days.

So we've decided that we're going to focus on education and that is and will continue to be a major thrust for us.

These are all Texan plants through here.

On the left.

Yeah.

Well, the left and the right.

Ebenopsis ebano for instance, the Texas ebony.

Now this strikes me as not being Texan.

No.

Well, now we've segued into Mexico.

Oh, just like that we stepped from Texas into Mexico.

That's right.

No, that's good.

We can get away from Texas.

And so this is a little mini Central Mexico.

Yep.

One thing that is unfortunate, or fortunate as the case may be, is that in a garden as old as this the population structure in terms of age is rather skewed towards older plants.

So basically it's everything that I can do to propagate and obtain by whatever means younger plants get them established and get them in line to replace the older ones as they pass away.

So I'm trying to continue what was started long ago.

Wow, this sensational red barrel you've got right up to where I can lean over and smell it.

Not real close.

So you've got them up here.

That's nice.

Well, this is really the only way that we can display mammillarias, Coryphanthas and some of the smaller cactus to keep them out of the way of the javelinas is to keep them in raised beds like this.

So they don't jump up and eat them?

Well, they haven't yet.

Well, they call this a taxonomic collection meaning it doesn't represent any particular place.

It's simply a grouping of plants.

The kind of plant as opposed to an area.

Exactly.

You would probably say that the golden barrel is probably the most outstanding.

We've got many large, old masses of them probably planted back in the 50s we believe.

Also the giant tree prickly pears, we still have about six of those that are surviving from the old days.

The senita, which seems to do very well here.

We also have a large number of old agaves, so we're continually propagating from those plants and starting new ones.

These look South American.

Yeah, this is the famous cardon grande otherwise known as the Argentine saguaro.

We happen to know the age of some of these old specimens of cardon grande.

This particular one here was planted in 1960.

The pace of life that a lot of people come to Arizona for is sort of the pace of life in a cactus garden.

Things move very slowly, it's very laid back, very relaxed.

And as long as you watch your back, it's really quite rewarding to watch the evolution over time.

Back in Pasadena the tension mounts as the final decisions approach.

Everybody for the rotusa?

Well, we have these four.

One, two, three, four.

This is the 18th Inter-City Cactus and Succulent Show and we think it's the biggest cactus and succulent show in the world, certainly in the United States.

And we have cactus and succulents from all over the world on display and also for sale.

This is first.

Correct.

And then second.

Correct.

Second.

Correct.

Second.

Correct.

The judges are experienced growers, people who entered and won over the years and have been showing five or six years at least and are in an advanced category.

Some of them own professional nurseries and also sell the plants.

I agree with you.

I like even the color of the pot.

Judging in and of itself I think is something that is enjoyable if you make it enjoyable.

They're also wanting to make sure they understand that the novice is someone that you want to be kind to.

You want them around for a couple of years.

Can we do first on this one too?

Very well done.

There will be difficulties where sometimes they can't agree and then that's when you have a tie-breaker judge that's an independent judge that comes in and will make that decision for them.

Chris.

So that needs to go.

That seneria.

That seneria we had was nice but these.

If you walk into it just feeling you're gonna do your best job, having fun with it, I don't think it's difficult.

There is some pressure because again people are wanting to have an honest perspective of their plants.

We get so many nice plants in here, let's give multiple seconds.

Teaming with another judge that you work well with makes it a whole lot easier, a lot of fun.

.look at the spination and the flowering and.

They're going to be looking at the same criteria but they're also going to be looking at the size of the plant, rarity does come into form.

.probably like one of the only plants at any of the shows in probably the country that I know of.

That's stereocarpus cochubianus with several different forms of abnormal growths.

Probably the only one in the country.

How many like the bursara?

Okay.

That's it.

So many of the succulents are now new because they're coming in from Africa, which we don't have a lot of experience.

So maintaining and just keeping it alive becomes a priority.

I think a beginner is into it because they have the love of the hobby.

The intermediate is now becoming a little bit more technically involved as to the growth pattern of the plant, understanding where it should be today and where it should be tomorrow.

The master again is looking from beginning to end and he wants the whole comprehensive plant to look the way it should look in the wild.

You know the personality of the people by the plants they grow and you can look at the staging and you can go, "Oh, yeah.

That's Larry's plant," without even looking.

"Oh, that's Mike's plant," without even looking because you know the staging.

You know how meticulous these people are to spend hours finding just the right rock that'll go in the plant.

Maybe they don't look like 'em but you can see their owners in 'em.

Is that your plant?

Of course it is.

Magnificent.

Old, plain, in bloom.

Just like you, Karen.

Oh, the biggest joy is watching a plant ten, twelve, fifteen years.

It's suddenly a show stopper.

And that's what these trophies represent is the fact that you've grown this plant from nothing to something that other people go, "Wow!

That one."

Cause that's what these trophies mean.

The judges want to take these plants home.

And so that's kind of cool, when your peers look at your plants and go, "Yeah, those are nice."

It's made out of cloth.

It's not real.

I think it's the unique geometry and the fact that they're survivors.

Any other plant would dry up and die, these plants think that it's a nice day.

Particularly it's the geometry, the strange forms and the fact that life will triumph over anything really that really make people collect these.

I've go to get something for my wife.

Go for the exotic.

Go for the exotic?

I came to the third annual show, this is the 18th, just by accident and walked home with about 30 plants and now I'm running the show as one of three co-chairs.

My wife made these.

She made these and that shows your love of cactus.

It's more than a hobby.

It's an addiction.

It's a legal addiction.

I went to Yemen to see those in habitat.

Really?

That's a long walk.

A long walk, yeah.

And those are not easy to keep alive.

Over millions of years, cacti have evolved into almost 1800 species.

Nearly everyone has its pointed defense against critters.

The spines and the strange shapes to which they're attached have become very attractive to collectors and to desert rats.

On a trip into the lands of the native Ópatas of Sonora, Mexico, the adventurous traveler must.

conquer the Cruz del Diablo.

survive the fiery effects of Bacanora.

all with the hope of being rewarded with the woven jewels of the ancient Ópata descendents.

Next time on the Desert Speaks.

The Gods Must Be Crazy award for the most out of this world UFO cactus and succulent plant.

And we're looking at things like this that just look like they came from another planet somewhere.

It's like, "Oh, it's little strawberries.

I'm hungry."

You can see the Romans putting these in your mouth.

Yeah.

Peeling them, you know.

Are those road apples or what?

Yes.

I mean, I've seen horse droppings that look like that.

Funding for the Desert Speaks was provided by Desert Program Partners.

A group of concerned viewers making a financial commitment to the education about and preservation of our desert areas.