Five: Cactus Growers of Utah
1979
Map of the “little house” and the very first greenhouse.
The years in my first greenhouse were the happiest years of my business life. Why? I had fallen in love, deeply and irreversibly in love. Love isn’t always about romance, but it is about passion. I was so stricken by the miracle and majesty of cacti, I couldn’t talk about anything else. Their sheer beauty, symmetry, shapes, swirl, spines, and just plain weirdness is more than enough for a lifetime of fascination.
The Grass Menagerie was disappearing in the rearview mirror. A year had passed between its closing and the completion of the cactus greenhouse. I didn’t have a mailing list or any way to contact past customers. And, because I had no parking, I was under the additional restriction of a business license to wholesale only. I was basically starting over.
I still hadn’t written a business plan. How could I, given the way events were coming at me like balls from a batting machine? I still hadn’t developed a business brain. I was operating on the “work is fun” concept. As long as I could pay the bills and eat breakfast and dinner, I felt successful in following my heart.
In 1979, the business was renamed Cactus Growers of Utah, and the entire 1,600 square feet of greenhouse space was filled with nothing but cactus and succulents. They had names like Sea Onion, Rat Tail, Texas Horse Crippler, and Feather Cactus—names only a mother could appreciate. But 1600 square feet is a lot of space to fill, especially when you’re filling it with cacti. My Volkswagen van was simply not up to the load. Once again, Providence stepped in. I had a retail customer, Elaine, a customer who shared my passion for cacti, although she hated succulents and called them DOS’s: Damned Old Succulents. I frequently had to remind her that although all succulents are not cacti, all cacti are succulents. Elaine had a husband named Jack who was an independent trucker. He made a weekly haul to Southern California but came home empty. He started hauling my shipments.
On the occasion of his first delivery, Salt Lake City was having one of its late spring snows. Jack parked the semi in front of the “little house” and dragged the boxes from the nose of the trailer to the rear doors, while I carried them down the driveway and into the greenhouse. It would have taken days to unbox it all except for Elaine. Like me, she thought this work was fun and volunteered to help. In fact, she worked for almost three years, repotting cacti or mixing soil, or any of a million tasks that needed to be done, all for the fun of it.
The change of focus from retail to wholesale meant I’d have to be away from the greenhouse making sales calls and deliveries. Having to be away was sad in and of itself, but the once steadfast Volkswagen bus, now dented and doddering, was a has-been, unable to proudly represent Cactus Growers of Utah. Also, I was hesitant to drive on the freeway for fear a tire might fly off. I went to a car dealership near downtown Salt Lake City in hopes of buying a cargo van and wandered around the lot for a few minutes, long enough to see there were several vans to choose from. One van caught my fancy. It was a bright red Chevy, all ready for the installation of shelving to transport flats of plants.
A salesman came out of the showroom and greeted me. I pointed out the red Chevy and asked if I could give it a test drive. He didn’t answer me, so I asked if he would please get the keys. After another long silence, he said, “But ma’am, are you the decision maker?” He was absolutely disbelieving.
“Yes.” I answered. “I make decisions.”
He took my driver’s license into the office of the finance officer and after a few minutes came back with a big smile on his face.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you are good people.”
At first, we loaded the van with a variety of sizes and types of cacti, and I drove from nursery to nursery, selling my wares like a kid selling rocks from a Radio Flyer wagon. It became clear early on, though, that selling a dozen or two plants at a time wasn’t going to cut it. The volume had to be stepped up.
I contracted with a superstore chain, and the first order came from a store in Pocatello, Idaho, one hundred and sixty-five miles north of Salt Lake City. Rather than risk the shipment with a short-haul trucking company, I delivered the order myself and drove back the same day. The following morning, I got a call from the nursery manager. She was hopping mad. She said the cacti had mealybugs and
threatened to throw the entire shipment out. I asked her to describe what she was seeing and knew immediately the cactus she was talking about; its botanical name is Astrophytum myriostigma. Astrophytum is the genus and the name means “star plant.” The species or specific name is myriostigma, meaning (myrio) many (stigma) dots or marks. In botanical Latin, the genus is always capitalized and the species is always lower case. I loved knowing all of this. But I could not convince the nursery manager that the white spots were just white spots. I was all blah, blah, blah, and she was all mad. I begged her not to throw the plants away, and the next day I drove back to Pocatello and picked them up.
One day, Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer DePaulis’ chief of staff came into the shop. Salt Lake was a sister city to London and the mayor wanted to send Queen Elizabeth II a Giant Saguaro (Su-gwahr-oh) cactus. The Giant Saguaro’s botanical name is Carnegiea gigantea, named after the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, a giant of a man. Saguaros are not red listed or on the endangered species list, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, but they are on the “protected” list. It is illegal to collect them without a permit. However, there are nurseries who work with state and federal governments to rescue saguaros and other cacti when habitat is being developed or disturbed. Licensed nurseries are allowed to collect the “at risk” plants and resell them, and each rescued saguaro gets a metal collar with an ID and batch number attached to it.
Working hard for the mayor and the Queen, we found a licensed saguaro nursery. But it wasn’t as easy as “please mail me a cactus.” Acquiring a saguaro from Arizona and shipping it to London took almost a year. There was so much red tape on both sides of the Atlantic: confounding forms and letters from obscure departments, batch permits, an export visa from the U.S. and an import certificate from the United Kingdom. What’s more, the saguaro, now named “Fred” by the Brits, was going to live in the greenhouses of the newly constructed and now famous Barbican Conservatory. The conservatory required proof of acquisition, customs clearance, and phytosanitary approval from Arizona, Utah, and California. California needed approval because Utah did not have a direct flight to London, so Fred had to fly west to Los Angeles before flying east to London. A “coffin” was built to transport Fred, who was about two and a half feet high and weighed 150 pounds.
Fred was carefully swaddled in carpet strips, and Mayor DePaulis sent along a red and white knitted cap and muffler with the words Salt Lake City in white letters, and a note to the Queen, “Just to protect Fred from the English weather!” Apparently, Fred was the first saguaro to live in a public greenhouse in Great
Britain. He caused quite a stir, especially when he was visited by Queen Elizabeth I, the Queen Mum.