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 cactus, I couldn’t talk about anything else. Their sheer beauty, symmetry, shape and weirdness is more than enough for a life-time of fascination.

The Grass Menagerie was disappearing in the rearview mirror. Six months passed between its closing and the completion of the 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. I’m not sure I could have, given the way events were coming at me like a meteor shower. Besides, I still hadn’t developed a business brain. I was operating on the ‘work is fun’ concept and as long as I could pay the bills and eat breakfast and dinner, I was successful in following my heart. The business was renamed Cactus Growers of Utah and the entire 1,600 sq. 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 forgive.

But 1600 sq. feet is a lot of space to fill, especially when you’re filling it with cactus. My Volkswagon 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 cactus. 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 the first delivery, Salt Lake 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 doors while I carried them down the driveway and into the greenhouse. It would have taken days to unbox it all except for Elaine. She thought this work was fun and volunteered to help. In fact, she volunteered almost every day for four or five hours. The change of focus from retail to wholesale meant I’d have to be away from the greenhouse making sales calls. I needed hired help, too!

One of my first employees was a young woman from El Salvador. Miriam and her five-year-old son fled to the safety of America when her own government was taken over by rebel factions. Thousands of young men were killed, including Miriam’s husband. Somehow, she found her way to Utah and to Cactus Growers of Utah. She was the kind of employee every boss dreams of having. She saw what was needed and did it. Everything was in order, everything watered, everything clean. Everyone else I hired naturally went to Miriam for direction. She wasn’t bossy but she didn’t mess around, either. She could be funny or fiery mad. She spoke English pretty well but she had her own phrases and body language, especially when it came to an employee named Kevin. She thought he was lazy, the greatest sin.

“OH. THAT MAN!” she’d cry, grabbing her hair and rolling her eyes.

When she needed help, she’d yell, “Kevin, I demand that you are here!”

In the first weeks, we loaded the van with a variety of sizes and types of cactus 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 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. Rather than risk the shipment with a local trucking company, I delivered it 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 cactus had mealy bug and she threatened to throw the entire shipment out. I asked her to describe what she was seeing. I knew immediately the cactus she was talking about. Its botanical name is Astrophytum myriostigma. One of its common names is Star Cactus. Astropyhtum, the genus, means star shaped plant and the species name is myriostigma. ‘Myrio’ is from the word ‘myriad’ or many. ‘Stigma’ means stain or dot. Thus, the Botanical Latin describes the plant: a star shaped plant with many dots. I couldn’t convince the nursery manager that the dots were normal. 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.

While staff and wholesale sales were growing, so were the retail sales. People must have been parking across the street at the 7-11 because we were getting a surprising amount of walk-ins. Word was spreading.

One day, the Chief of Staff of Salt Lake City Mayor Palmer de Paulus, came in. Salt Lake was the sister city to London and the Mayor wanted to send Queen Elizabeth ll a Giant Saquarro. The Giant Saquarro’s botanical name is Carnegiea gigantea, named after the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, a giant of a man. Saquarros are not endangered but they are on the ‘protected’ list. It is illegal to collect them without permit. However, there are nurseries who work with the State and Federal Government to rescue them when habitat is being developed or disturbed. Licensed nurseries are allowed to collect the ‘at risk’ plants and resell them. Each plant has a metal collar attached with an ID and batch number.

We found a licensed Saquarro nursery but, acquiring a Saquarro for the city of 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 permita, an export visa from the U.S., an import certificate from the United Kingdom. What’s more, the Saquarro, 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 weighed 150 lbs. He was carefully swaddled in carpet strips. Mayor dePaulis sent along a red and white knitted cap and muffler with the words Salt Lake City in white letters and he wrote to the Queen, “Just to protect Fred from the English Weather!”

Apparently, Fred was the first Saquarro 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.