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Xerophile, Revised Edition: Cactus Photographs from Expeditions of the Obsessed
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About Xerophile, Revised Edition: Cactus Photographs From
Product Description An updated edition of the cult classic, featuring stunning archival photographs of hundreds of the rarest and most spectacular plants on Earth, taken by a motley crew of cactus obsessives “A catalogue of wonders that most of us will never get to see in person.”—The New YorkerFrom the people behind Cactus Store comes Xerophile, a photographic collection of these improbable desert wonders in the wild. Drawing on the archives of twenty-five cactus obsessives—from PhD botanist to banker, art teacher to cancer researcher—this revised edition spans eighty years and features new and expanded descriptive notes for all 350+ photos.Xerophile brings together eighty years’ worth of these explorers’ remarkable images from some of the world’s most remote habitats: a peculiar two-leaved plant that lives for millennia in the deserts of Namibia; succulents whose poisonous sap is used by hunters to fell large game in Angola; and cactus that live on snow-covered mountains in Bolivia, sink below ground level to survive droughts in Mexico, are pollinated by bats in Brazil, and grow in pure lava fields of the Galápagos Islands. About the Author Cactus Store is a botanically minded creative collective with locations in Los Angeles and New York City. Founded in 2014, the group mines the cracks between disciplines to help broker and deepen interspecies relationships between plants and people. Cactus Store designs botanical garden spaces and greenhouses, produces gardening clothes and products, and is currently developing a television show about plants. It has been featured in the New Yorker, Surface, Atlas Obscura, Los Angeles Times, Gardenista, GQ, Purple magazine, Apartment Therapy, and more. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Preface Xerophile adj. (from Greek xeros, meaning “dry,” and philos, “loving”)—thriving in or tolerant or characteristic of an environment with a limited water supply. Since the 1930s, Southern California has been home to a rich network of cactus and succulent clubs, societies, and shows. Evidence of this history is stored away all over the Southland—go to a longtime cactus collector’s garage, and you’ll likely find shoe boxes stuffed full of old succulent newsletters and magazines, stacked up next to the Christmas decorations and boogie boards. Bargain bins at cactus shows in the Valley can yield issues of the Czech journal Kaktusy from the 1980s, out-of-print books on the euphorbias of Africa, or a hand-typed field guide to the cactus of Baja.To us—members of a younger generation of collectors accustomed to relying on the resources available online—this printed ephemera was a fascinating relic, a view into a past world. After opening the Cactus Store in 2014, we became increasingly captivated by this material. We acquired what we could, and as our library expanded we were continually struck by a certain type of photography that we weren’t accustomed to seeing.These weren’t the usual photos of perfect show plants in a greenhouse, a saguaro lit by a blazing sunset, or a slick studio shot of an obscenely flowering Echinopsis. What we became captivated by, and what we found to be far more beautiful and true, were documentary photographs of cactus in their native environments, the often improbable landscapes where these plants grow wild. Seeing an image of a 15-foot-tall (4.6 m) Browningia candelaris (page 138) living in a habitat that is Earth’s closest equivalent to Mars, its trunk thickly covered in spines, topped with a crown of twisted, rust-red branches, will quickly make you realize that the 6-inch (15 cm) green juvenile you’ve been caring for—and watching grow at a glacially slow pace—is a long, long way from home. Xerophile is made up of these images, hundreds of them, which we have spent the past two years tracking down.They are drawn from the archives of twenty-five explorers and span eighty years, from the early days of Kodachrome to the bottomless me
