Days are busy for cacti king
BELEN, N.M. -- To connoisseurs of cacti, Steven Brack is the prince of prickly, the sultan of succulents -- the man who keeps them flush with seeds both rare and common.
His kingdom of cacti sits on a sandy patch of desert atop a mesa in the heart of New Mexico. He guesses he's about the only full-time producer and exporter of cactus and succulent seeds in North America.
His business, Mesa Garden, might be helping to protect species of rare cacti from poachers.
"It's not worth it any more because of all the work tramping around in the heat and the hard conditions," Brack says of cactus poaching.
"Another factor is the ethics of the growers. Most growers won't touch the selling of wild plants."
His 14 greenhouses -- which he cobbled together with boards and sheets of plastic -- hold about 15,000 kinds of plants. The plants come in a rainbow of colors.
Each year, Mesa Garden ships about 150,000 packets of seeds and about 35,000 live plants, Brack guesses. Sales to Europe total about 30 percent, while Russia accounts for about 20 percent and the U.S. makes up the rest.
"I think people want to have something new and exotic and unusual. The American deserts are very exotic to the European psyche. It goes back to the lore of the Westerns and cowboys," Brack says.
Janet Rademacher, sales and marketing manager for a wholesale nursery in Phoenix, says the demand for drought-resistant plants for landscaping has grown about tenfold in the past 15 years.
"A lot of the cities and the municipalities have all been working on educating the public on using desert plants to save water," Rademacher says.
Brack became hooked on cactus as a child growing up on a dairy farm outside Eau Claire, Wis., where he was active in the 4-H club.
"When I was a kid, I guess I saw some of these plants on a window sill, and that led me to the library, and one book led me to another," he says.
"Some books I discovered were seed books from Europe," he says. "It was real fun, and it excited me that these plants had a Latin name on them."