Of Cacti and Cats’ Whiskers

We happened by the annual show of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America the other day, and found that a lot of people are interested in these drought-resistant plants--which is all to the good in a land that imports most of its water. “If this weekend was any indication, interest is steadily increasing,” Fred A. Hutflesz, the show chairman, told us. “We had more people than ever in the past, and beat last year’s gross of $18,000,” he added, referring to the plant sale that was a major attraction.

This was the 22nd society show and sale held at the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum in Arcadia. It ran out of parking space almost from the minute the doors opened. “They tell us it is the biggest weekend of the year at the arboretum,” Virginia Martin of Arcadia, the corresponding secretary of the society, reported.

The show demonstrated its commitment to conservation by denying prizes to cacti collected in the wild. Many of the native plants in the United States, Mexico and other Latin nations are on the list of endangered species, and the Cactus and Succulent Society wants nothing to do with any extinctions. So all of the competing plants were propagated in captivity, as it were. “Encouraging seed propagation is a good thing,” Hutflesz said. We could not disagree.

Don’t get the impression that this is a provincial business. The society, founded in Pasadena in 1929, has 80 affiliated groups in just about every state, with an expectable concentration in the Southwest, but there is one in Canada and one in Cuba. And at the annual meeting that capped the second day of the show, the speaker was from Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens in Cape Province, South Africa, which provides some of the most interesting and one of the smelliest of the succulents.

Succulents come from all over the world, but cacti come only from the Western Hemisphere, we learned. The diversity was evident in the top prizes--both won by Anne Shein, a commercial grower from Marina in the Monterey area. Her best-of-show cactus was a Neoporteria Microsperma from South America, which has elegant yellow blossoms. Her best-of-show succulent was a Stapeliopsis neronis from South Africa. The Stapeliopsis depends on flies, not bees, for pollination, and it attracts the flies with dark-colored flowers that, to quote Hutflesz, have a “terrible odor, like rotting meat.” He quickly added, “But you have to get down close to smell it--thank God for that.”

Hutflesz works for the Los Angeles County Welfare Department, but he has been hooked on his hobby of succulents and cacti since his high school days, when he took a part-time job in a succulent-and-cactus nursery in Carlsbad. Now he has two specializations. One is Mesembryanthemum from South Africa, commonly called ice plant, of which he has about 30 of the more than 500 varieties arrayed in pots in his backyard in Los Angeles. The other is Pachypodium, an upright succulent from Madagascar and South Africa. In the next couple of days he will complete his collection of all 10 known varieties of Pachypodium with the purchase of a rare seedling from a nusery in Carpinteria. That will not be the end of his problems, however. Pachypodium depends on hawk moths for pollination, because only the hawk moths’ long beaks can penetrate to the pollen deep in the oval flowers. In the absence of a reliable supply of hawk moths, Hutflesz does it by hand--with a cat whisker.