I always tell people my husband
and I own a cactus and succulent nursery.
We sell cactus and succulents
from deserts around the world.
We all started from a very early prototype of life,
and then we've gone our different ways and plants
are just one of the ways that life has continued.
I see that when I look at plants, these are living things
When it was time to go to college,
I didn't really know what I wanted to do
and to tell you the truth,
I didn't even really
realize that a degree in horticulture existed.
I came out here to go to school.
I started in engineering,
got out of that reasonably quickly and got into
the Agriculture College.
There were beginning horticulture classes
and I took them and I love them
and I thought, OK, I'm going to figure this out.
I was growing crops of plants
for them to use, and I loved growing crops, I realized.
Nothing is more exciting than growing from seed
because you start
with this little teeny tiny seed and you end up with a plant.
This is Pachypodium brevicaule
This is not a seed that you can buy readily.
These are some fruits developing on flowers. I did
maybe as long as a month ago.
I'm trying to mimic what the major pollinator
in nature does, which is a moth.
This is a Javelina bristle simply cut
and taped on to a piece of wood. Microscopically,
there's little hairs on it that can grab the pollen.
A lot of times people will say, Isn't that lucky
that Gene found someone that could share his interest?
And I kind of go, What? What are you talking about?
Because I actually purchased this property before we
were even married.
This property that we're on
today was established as a nursery flower shop in 1933.
Jane had the property with a flower shop.
I actually rented space from her at that time. And then
life happened after that.
B.C.N. Baja California Norte
Being people with degrees in horticulture.
Our focus really was on propagation.
And so we started seeking seed sources.
In 1987, there was a large grower of mesembs
in Azle, Texas, and he died unexpectedly. By chance,
we were in a situation where we could buy it from his widow.
And so that was how we really got started in lithops.
Everybody has a different
description for what they think they look like.
I think they look like little living stones.
They're all different
and they're all beautiful in their own way.
I love the idea that their mimicry plants, the plants
just disappear into the rock.
For several years, we sold lots of seed to China.
We pollinated all the lithops,
and then we collected all the seed capsules,
and then we sold them to China.
To the tune of three to 4 million seeds.
That was really fun.
But now they grow their own.
They don't need us anymore.
Jane was talking to you about the lithops, and that's
probably the biggest collection of lithops in the Americas.
And we definitely have a national following, for sure.
And even in an international following.
There's a lot of rare and hard to find
plants that we have,
and we try and have pairs of those plants so that we can
mass produce them.
This plant here is Welwitschia mirabilis.
It's a rare kind of slow growing
plant grows out in the middle
and nothing in the deserts of Namibia.
They're very primitive, coniferous plant, so they cone
instead of flowering, they can grow to be 2 thousand years old.
It is a much slower group of plants to work with.
I like continuity.
I like to see things continue over longish periods of time,
years, in some cases decades, lifetimes.
There's a huge emotional
attachment and that's always been the hardest thing.
And Gene and I are having
degrees in horticulture
instead of business. That was really the hardest thing.
Some people, you can just tell they want to put something
on a windowsill and or on a coffee table, in a dark room,
and they want it to look great forever,
and they're never going to take care of it.
And I'm just not interested in sending my little
plants to their death.
The other part of this that I like so much
is to grow my plants to a point where they really look like
what they're supposed to look like as old plants in nature.
That's a satisfaction, probably one that I'm winding
down on being able to experience as I get older
because there aren't too many more cycles of years left for
me to grow some of these things up to up to their size.
I'm at a point now that's very difficult for me
because I'm a retirement age, and I would love
to do other things.
The goal on once a week is to keep the roots from drying out.
I'm trying to work less,
but Gene wants to grow plants forever,
and so I say, great, go for it.
You know that I have no problem with him
growing plants forever because we love to grow plants.
But as a result, I'm trying to sell more of the lithops.
The more lithops
leave Genes going, oh,
but we can't have all the lithops go!
He loves to look at the lithops.
So on this table, I have been selecting plants
that I think are particularly nice.
These are plants that I have been staging.
When I first bought the
property, there was a flower shop on the property
and I had no intention of ever
running a flower shop ever in my life,
but that's what paid the mortgage, so I had to.
I missed that really pretty thing you
get with flower arrangements.
So now I've just transferred it over to staging plants.
Making an arrangement, I really feel attached
to how the plant's going to feel among the rocks.
I take care and how I place the rocks.
I want them to look nice.
I want them to look like nature.
OK. I have my own little piece of desert,
If I can make a nice, pretty staged plant
so that somebody can look at it
and just kind of dive into that pot
and get lost for a few minutes
thinking about where they are among those rocks.
To me, that's very pleasurable.
This is Gene's new collection that I'm potting up for him.
I spend most of my a lot of my time
thinking about other things
I'd like to travel, I'd like to be in other places.
I'd like to study other types of plants.
But I don't want to give up what I do.
So if anything, I need more concurrent lives
so that I can do it all and do more all at the same time
without stopping anything.
Now the reality of life
is that I'm going to have
to stop some things, many things as time goes on,
and I probably just haven't come to enough
grips with that, as she has.