Why Are We Living With Such Ugly Succulents and Cactuses?

IN LEWIS CARROLL’S 1876 nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” a crew of adventurers, including a baker, a barrister and a beaver, seek to ensnare an elusive fictional beast called a Boojum — a being so hideous in appearance that to merely lay eyes on it will cause a person to “softly and suddenly vanish away.”

A potted Boojum tree (Fouquieria columnaris), a succulent native to the Valley of the Candles in Baja California, greets visitors alongside a plaque inscribed with an excerpt from the poem at the entrance to the Los Angeles branch of the Cactus Store, the bicoastal shop and creative studio specializing in rare and unusual xerophytic, or drought-tolerant, plants. Roughly the size of an adult human, the Boojum — one of two in a shaded courtyard next to a greenhouse that the shop maintains as a specimen library — resembles an inverted parsnip densely studded on its upper half with spiky, leafy branches that form a broomlike mane, lending the plant a mien that in 1922 prompted the English botanist and explorer Godfrey Sykes to nickname the species after Carroll’s boogeyman. Though the succulent may not be grotesque enough to fell an onlooker, it does, like many species in the Cactus Store’s collection, have an almost comically inelegant form.

One could argue that all forms created by nature are beautiful, and yet a genre of houseplants are becoming increasingly prized for their ugliness. Now that the pandemic has reoriented more of us toward domestic pursuits, including tending to potted vegetation, people are adopting “a collector’s mind-set and are looking for the more weirdo thing,” says Alika Cooper, 44, the Los Angeles-based artist and horticulturist behind the garden consulting practice Chthonic Ivy. Over the past two years, she has amassed an art world following for her Plant Sale, a pop-up market for atypical flora — such as bulbous, shaggy sea onions and ox tongue, a succulent with fleshy, oblong segments — that has been hosted by Vielmetter gallery and by the headquarters of the nonprofit arts organization Los Angeles Nomadic Division.

As with the human face, aesthetically aberrant varieties of domestic plants are often more intriguing to the educated eye. It takes something of a botany nerd to want to live among caudiciforms, characterized by protuberant water and nutrient storage organs that allow them to withstand droughts and live for hundreds of years; one species known as elephant’s foot (Dioscorea elephantipes) has a bloated, woody base textured with raised hexagons that could together be mistaken for a distended tortoiseshell. The same is true of a subset of succulents that convincingly mimic rocks and toads, like those of the Lithops genus (named for the ancient Greek words for “stone” and “face”) — squat bisectional nubbins with surface patterns that call to mind cerebral cortices — and Pseudolithos (meaning “false stone”) cubiformis, a pillowy square with pimply reptilian skin. These peculiar forms are evolutionary adaptations, too: camouflage against hungry predators.

“I think storytelling is part of the appeal,” says Christian Cummings, 43, a partner in the Cactus Store with Carlos Morera, 38, and Max Martin, 36, who founded the business with the architect Jeff Kaplon, 41, in 2014; Cummings, Morera and Martin all have backgrounds in art and design and have expanded the platform beyond horticulture to include clothing, lawn furniture, ceramics and books. During a recent visit to their studio, Cummings gestured to an Aztekium ritteri, a tiny, wrinkly cactus with fractalized swirls that he describes as “Yoda-like.” The native version of the plant grows so slowly in the crannies of the cliffs of Nuevo León, Mexico, that for the first few years of its life, it never gets bigger than a grain of sand. Cummings estimates that his store’s specimen took 25 years to reach the size of a blueberry.

TO LIVE WITH and lend pride of place to such a curious and unassuming life-form is “ego slaying,” says Cummings. It is also, perhaps, an act of defiance against the superficiality of the botanical zeitgeist on Instagram, which has done for certain plants what it has for certain places. Over the past decade, glossy tropical species like Monstera deliciosa and familiar, friendly ones like the fiddle-leaf fig have become prop styling clichés for direct-to-consumer brands, a millennial design trope on par with (and often paired with) pastel gradients or terrazzo.

Plants have, of course, long followed their own cycles of fashion, as has been observed by Loney Abrams, 36, and Johnny Stanish, 40, of Wretched Flowers — a New York- and Connecticut-based floral and object design studio with a droll goth sensibility — who in 2021 shared on their Instagram account a pair of slide shows tracking 20th-century potting trends (hanging vines softened the sharp corners of midcentury architecture; bamboo was big in the ’90s, when designers were looking to China for inspiration). Though the Wretched Flowers duo offer only cut bouquets and vessels, they subvert industry standards by emphasizing plants that are regarded as pests, such as love-in-a-mist (also called devil in the bush) and milkweed, or ones that have gone to seed. It’s a political as well as an aesthetic strategy. “Plants that are known as native weeds are the most abundant, available and environmentally friendly,” says Abrams.

After all, conventionally attractive plants and flowers have a history of provoking dysfunctional human behavior. Tulips spawned what is often regarded as the world’s first financial bubble in 1637; orchids, for all their elegance, have since the Victorian era been a target for theft and hunters, with some species threatened by extinction. Even common houseplants are often shipped across long distances. “Traditional beauty,” Abrams argues, “is unsustainable.”

It’s why ugly plants might be the mascots of our particular era: not just because of their quirkiness but for their remarkable ability to thrive in seemingly impossible conditions. The Boojum can pierce and grow straight through neighboring Saguaro trunks. Copiapoa cinerea, a rounded tubular cactus with wavy ridges and black spikes, is found in the driest part of the most arid region on earth, the Atacama Desert in South America, and survives by absorbing fog; it tilts to the north and sprouts woolly hairs where the sun hits in order to shade itself. Perhaps ugly plants feel right at this moment in ecological history because they have something important to teach us. “Plants manipulate animals to survive,” Cummings says, invoking uncanny phenomena like jumping cactuses and carnivorous flowers. As the world burns, we would do well to emulate their resourcefulness.