The above from an atlas of very finely rendered drawings of root systems of plants, courtesy an old friend of mine. From: Kutschera, L., Wurzelatlas : mitteleuropaeischer Ackerunkraeuter und Kulturpflanzen. - Frankfurt am Main : DLG - Verlag, 1960 (2. Aufl. 2010). - 574 p.
Yesterday, I reconnected with my younger self's fascination with cacti and succulents. Going back to my roots, plant pun intended, sorry. I was sorting through my books in an effort to get a little more organized in spite of not having any bookshelves yet, and I happened on a stack of publications that I used to have mailed to me from Edgar and Brian Lamb's Exotic Collection in Worthing, Sussex, UK. The Lambs were a combination of true British eccentrics and extremely knowledgeable, dedicated cactus and succulent fanatics. Edgar Lamb's publications spanned nearly four decades. I somehow got a copy of one of the Lamb's cactus books at age 13, and then convinced my mother to subscribe me to their monthly publication. It was a cool thing, getting their little newsletters with photographs, via AIR MAIL (as they always wrote it, in all caps), all the way from Worthing, Sussex.
I subscribed to their monthly brochures for about five years, from age 13 to 18. I still have most of them. During the course of my subscription, Doris Lamb, Edgar's wife, died, and then, in 1980, Edgar Lamb died. His son Brian kept The Exotic Collection going for maybe another seven years or so, but eventually moved to the Canary Islands, and was, for a time, the director of the Alameda Gardens there. An example of a typical cover of their newsletter, from June 1980, and a two page article about Baja California Mammillarias, which might have been my first "hook" for these species:
Five years earlier, at 13, I sent in a letter for their "Overseas Newsletter" that they published with each issue.
People have often asked me how and why I got so passionately interested in cacti and succulents, and I never have much to say except that I was just drawn to them. I'm sure the eccentric and total enthusiasm of my distant cactus fanatics, the Lambs, fanned the flames. They also published a few different travelogues, two of which detailed their trips to the southwestern US and Mexico, and I bet these articles were the first enticement for me to travel westward.
My hobby grew to the point where I bought a mail order redwood greenhouse, using $300 of my paper route money that I had saved over a three year period (about $1500 in today's money), that was about 12 feet by six feet, covered with plastic. I vividly recall when the truck pulled up to unload it. It was a semi tractor trailer. I valiantly tried to assemble it myself from the instructions, to no avail. My sister's boyfriend came over from across the street and helped out, and we eventually got it put up. I had big, big plans for what I was going to do in there. I even convinced my father to add an electrical outlet outside the house, and I bought a little electric heater. The first winter, the fuse for the heater tripped, and the 20 or so plants I had in the greenhouse froze solid and died. Later that winter or very early spring, a huge gale blew through and destroyed the greenhouse, pretty much. I wrote an angry letter to the company (I wish I still had that) and they refunded every penny (and I used the refund to buy a Rogers Dynasonic snare drum, which I also wish I still had). Looking back, what a sad waste of redwood. I could have easily repaired it, probably, or found some way to salvage the wood, at least. The entire enterprise just felt like a dismal failure to me, and I had no support for persisting with all of it.
Every spring, the Exotic Collection newsletter would describe how to visit their greenhouses, and
mention various things to do in Worthing, one of which was to dine at the Thomas A. Becket Inn. Out of curiosity, I looked that place up yesterday, and it turns out it was recently upgraded and is still going.
I found a hilarious and typically weird British review of the place, which reminded me of the old John Cleese series, Fawlty Towers.
There are a lot of interconnected memories around the cactus hobby, woven into the strange period of life from age 13 to about 18. My other passions were drums and women. Somehow, I was forming the basis for just about everything that would motivate me for the rest of my life. M recently was listening to some music that I have up at Soundcloud, dating back to 1990, and I was reminded that it has been a very long time since I played, let alone performed. One of the distinct patterns in my life has been the alternation between horticulture/botany and music, rarely managing to sustain both for very long, especially when I have a full time teaching job, which I have had for almost every year of the past 34 years. Definitely during the PhD, music went pretty much completely to the background (other than listening, of course).
One of the things that taking this month off from Facebook has facilitated is more attention to my surroundings, and my past. There are a couple of "media management" projects that I want to do. One is to sort through all of my photographs and index the best of them somehow. The other is to catalog all of the recordings of music performances that I have, and figure out what that timeline was like. I also want to scan a bunch of the fiction writing I was doing when I was younger, all of which bedraggled old paper copies I have been dragging around for decades. Some of this will have to wait, since I will be on the road for most of the summer. A short trip up through Angeles National Forest and over to the edge of the Mojave on Saturday had me yearning to get out and be out for weeks. Fortunately, after June 11th, I will be able to do just that.
View from about 7000 feet, in the Angeles National Forest, looking down on a thick layer of low clouds, from an area with some fire damage.
Fascinating account.