My Road Trip With the Do-Gooding Cactus Smugglers
March 10, 2026 at 12:38AMCharlie McCann rides along as Ran Fowler, a California nursery owner and plant sneak, travels to Mexico to gather seeds and cuttings from a dozen different kinds of succulent and then sneak them back across the US border. McCann’s tense narrative carries an engaging history of plant theft, and is barbed, here and there, fun writing. (“Strolling through a desert landscape is like inhabiting Salvador Dali’s brain.”) And Fowler makes a great subject: an obsessive whose reverence for succulents falls somewhere between righteousness and delusion.
Fowler was in his early 30s when his then-girlfriend planted a “depressing” strip of earth outside his apartment with succulents as a birthday present. Before this, he hadn’t been interested in plants. When he was a kid, his mother had dragged him to botanical gardens, which he wrote off as zoos without animals. But when he saw the succulents outside his apartment he was blown away by their shapes. He remembers looking at a D. pachyphytum and thinking, “how is this a plant?” The succulents “pulled me down this rabbit hole”. He quit his job as a social worker and began working at a botanical garden. Eventually he opened his own nursery. His personal collection of succulents now exceeds 10,000 plants.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/03/09/cactus-succulent-smuggling/
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