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NEWS:
Trichocereus pachanoi scanned at St. Lawrence University’s Microscopy & Imagery Center, from Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas (https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/), used with permission of Jill Pflugheber & Steven F. White, © 2023.
For several years I’ve been contributing plants to Steve White and Jill Pflugheber’s fascinating scientific art project, Microcosms — wondrous images of American sacred plants produced through confocal microscopy. The site was just updated — a few sections now feature my Andean photos, with more to come.
You can read my commentary on the project: https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/commentary/ben-kamm/
I’ve also contributed an article on the Andean keystone tree Polylepis (A larger article is in the works, but the hectic summer and my daughters bringing covid home from camp interrupted, so they’ve posted this smaller [quite literally fever written!] piece as a ‘placeholder’) – https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/plant/polylepis-spp/
Peruse the comments of other colleagues such as Neil Logan, Manolo Torres, Dennis McKenna, Luis Eduardo Luna, etc.: https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/commentaries/
Polylepis incarum scanned at St. Lawrence University’s Microscopy & Imagery Center, from Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas (https://www.microcosmssacredplants.org/), used with the permission of Jill Pflugheber & Steven F. White, © 2023.
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Herpetological Kin:
In addition to the diversity of rare and endangered plants here, the nursery and gardens also provide habitat for a medley of ‘wildlife’. We rejoice that the herpetological denizens are really thriving in recent years—our native treefrog (Pseudoacris sierra) is the most abundant resident of the nursery along with blue-belly lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis); we also have the more solitary alligator lizards (Elgaria multicarinata) and the secretive blue-tailed skinks (Plestiodon skiltonianus)—all of the lizards have taken to breeding and overwintering in the big greenhouse. We see a medley of small snakes here: striped racers (Coluber spp.), ring-necked (Diadophis punctatus amabilis), gartersnakes (Thamnophis spp.), sharp-tailed (Contia spp.), the occasional gophersnake (Pituophis catenifer), and my daughters’ favorite—the shy and gentle rubber boa (Charina bottae). The nursery and environs also provide habitat for worm-like slender salamanders (Batrachoseps attenuatus), friendly faced Ensatinas (Ensatina eschscholtzii), rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) with their affable demeanor, orange bellies and highly toxic skin, the occasional arboreal salamander (Aneides lugubris), and the intimidating giant Pacific salamander (Dicamptodon ensatus). A large Sequoia tree that toppled in our stretch of creek last year is now the preferred basking spot for our local Western ‘pond’ turtles (Actinemys marmorata)—we’ve observed up to 6 at a time sunning themselves, from 1.5″ juveniles to 9″ seniors!
Ember with turtle
Diadophis punctatus amabilis
A child’s box of delights: rough-skinned newts, Ensatinas, slender salamanders and tree frog!
Ensatina with eggs
Kiera & Ember with Charina bottae
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LITTLE, BIG
Since 2020 I’ve been volunteering my help to a very special book project — an archival, art book edition of our friend John Crowley’s beloved novel Little, Big illustrated by Peter Milton, see our webpage. Winner of the World Fantasy Award when it was first published in 1981, the novel is esteemed by a broad diversity of fans — from Yale literary critic Harold Bloom to ethnobotanist Kat Harrison, from musician Maynard James Keenan to acclaimed storyteller Ursula K. LeGuin and psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. For many readers Little, Big is more than a novel, it is an an enchantment, an alchemical engine of the imagination. Publishing this unique new edition has been a 20 year saga, stalled by sundry issues. Recently I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with celebrated fantasist Neil Gaiman, who has become a major supporter of the project, along with my friend and counterculture historian Erik Davis [see Erik’s new essay https://www.burningshore.com/p/big-little-big]. Their generosity has helped revivify the project and allowed printing to finally begin in 2022. The project’s architect and publisher, Ron Drummond, had a stroke June 2022 and since then book designer John D. Berry and myself have been tasked with overseeing the last stage of production and making sure all is in order to distribute books. Just updating the 18 years of customer records proved a considerable task; my volunteer work since summer 2022 has almost become a 2nd full time job. We are excited to report that the project is nearly complete; the hardcover edition is now shipping, but selling fast, plus a limited quantity of the signed, Numbered edition — invest in a copy while you can!
Books can be ordered through: https://store.deepvellum.org/products/little-big
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NURSERY NEWS:
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4/28/24 Family matters have continued to force my attention elsewhere the past month, but spring’s fecund verdure is calling me back to botanical endeavors…
Things are moving slowly, as I still face a lot of obstacles & uphill labor.
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3/17/24 The past 6 weeks have been arduous. February was more chaotic than I can convey — a lost month.
Storms downed dozens of trees, causing repeated power outages (up to a week long), some flooding, closed roads, damage to the nursery, plant losses, etc.
The last few weeks have added family illness and a medley of computer issues. All this comes on top of the difficulties of 2023, plenty still unresolved…
Once again this puts us in a difficult position, unsure of the most viable route forward for SS…
I must beg your patience once more as we work to figure out what this means for our offerings this year.
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12/8/23 It has been an unusual and erratic autumn — we’ve had early rains, early heavy frosts and late heat spells… all of which have continued to create new challenges in the nursery. After minimal trouble since last winter, this week a pair of our native Dusky-footed woodrats mowed a tray of Passiflora, half our Lapageria stock; they snipped a batch of Ilex vomitoria & Philesia seedlings and several rare Vaccinium, Gaultheria, and Pernettya. Sigh. We recovered some of the cut stems and will attempt to root, but this is another setback to future offerings.
The SPECIMEN PLANT LIST is updated for December, see partway down this page. The final and largest update of the year, we’ve added many new cacti & succulents, unique medicinals, Andean species (including a medley of rare Ericaceae) and our current stock of Andean Tubers. This is where we’ve listed a selection of the currently available retail plants. We’ve also posted the last of some Botanical Products — balsam resins, Goldroot, Muña oil, and a selection of New, Rare, and Used BOOKS near the bottom of this page. Several books are currently on sale, including Jonathan Ott’s essential titles. Some of the singular rarities we’ve listed come from the library of our late friend, the celebrated ethnobotanist Richard Felger.
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10/30/23 We’re navigating the increasingly manic weather that seems to have become the norm — just over a week ago it was suddenly hot again, in the high 90s F, then 24 hours later it was raining and the temperature dropped nearly 40 degrees! Since then it has gotten colder; the last few mornings we were hit by rather significant frost — about 3 weeks earlier than we usually see this frozen. This damaged a bunch of leafy plants and has me scrambling to get the tender species moved into the greenhouses, the greenhouses damaged by last winter’s storms reskinned, and the nursery ready for what is predicted to be another wet winter.
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10/6/23 This has proven to be a most calamitous year.
We lost most of the last 2 months and S.S. has been virtually ‘shut down’ during this time. Our eldest daughter brought COVID home from camp at the beginning of August; the girls recovered quickly, but I was hit pretty hard — it took me nearly 6 weeks to get my energy back and 8+ weeks on now I’m still experiencing some exasperating cognitive impairment. There was a period of extreme, flash heat while we were incapacitated with COVID — this caused a fair amount of damage within the nursery, even to some of the Trichocereus, which had barely recovered from winter injuries. The irrigation system recently installed in some sections of the nursery prevented all out catastrophe. We can say, unequivocally, that we’ve lost more plants in 2023 than any other year in Sacred Succulents 25 year history. We’ve also accomplished less propagation this summer than any I recall. We’re uncertain to what extent this will impact our offerings in future seasons, but right now it means our retail lists are in need of significant revision — a task which I’m unlikely to accomplish until this winter. In the interim, we’re not handling seed orders until sometime in 2024 and availability should be confirmed via email for all retail plant orders.
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7/27/23 Months later and we are still seeing new evidence of damage from last winter’s extreme weather. Until recently, this had been the foggiest and coolest summer we’ve had in over a decade. This has made recovery and cleaning up the winter damaged Trichocereus problematic and new growth slower than any year I can recall! We’ve also been peppered with sporadic sudden heat spikes—these extreme temperature swings have been hard on many plants. We’re discovering more plants failing to wake from dormancy and damage among some of the species in the greenhouses, greater than anything we’ve seen before. In the last several months we’ve lost about 70% of our Andean Echeveria, over a dozen of our large Burseraceae mother plants (Copal, Frankincense, Myrrh), and a fair number of globular cacti — Ariocarpus, Turbinicarpus, Mammillaria, etc. This is humbling and perplexing, to say the least. I can’t piece together all of the causes of the damage and loss… some of it makes no sense I can track; it seems to be a complex accumulation of factors. Propagation this year has primarily been limited to our efforts to salvage damaged plants, and looks to remain so for the season. All this will have a notable impact on our future offerings. Under these current circumstance, new orders should be restricted to items on the Specimen Plant List [halfway down this page]—we have to discourage new orders from our retail PDF lists until we can entirely update them; you’re welcome to make inquiries, just know that there’s a fair number of plants/seeds that won’t be available until next year…if again at all. Once more, I apologize for the inconvenience.
Not all is woe, we continue to at least inch forward with essential nursery renovations. Some of the plants we’ve lost we have backed up at various botanical gardens, and, of course, in the gardens of some of you fine phytophiles. Many of our Asian and Andean shrubs and trees have thrived in the cooler weather, plus we finally seem to have entered a stretch of sunny summer days. We have managed to plant some seed, including fresh batches of Boswellia and Bursera; we also have seedlings of exciting new Trichocereus hybrids coming along which we hope to offer this winter or next season.
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3/29/23 This winter has been hard on the nursery & gardens. Since the new year, we’ve been repeatedly battered by large storms — high winds, torrential rain, sleet & hail, even freak snow, along with numerous power outages lasting from 1 to 5 days. The storms damaged several nursery structures, the deluge repeatedly washed out segments of our driveway and parts of the nursery. For a couple days in mid-March, half of our lower garden and the adjacent portion of the nursery had a few inches of water flowing through. In-between the storms we’ve had unseasonal warm & sunny days, with a temperatures in the 60s & 70s (° F), and frequent freezing nights as cold as 18° F. Such capricious weather has caused a great deal of damage to our plants — the high humidity in the greenhouses resulted in mold & rot issues with some succulents, while we lost assorted leafy plants due to the drying heat of unseasonable sun unexpectedly warming the greenhouses to over 80° F! Outside, the Trichocereus cacti have taken an irregular amount of damage from the erratic climatic extremes. Inexplicably, species which have historically been the hardiest for us (T. terscheckii, pasacana, & the clumping species and hybrids) have been among the hardest hit. Injuries are still showing up on plants and we likely won’t know the full extent of the damage until late spring. In addition to all this, it has been the worst cold & flu season we have ever experienced — since autumn, my daughters have brought some malady home from school to share with the family at least once or twice a month.
The absurd vicissitudes these past months have frustrated my attempts to update the website & catalog and have severely interrupted my usual winter propagation work, seed cleaning and sowing. Efforts to finally complete the nursery renovations have also been greatly effected — in fact the storms have necessitated additional renovations. With the heroic help of my colleague, Matt Magee, we were able to accomplish some work: constructing a 25′ shade structure to replace one blown down in January, removing 30′ of decrepit wooden benches and rebuilding a metal bench in their place, complete with 8′ propagation chamber on one end.
All of these intractable events have had a real impact on our plans for the year and the availability of many plants. We had planned to fully resume retail operations this spring… but alas, circumstances demand that we once again limit retail plant & seed sales and shipping.
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1/9/23 A large storm came through and we lost power, internet and phone last Wednesday, January 4, and only just got these back last night. There’s been flooding and an inordinate number of fallen trees throughout the county. An old 8′ by 25′ long redwood and shadecloth structure broke in the high winds and was blown against one of our smaller greenhouses–damaging the skin but not the frame of that structure. This apparently excited a pair of amorous woodrats who were moved by the destruction to focus their passions on snipping several trays of plants — our stock of Desfontainia, Amomyrtus, and Ilex vomitoria are nearly decimated, along with some rare Vaccinium and Gaultheria. The rain deluge eroded part of our driveway and some areas around the nursery, but no flooding — in fact the positive side of all this is that our creek is finally back to a healthy level and the aquifers are being replenished, for which we are deeply grateful. The dismal anthropogenic interaction with the northern California ecosystems here the last 160+ years means that many of our watersheds and forests are a disaster with these heavy rains–especially after the drought and fires the last few years.
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11/23/22 We just discovered that our friend Ken Symington passed away in September at the age of 90. Ken was a Cuban born chemical engineer and one of the unsung heroes of the entheobotany renaissance of the 1990s. With Rob Montgomery, Terence McKenna, and Jonathan Ott, Ken organized progressive educational conferences around the world including the famous annual gatherings in Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico — where we first met many fine folks in 1994. We all have Ken to thank for the beautiful English translation of one of the most poetic books on Amazonian mythology, plant lore and wizardry: Cesar Calvo’s classic The Three Halves of Ino Moxo. Ken was a kind and radiant soul who encouraged us to follow a green and flower strewn life path. We were blessed to have known him.
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10/12/22 We are mourning our colleague Christian Rätsch, who died last month. Christian was pioneer scholar of psychoactive ethnobotany and the reclamation of Euro-pagan traditions and plant preparations. His research, joyous curiosity and beautiful books have inspired us for the last three decades. Christian was a monument to himself — an utterly unique man that greatly enriched the lives of many folks through sharing his love and fascination with the remote and forgotten facets of our world. Some of his 40+ books have been translated from his native German to English, such as The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, The Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs, Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas, Witchcraft Medicine, Pagan Christmas, etc. Photographs of plants we grew grace the pages of several of these titles. May we all strive to leave the world a richer, better place as Christian has.
You can read about a few of our memories of Christian.
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3/24/22 Many nurseries operate seasonally and it now makes sense for us to adopt something similar. As mostly a one man show it is simply no longer viable for us to maintain shipping 5 days week year round as we have for the past 24+ years. We are currently limiting the extent and frequency of shipping orders.
After years of perpetually diversifying and expanding our catalog offerings we have come to a point where we have to consider some downsizing to return Sacred Succulents to a more manageable state of operation for us. To this end and to safeguard our decades of conservation work we have in recent years donated or distributed hundreds of rare and endangered plants to the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens, the California Academy of Sciences, the Huntington Botanical Gardens, the Ventura Botanical Gardens, the Seattle Spheres, the UC Fullerton Greenhouses— to name a few organizations we have received very positive recognition from for our work & contributions. Thus, there are some of our catalog listings that will not be available again after this year.
We are enacting and exploring these and other changes to protect the long term viability of Sacred Succulents. This means that we will only be shipping retail orders intermittently as we continue to take time out to complete essential renovations, reconfigure aspects of our operation (to protect the long term viability of Sacred Succulents in light of our erratically changing climate), and ultimately return to the level of customer service that we have historically offered.
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10/27/21 We got word that our friend Gabriel Howearth was swept away in a flood last August. Gabriel was a lauded conservationist and co-founder of Seeds of Change. He’s been an inspiration and unwavering champion of our own work for the past two decades.
One of the great seedsman of our age, gone…
You can read more about him: https://bioneers.org/a-tribute-to-gabriel-howearth-champion-of-biodiversity-zmbz2109/
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11/26/20 Sacred Succulents has always been a small family run business, for all practical purposes most of it has really been a one man show. Yet it is also a complex ever growing entity. For over 23 years now a few thousand of you fine folks around the world have contributed to our existence and ongoing endeavors. There are no words we know that can fully express our deep and sincere gratitude for your support and enthusiasm over the years. We would not exist without you. Collectively we have introduced hundreds of new plants into cultivation, hopefully safeguarding some from extinction and cultural loss. And of course at the heart of our gratitude is the plants themselves – we are all truly blessed to be born of such a fecund world with an astounding diversity of vegetal wonders to nourish and flourish us.
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11/3/20 Our friend Richard Felger died on October 31. He was a giant in the world of ethnobotany and conservation, a poet and man of great heart. He left the world greatly enriched by his work and books, yet we can’t help feel the world is still a bit poorer without his presence… For more on Richard’s amazing work see – https://www.desertfoodplants.org/
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8/15/20 We are all feeling the strain of the pandemic as we watch the tide of human desire and will break upon the rocky shore of bio-physical reality. As we recalibrate aspects of the nursery and shipping schedules we hope to give our self more time for writing and research. We just added a few pieces to the Botanical Reflections page of the website; the first time we’ve updated this page in 9 years. Here you can find a smattering of our writing; childhood botanical musings, our floral assessment of a remote Incan site, bizarre genealogy, and pondering the fictions of taxonomy. We will post more eventually.
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The site of the Incan shrine and remnant Polylepis forest of Chakan, above Cusco, Peru