by Traude Gomez-Rhine

John Trager is proud to show off his favorite exotic offspring, thousands of which fill the Desert Collection shade house in the Huntington nursery. Row after row of cacti, euphorbias, and other succulents crowd the worktables around the doting horticulturalist. He picks up a small container among a large collection of Stenocactus ochoterenanus --delicate globes of cacti resembling sea urchins. Covered with spikes, some are topped with a mere wisp of a flower striped in white and violet—such fragile beauty surrounded by barbed danger make for an alluring botanical specimen.

When the horticulturalist arrived on staff at The Huntington in 1983, a handful of seedlings of the plant were already part of the collection, grown from seed that had been collected in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí in the early 1970s. Years later, in 1999, Trager finally found a space in his schedule to hand pollinate about five plants. He was rewarded with hundreds of seeds. A couple of years later he sowed the seeds produced from that effort and is now cultivating and selling these second-generation plants as part of the Huntington’s International Succulent Introductions program, or ISI.

In existence for almost 50 years, the ISI is both a shopper’s paradise and a unique conservation program. The Huntington’s plant introduction program propagates and distributes new and rare succulents to collectors, scientists, and research institutions. While certainly a savvy way to build Huntington collections, it also furthers scientific knowledge and helps to mitigate the alarming rate at which the world’s flora is becoming extinct.

“We need to acknowledge that the landscape is changing radically around the world,” says Jim Folsom, the Marge and Sherm Telleen Director of the Botanical Gardens at The Huntington. “In a few decades half the planet’s succulents will be lost. In the plant kingdom, the more you propagate, the more you keep for the world.”

It was Folsom who formally adopted ISI as the Huntington’s own in 1989, shortly after he came on board as the new botanical director. His predecessor Myron Kimnach had helped found the program as an independent nonprofit when he was on the staff of the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley in the late 1950s. Joining forces with J.W. Dodson and two other like-minded friends, Kimnach started propagating in earnest in 1956. During his tenure as superintendent and curator of the Huntington Botanical Gardens from 1962 to 1986, Kimnach made numerous expeditions to Mexico to conduct fieldwork, resulting in the discovery of many new species. (He began the Huntington’s popular plant sales, in part, to finance such expeditions.) Kimnach supervised the propagation of many of these new succulents for introduction through ISI and for planting in the Huntington’s burgeoning Desert Garden. Today—as then—only seedlings, grafts, and rooted cuttings produced under nursery conditions are sold. All income generated is used to support the program.

Since Kimnach’s heyday, botanical gardens have assumed even greater positions of leadership—and have become much more vocal—on issues of conservation, a response undoubtedly driven by deepening environmental concerns. “Potentially, we play a huge role as repositories of biodiversity—and also as places of outreach and education,” says Trager. Curator of the Desert Collections, Trager is the program’s chief ambassador. He balances the pleasure of distributing new cacti to grace collectors’ hothouses with the responsibility of dissuading people from going into the wild and digging up plants on their own.

For more than 20 years, Trager has spent uncountable hours in the nursery taking cuttings, sowing seeds, cross-pollinating plants, and performing the endless—often mundane—tasks required to generate new life. “Timing is everything,” he explains with a sweeping glance through the nursery’s huge space, which also extends into a hothouse. “We can’t possibly be in the right place all the time. Fruits may explode when we’re not there to catch the seeds.” His coworker Karen Zimmerman, Desert Collections propagator, helps him watch for these opportune moments among the 200 to 300 different species in various stages of propagation. A single plant can sometimes take five to eight years to yield a good crop; some plants need decades. Because Trager does not have to adhere to the business model of a commercial nursery, he can adopt a Zen approach—everything happens in good time. Also, his other full-time curatorial duties mean some plants just have to wait their turn in line, as was the case with S. ochoterenanus.

“Propagation requires extraordinary patience,” says Trager. “But it’s worth it for the promise of producing a new plant that hasn’t been seen in the United States.” Trager developed his skills early in life. As a teenager growing up in Santa Barbara, he “inexplicably started chopping and propagating” the succulents in his family’s backyard. Upon exhausting these plants, he moved on to take cuttings from the neighbors.

The ISI distributes as many as 40 new succulent varieties every year, requiring at least 100 plants of each to fulfill orders. Published annually in the March/April issue of the Cactus and Succulent Journal, the ISI catalog attracts mail orders from around the world—including a thriving clientele in Germany and England, which generates one-sixth of the ISI orders. The ISI catalog can also be found on the Huntington’s Web site.

The 33 species for sale this year are indigenous to the Canary Islands, Chile, Madagascar, Malawi, Mexico, and South Africa. From the United States comes a new variety of cacti that makes its horticultural debut. Discovered by botanists in the desert of southern Texas a few years back, Echinocereus viridiflorus var. canus has greenish-yellow flowers with a lemony fragrance. Also featured is Boswellia nana, a rare treat from Socotra, a remote island in the Arabian Sea that has seen few botanical expeditions because of tight governmental controls. The plant is perhaps the most ornamental of the frankincense genus, similar in look to a compact bonsai with glossy, feather-like leaves and showy pink flowers.

The laissez-faire political climate that once allowed explorers to collect botanical specimens from Mexico and beyond has—in the last decade in particular—changed dramatically as governments have moved to impose more stringent restrictions on collecting and exporting plants. Intended to protect biodiversity, this tighter control has also severely curtailed field expeditions for educational and research institutions such as The Huntington. Because funds are limited—as is staff time—Trager has relied more heavily on botanists and explorers who already have permits to collect seeds in certain countries. Walter Röösli and Ralph Hoffmann, a noted team of Swiss explorers, collect specimens from the exotic and singular flora of Madagascar. “The Swiss team is very judicious in harvesting from the wild—they only take what they need to establish a species in cultivation,” says Trager.

Röösli and Hoffmann propagate new plants in Switzerland then send them to Trager with necessary permits and documentation. Plant data include information about the precise wild location of the plant and the soil type, associated flora, and altitude in which it thrives in the wild. These details are critical to researchers, and many have used the Huntington’s repository of original source material for their own botanical studies precisely because the records are so thorough. The documented collection grows more valuable to researchers as governments around the world impose more restrictions, and as plant diversity diminishes.

Anyone with even a slight interest in the environment knows the outlook is not especially hopeful. Some studies estimate that as many as two-thirds of the world’s flora and fauna may become extinct during the course of the 21st century, the result of global warming, encroaching development, and overfarming. Scientists alarmed by these prospects are working diligently to propagate plants outside their natural habitats, in protected areas.

Ex-situ cultivation, as this practice is known, can serve as a stopgap for plants that will otherwise be lost to the world as their habitats disappear. In Madagascar, from which come a significant number of ISI plants, only about 15 percent of the land is now forested—people, cattle, fire, and a burgeoning industry of charcoal production have cleared much of the rest. The Huntington has 60 individual seedlings of the Madagascan succulent tree Euphorbia kamponii, a few of them growing in the Desert Garden. (Euphorbia is a succulent genus of the Euphorbiaceae family, one of the largest families in the plant world.) Only three individual trees of the species are known to exist in the wild in Madagascar. While Trager has no illusions about repopulating species in the far corners of the world, he is heartened by the fact that future botanists will be able to use ISI plants if they ever want to reintroduce a species into its native habitat.

It’s easy to be a pessimist in this business, just one step ahead of extinction. Trager, however, brightens considerably as he displays another offering from this year’s catalog, Othonna protecta. “It’s an ugly little plant, actually, in the sunflower family—a little succulent with daisy-like flowers that only open in the morning,” he says with pride. “Its charm is that it has a caudex, a Latin term for a swollen, water-storing stem. Caudiciforms attract a huge following because of their gnarled, bonsai quality.”

Trager collected the original plants himself in the Richtersveld region of northwest South Africa in 1997, being permitted to bring back only three specimens. Now he gazes upon an entire flat of descendants. The ISI offerings represent the first time the plant has been in cultivation, although fortunately its survival in the wild—at least at the moment—is not in jeopardy. But Trager is ever mindful of his role as custodian of a species’ future. “It’s definitely worth having in cultivation,” he explains, “because you never know when something might happen to the indigenous population.”

Traude Gomez-Rhine is a staff writer at The Huntington.

View the current International Succulent Introductions catalog.