How They Pass the Time in Pelpel

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“You know,” Dan Britton said, pointing to a particularly sinister-looking ash-gray cactus on the nursery bench, “all these plants have stories, and some of them are damned strange stories. I don’t mean botanical stories. I mean that all these peculiar plants that we grow here in California and that we take pretty much for granted had to be discovered by someone in some nasty corner of the world and collected and brought back and propagated and distributed. And in the process of all that, odd things have occasionally happened to the people who went out and found those plants.” He picked up the ash-gray cactus. It was strange even as cacti go, not only because of its deathly color but because of the glossy black spines, heavy and menacing, running in rigidly aligned vertical rows down its sides. “Copiapoa cinerea,” said Britton, “from the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. This one and most of the others you’ll see are descended from the parent plants that I collected thirty years ago in the Atacama, between Pelpel and Sabroso. I ought to tell you that story some time.”

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