SHANGRI-HA CACTUS RANCH
DELIBERATE BEAUTY THAT STARTED 100 YEARS AGO
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ABOUT US
About 90 years ago, our grandmother, Rebecca, commissioned a greenhouse to be built in the deep end of their backyard. It sat in a clearing, beside the old cottage, with only an abandoned three well aluminum sink, and my granddaddy’s first vegetable garden, between it and the dark tree line where deer and bobcats roamed beneath the pines.
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We grew up watching her take care of each of her finds, watering, cleaning, dividing and repotting them as they grew. She knew them so well, loved them even. She’d move them from one side of the greenhouse to the other depending on their needs, their appearance, the light, the pot, the space, the season. A tarped mound of play sand appeared one day beneath a nearby pecan tree. We knew it was not for us.
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I watched her, amazed by the exotic, other-world she had created inside those glass windows. Every shelf was full of crazy, beautiful creatures that seemed so foreign to other yards on the Georgia Fall Line where box woods traditionally buttressed Charleston grass, then gave way to mounds of daylilies and azaleas rolling wild to the edge of some nearby fence line or pecan orchard.
Back then, in the 50s, 60s and 70s she learned wherever she could. From the set of the New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Gardening that sat on the bottom bookshelf in the den, from the local feed and seed stores in the south and east sections of town, from the church garden club she started, from a rural garden club near the house which met at the public school, and even at the farmer’s market…she borrowed, shared and traded plants and knowledge.
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When I got my first apartment in Atlanta, I asked her how to choose some cacti for our place. We were standing in the middle of her azalea garden, where she relished such questions near the end of the day. "Always buy the ugliest ones you can find," she told me. Then she laughed, met my eyes and led me to the house.
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Today, almost 50 years later, I still have her lime green copy of Exotic Plant Manuel that she kept on the mahogany sideboard in the living room, and I use it every day too. And I know how happy she would be to see us, to see me, carrying on her tradition of growing, and loving, the ugliest cacti {and succulents} we can find.
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Los Angeles – 2022
