Episode 169: cactus and succulent poaching - what you need to know

Dudleya farinosa growing in Regional Parks Botanic Garden near Berkeley, California. Photograph: John Rusk on Flickr.

Dudleya farinosa growing in Regional Parks Botanic Garden near Berkeley, California. Photograph: John Rusk on Flickr.

Transcript

Episode 169

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Jane: Hello, it's 2021 and I am Jane Perrone, your guide to the world of houseplants! Whether you are a pandemic convert to the houseplant cause, or whether you've been growing them since day dot, my podcast On The Ledge is here for you!

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Jane: If you're feeling déjà vu all over again, like I am right now, back to home-schooling and trying to juggle work and domestic commitments, then a shout-out to you! What that means for On The Ledge podcast, well, hopefully not very much. I'm going to try to keep the show going on a weekly basis and keep up with the Extra Leaf episodes for Patreons, but it may impact the show a little bit. I'm really trying to prioritise my children's health and wellbeing at the moment because this is the second time they have been stuck at home and this time around the weather isn't great. So I'm doing my best to really prioritise them at the moment, so, of course, the podcast will be here but it may be that some episodes end up being a little bit shorter, a little bit less comprehensive than usual, but we'll see how it goes. I'm going to do my best to keep On The Ledge rolling because I love making the show, it's great for my mental health and I know it's great for your mental health too.

What are we talking about this week? Well, if you've ever wondered whether that very rare cactus you're lusting after on the internet is an ethical purchase, this episode should help. I'm joined by Jared Margulies who's an academic who's been going behind the headlines to find out more about the trade in illegally-obtained cacti and succulents, plus I'm answering a question about storing corms. Like the sound of that? Keep listening!

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Jane: Thank you to those of you who sent lovely comments about my Christmas bonus episode and, for whoever it was who made this request, may I say once more: "Bah, humbug!" It has occurred to me that the fourth, yes, you heard that right, the fourth anniversary of On The Ledge podcast is coming up fast! It is actually on the 28^th^ February 2021 that the show turns four, and the Friday before that, that happens to be a Sunday, I will do some kind of episode marking that anniversary and if you have any suggestions of what to include in that milestone episode, then do let me know.

Thank you, also, to all of you who have decided to support On The Ledge while I've been off the air. Al, Caroline and Jonathan all gave a one-off donation via ko-fi.com. So if you don't want to commit to a monthly payment, or an annual payment, to On The Ledge and you just want to fire me over a little bit of cash to say "Thank you for the show," roughly equivalent to the cost of one or more cups of coffee, then you can use ko-fi.com to do that and you'll find a link to that in the show notes. Thank you to that trio of listeners who chose to do just that!

Thank you also to the six listeners who've become Ledge-End supporters on Patreon, that's Cynthia, Jeff, Julia, Garrett, Arthur and Jackie, and to Jessica who became a SuperFan on Patreon. Again, Patreon instructions are over on the website for details of that and there's also some other tips on what you can do to support the show if you don't have any spare moolah to pass my way!

One of the things you can do, which costs you only a few minutes in time as opposed to anything monetary, is leave a review for On The Ledge and that's what StomataMama in the US - great name! - did and left a lovely review for On The Ledge, so thank you for that. And that's no small feat because I know that leaving a review on Apple Podcasts can be a bit of a pain in the proverbial, so thank you for going through that StomataMama and I'm grateful for your input.

Thank you to Sal for getting in touch just before Christmas. You may remember listener Sal because Sal is a doctor working with Covid-19 patients in the US and has been mentioned on the show before and in this lovely message that I got from Sal, they wrote: "We've had another surge of hospital admissions over the past several days and some of us will have to give up our holiday vacations to help out, as it is all hands on deck. Yesterday, I came home feeling that there is no end in sight to this crisis. Lo and behold my son greeted me at the door with a big smile stating, 'Mum, you just got a card from someone you highly admire!' and it was your beautiful holiday card! Then I took the On The Ledge podcast quiz and, well, I have to admit I have no idea about Calatheas or cacti spikes, but I remembered the baboons, Wolfie and your husband's preferred name for the podcast, so I was filled with joy! Your On The Ledge manifesto and your podcast are truly beacons of hope for me, and many others, during this incredibly difficult year!"

Well, thank you Sal for everything that you have been doing and for giving up your rest-time over Christmas to look after Covid-19 patients. I imagine it hasn't got any easier since you wrote that message and my heart goes out to you. Keep on keeping on and stay well and I just salute you for everything that you do. It's really lovely of you to send such a nice thank you message to me. I don't really feel like I deserve it but, yes, I just jabber on about plants, which doesn't seem like much of an effort to me, but thank you for your message because it meant a lot and it was great to hear from you and it's good to know that that Patreon card really hit the mark for you.

And a final festive reference, for the moment: thank you to Jackie for your lovely email, sending me a picture of Norman, your Dracaena, which apparently was jealous of the Christmas tree and so has been bedecked with red ribbons and then all the other houseplants decided to get in on the act! It made me chuckle seeing Norman the Dracaena with these beautiful red ribbons, so thank you for sending me that!

Now, let's crack on with today's interview. The market for desirable cacti and succulents has never been hotter and if you keep an eye on the news, you may well have seen headlines about poaching including, "Asia's hunger for 'fat plants' worth their weight in gold". That was a headline from The Times back in February, last year. And another from Business Insider, "Thieves in California sell illegal succulents to Asia's middle class" and in The Guardian, "Stolen succulents: California hipster plants at centre of smuggling crisis".

So, we know poaching is happening, but snappy headlines don't tell the full story. So, I decided to chat to an academic who is studying this phenomenon. In this interview, we'll find out that the stereotypes about who the poachers are and where they're operating and where the plants are ending up need a little bit more examination than those pat headlines and we'll find out what to look for and what questions to ask when you are thinking of buying a desirable cactus or succulent, or, indeed, any other houseplant. And Patreon subscribers, look out, because I'll be dropping an extra segment of chat with my guest into your feed in the coming days in which we look at the phenomenon of men and cacti and delve a bit deeper into the issue of poaching. Right, let's get cracking. I shall hand over to my guest, Jared Margulies, to introduce himself.

Jared: I'm Jared Margulies. I'm an assistant professor of political ecology in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama and I'm currently doing research on the illegal wildlife trade in succulent and cactus plants.

Jane: This is a subject that I've wanted to tackle in the show for quite a long time, Jared, so hearing from you was great because what seemed to be lacking in my research so far, was going deeper than the sort of scary, shouty headlines about plants being poached, and actually finding out a little bit more about what's really going on here because, as we all know, those headlines aren't always quite quite accurate and that's exactly what you've been researching, so it's really great to talk to you. What was it that drew you into focusing specifically on cacti and succulents in terms of illegal trade in wildlife?

Jared: I was hired as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sheffield, in the Department of Politics and International Relations, a few years ago, to work on a larger project about increasing relationships between biodiversity, conservation and security. Specifically, the group was looking at issues related to illegal wildlife trade globally across all kinds of species, including the more famous charismatic ones, such as poaching related to rhino horn and elephant ivory, but I was really interested in trying to understand, from a more nuanced and in-depth perspective, the real mechanisms and means by which trade occurs. So, in particular I was really interested in finding a form of illegal wildlife trade where I could really spend a lot of time with all forms of actors involved in this trade, from law enforcement, to people involved in illegal wildlife trade itself. I came across some articles about Saguaro poaching in the in the US South West, which was the first time I had heard about cactus theft, let alone illegal wildlife trade and succulent and cactus plants. I was really intrigued and I started doing more research and discovered, on the one hand, as you mentioned, a variety of different media articles on the subject, some of which seemed fairly dramatic, but on the other, really, a lack of meaningful in-depth social research on the subject. So, it felt like a really good opportunity to really dive into an area of illegal wildlife trade; whether it really is a lot of important information missing about how it functions and why.

Jane: What is the state of play now with poaching? I guess we're all assuming that the burst of interest brought about by the pandemic in cacti and succulents, and houseplants more widely, would be driving up poaching, but is that really the case? Do we know, at the moment, what's happened in the last year?

Jared: I don't think we know. What we do know is that illegal trade and illegal poaching of wild cactus and succulent plants is by no means something new and it's important to note that what makes the wild extraction of these plants, and their illegal trade, illegal in the first place has a lot to do with international trade conventions that regulate forms of international trade and transit of endangered species. So, specifically here, I'm referring to CITES, which is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. So it's important to note that it's these international trade regulations, alongside national and state level laws, that make certain forms of trade or extraction of plants illegal and this is something that's been occurring for a long time; CITES has been around since the mid-1970s. I do think it's fair to say that, with the emergence of online trading, and I do think that this is affected and mediated by the rise of social media influence in the world of plants and plant commodification, we're seeing, we could say, an acceleration in an increase in the scale of these trades, in part because of the ability of the internet to connect people around the world in very important ways, which further enables and accelerates the capacity for plants to really live and move in global ways that, perhaps, would have taken longer in earlier eras of illegal trade.

Jane: Well, I guess, the bottom line is that a lot of these plants that we now count as popular houseplants came about, or were brought into cultivation, at a time when none of these rules existed, but in fact there must be a lot of devastation back then, when these plants first became popular in, I don't know, the 1800s -- whenever each particular species was "discovered". As you say, this is really not a new thing but we need to be particularly concerned because of this drive of things like Instagram. How does it actually work? Would poachers be looking themselves on Instagram to see what's popular and then finding people to go out and find this stuff?

Jane: I think what's important to note, one problem we have, is that when we say something like there is an illegal wildlife trade in cactus and succulent species, we fail to recognise that there are many forms of these trades. So, there's multiplicities of illegal wildlife trades and cactus and succulent plants and they come in many different shapes and forms. So, one kind of long-standing and classic version of this would be highly skilled, well-researched, individual folks who go out into cactus and succulent habitat, say a European cactus collector who goes to the US/Mexico borderlands, for instance, extracts plants, say a very old area, carpus species of cactus, takes it back to Europe and either sells the wild plant or, quite possibly, also uses it as a stock plant to then reproduce and produce more plants as well. On the other hand, we have seen the rise with Instagram, for instance, of clearly wild-extracted plants, but also on forums like Etsy and also eBay, clearly wild-extracted plants ending up on these forums, where, again, I think what we're seeing is probably a very select number of, what we can call 'poachers', who've leveraged the capacity of these platforms as a marketplace and are going out extracting plants and then posting them online. One of the problems with the impact of the illegal wildlife trade on these species is so many of them are slow-growing and long-living species, so it doesn't necessarily take that many people going out and illegally extracting and taking plants to have major effects on the populations of these plants and the ecosystem is very large.

Jane: Do we know if this poaching is happening mainly as a result of highly-organised, highly-motivated "specialists", if I can call them that, on the whole, with a few people on the edges, almost like poaching tourists, just doing this once when they happen to be somewhere where there's a rare plant and picking it out? Or is it a real mix? Or is it mainly people who think, "Oh, I'm on holiday in South Africa. I'm on a tour where I'm being shown rare plants. I'm going to come back tomorrow and take some of those!"? There's this kind of line between poaching and kind of, "Oh well, I didn't know!" tourism. Is there a line between that, or is it effectively the same thing?

Jared: It's such an important question because it speaks to the social construction of illegality and illicitness in really important ways. We need to be very careful in using terms like 'organised crime' because they mean particular kinds of things within certain contexts, specifically criminological contexts. I think it's more accurate to say - and this is a concept I'm drawing on from some of the criminological literature - that much of what is being described, for instance, in splashing news articles about the organised criminal cartels involved in cactus poaching, for instance, are more reasonably... we could consider them disorganised forms of crime. In the sense that there are clearly people involved who know what they're doing and have good information, for instance, about where plants are found. This, of course, relates to the fact that it's quite easy now, with the internet, to find a lot of information about where plants are found in habitats, whether it's via forums or even in more formal scientific research. They go out, they find plants, they may or may not have lists of potential sellers and dealers, but this is not organised crime in the way that we understand drug cartels to be organised crime. It's important to not conflate the two because it has significant effects about how we should meaningfully respond to these forms of crime. There's very good reasons to think that trying to focus on supply-side disruption through forms of law enforcement is not the right approach to take and this is based on a lot of information from criminological studies on disrupting crime syndicates, for instance, and instead what we should be really focusing on, probably, is the demand side. Do, for instance, consumers understand that these are wild-extracted plants? Do consumers not have the information they need to be able to recognise plants that are coming from the wild versus, say, plants that are being legally and sustainably cultivated, for instance, in greenhouses instead?

Jane: I guess, this leads me on to ask what should we, as consumers, be looking for, or not looking for, when we want to buy a few succulents and we've gone past the regular things that we can pick up in our local garden centre, or even specialist nurseries, and we're getting all excited about rare things. What are the red flags that we should be looking out for? Is it easy to spot things that have been poached?

Jared: There's a few things that people should look out for and I think one of the important things that folks should think about is feeling comfortable asking people, whether it's a local shop or online dealers, to confirm the origins of these plants that they're thinking about buying. One, I think in asking those kinds of questions, it will create a culture in which buyers, as well as sellers, understand that this is an important issue that has impacts on species and habitats, but it's also a good place to start in terms of trying to figure out the origins of particular species. As you sort of hinted at, and to be clear, the vast majority of us, if you're going into a regular plant store or a local garden centre and are buying reasonably run-of-the-mill succulents or cacti, the chances that you're dealing with something that was extracted from the wild is incredibly low. It is, of course, when you get into these more rare areas that it's more important to ask these questions and there are some signs. An important one being plants that are coming out of habitat will look like they've lived a little, right? And there's some good examples of this online, if you do a little bit of Google searching, where some great folks have put together some guides on how you can sort of see some of the signs. So, for instance, wild-extracted plants are going to look much more weathered, frankly. They will look, to most people, a lot less aesthetically-pleasing than cultivated plants. They're often much more compact, or contorted, in their form, due to the effects of time and weather, for instance. So there are signals, for instance, that plants may be wild-extracted plants and if you see those signals, it's all the more important to ask these kinds of questions.

Jane: Presumably, if you get a kind of "No comment" answer, or they don't want to answer, or they're dancing around the subject, then you've got to steer well clear because the likelihood is there may be a possibility that these plants have been poached?

Jared: Yes, and I think it's also worth noting, of course, that one thing that is interesting about the illegal trade in cactus and succulent plants, and one of the reasons I became interested in it as a researcher, is much of this illegal trade is happening in the open. There's not illegal cactus and succulent plant trade happening on the dark web. It's up in eBay, it's happening in Etsy and oftentimes people are advertising plants, as such, as 'wild plants', because they know that there is a market for wild-collected plants by certain kinds of collectors who see additional value in those plants. The good news is, I think that culture is changing and I think one of the ways that it will continue to change is by having these kinds of conversations, so I think it's wonderful that you're doing a show on the subject because I do think that it is a relatively outdated ethic of collecting, that people value wild-collected plants for their personal collections. I do think, increasingly within the community of cactus and succulent collectors, especially at least those who I've been spending so much time with both in the United States as well as Europe and the UK, there's an increasing recognition of the importance of thinking about these collections as having relationships with the sustainability and preservation of plants and habitat, which is a very good thing.

Jane: So, if we see something, say, on eBay, or Etsy, that we think, "Oh, that looks like it's been wild-collected," presumably the best thing to do is to report it to eBay because the more reports they're getting, the more they're going to scrutinise these sellers?

Jared: Yes, I think that's right. One of the things that's really difficult about regulating illegal trade in cactus and succulent plants is one, how many different species there are, oftentimes species are sold under different names, so it does present challenges, I think, for instance for some of these social media platforms to regulate this. But there's also been some really great research that's coming out, especially through a particular project I've been made aware of called Floraguard, for instance, on ways that these platforms can begin to start to automate tracking and monitoring the selling of wild-collected plants.

Jane: Yes, the technology must be there for platforms like eBay to start really cracking down on this and what's the global will to get this under control like? Does it vary from country to country as to how they're dealing with this and how much resource they're putting into trying to tackle it?

Jared: It varies, country to country, and it's important to note the difficulty of trying to regulate this truly global trade. I think it's also really important to note that, despite so many of the media articles that have come out about illegal trade in cactus and succulent species, some of the largest consumers of cactus and succulent plants - specifically here I'm thinking of the illegal-trading cactus and succulent species - is coming from the global north, is coming from the United States, as well as European countries. This is a narrative that runs counter, oftentimes, to the kinds of stories we see about, where wildlife trade happens and where plants are coming from and where they're going. So, an important thing for listeners to also think about is the ways in which illegal wildlife trade isn't something that's happening somewhere else out there. It's happening very much here at home. In terms of thinking about these questions of regulation that you bring up, it's incredibly difficult and one of the reasons it's so difficult, of course, is especially when plants are in the juvenile stage or the fact that within CITES, say, "All Mexican cactus seeds are also listed and require permits for export from Mexico". The capacity of law enforcement agents to recognise these different species and to recognise that a seed in someone's pocket is in fact a cactus seed, it's incredibly difficult work and it requires a lot of capacity building on the side of law enforcement. So, for all of these reasons, it's all the more important to also think about the demand side of this equation in trying to develop ethics by which people respect plants in their own collections as having relationships with those that live out in habitats, in nature, and also an ethic of care that extends to wanting to preserve and maintain those species and habitats rather than taking them home to possess.

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Jane: More from Jared shortly, but now it's time for Question of the Week, which comes from Joshua. Thank you for your lovely message, Joshua, which you begin by offering "greetings from my jungle slice!" Hmmm, jungle slice! Sounds delicious! Sorry, I've been doing a lot of baking lately and any mention of slice immediately turns my mind to buttery, baked goods. Somebody's going to have to come up with a jungle slice recipe now. Sorry, this is veering off into dangerous territory of a baking podcast, so I shall get straight back onto the plants. Joshua writes: "About a month ago, I bought myself a gorgeous Xanthosoma sagittifolium Frozen Planet, or Arrowleaf Elephant's Ear, which then, as a result of cold shock and excessive damage from bad handling received during delivery, lost many of its leaves." Ooh, Joshua, I can feel your pain. "It is down to its last three leaves which are also fading, with yellow and brown edges developing on, especially, the small, baby leaf. Last week, I decided to repot it from the squishy soil it came in" - good decision! - "into an airy Aroid mix, inspired by the Plant Daddy's Podcast" - even better decision, Joshua! - "and noticed that the corms are doing okay and even shooting out new roots". Well, that is good news! Joshua's question, though, is this: "What should I do with the corms if the plant loses all its leaves? Would I have to lift it from the soil, to prevent rot, or are they okay hanging tight in the soil with reduced watering?"

So, Joshua, there are two possibilities here. Possibility one, that you leave the corms in situ in the pot. If they do die back completely and you don't water them, well, you may wish to just slightly, slightly, slightly, away from being bone dry and then when you're ready in the spring, and you think that light levels are improving, you can then start watering them again and they will re-shoot. This is the easiest route forward and I actually think, personally, is probably the best route. By leaving the plants in their substrate, bearing in mind that you've put them in this wonderful airy Aroidsubstrate, as recommended by the wonderful Plant Daddy Podcast, they're going to have lots of air around their roots, they're going to be surrounded by a substrate that's suitable to them, they are not going to be subject to the whole of their surface area being exposed to drying air which can cause the corms to shrivel and die.

The other option is that you take them out of the pot, dry them out for a few days in a cool place out of direct sunlight, and then get them ready to be stored and you could store them on a layer of something like dry vermiculite or dry coir with a tray, with them laid out, all separate, so they're not touching one another. Put a layer of your substrate, whatever that may be, and then spread the bulbs out across that tray and then top up with another few centimetres of your vermiculite or whatever. To me though, that seems like extra work. I guess the advantage of that method is that you can check your corms throughout the course of that period of dormancy to see whether they're rotting, or whether there's any problems. If they start to shrivel excessively you may need to spray that substrate a little just so that they get a little bit more moisture.

I'm thinking that the best thing you can do is leave them in their pot, let that pot dry out, put it somewhere out of the way, it doesn't have to have any light, so it could go in a cupboard somewhere, just do a reminder on your phone every few days, to check on it. The worst thing about it is you just can't see what's going on, how the corms are, but I think there's more danger from disturbing the corms taking them out of their place, where they've been happy-ish, than there is from dislodging them and putting them into another substrate.

I speak from personal experience on this. I had some Caladium corms which I had outside in a pot and I decided to store them indoors and I let them dry out but they just got too dry and shrivelled and they didn't make it. It was heartbreaking, not least because Caladium corms aren't the cheapest, and also just because I wanted to enjoy more foliage the following year. So, Joshua, it's up to you. Some growers also recommend using wood shavings. My daughter recently having got a snake, I'm thinking of Aspen snake bedding as being something you could use for this, if you happen to have that around. When you do examine those corms, the main things to be looking out for are moulds, squishy bits, soft bits, obviously, shoots. If they do start shooting, then you will need to prop them up if they have been in a tray being stored outside the pot. If they are shooting and they're in the pot then that's the cue to start watering again. So, do keep a close eye on them, a reminder on your phone is absolutely vital, as I've discovered, and that way you should get some growth. I would say you're looking at probably end of February, beginning of March, for growth to realistically begin, but it depends how much light and heat they are stored in. If you want to keep them from shooting too early, then go for cooler temperatures, an unheated room would be absolutely fine, somewhere where they are not going to freeze, they're going to be far away from freezing, we're talking 10C which is - she says, looking over at her chart - sorry, I'm going to lean over and the chair is squeaking, apologies! 50F is what you're looking for, roughly. That's about 10C. So, yes, keep them cool and they should resist shooting until you're ready and then you can bring them into a warmer place. So whether they're in the pot or in a tray, you can apply this. Bring them into a warmer place and start watering again and they should start shooting. When you do start watering and they're in the pot, just remember there won't be an awful lot of active root growth, so therefore your watering should be very controlled. If it's in that airy Aroid compost then, hopefully, that won't be a problem.

I hope that helps, Joshua, and I hope your Xanthosoma Frozen Planet is looking amazing by mid-summer. It looks pretty good now, looking at the pictures you've sent. I think you're worrying unnecessarily. Plants like this, yes, they do get bashed about in transit, but they will come back. That's why they have these corms. They store nutrients and resources so they can come back better than ever. So I hope it all goes well. Let me know, Joshua. And if you've got a question for On The Ledge drop me a line ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. Include as much info as you can. Pictures are always super-useful.

Now, it's time to go back to our interview where I want to find out about the particular threat to a Californian succulent whose common names include Powdery Liveforever.

Jane: I'm interested to get on to talking about your particular research into the Dudleya farinosa succulent, which draws on a lot of what we've already been talking about, in terms of misconceptions in the press and elsewhere about how this whole thing works in terms of who's buying these plants and who's driving the demand. Can you describe Dudleya farinosa for anyone who hasn't seen it, or doesn't know what that particular succulent looks like, and whereabouts it grows and the landscape in which it grows?

Jared: Yes, so Dudleya farinosa is an interesting species and, to be clear, I'm not a botanist and I'm learning alongside doing this research on illegal trade and succulent and cactus plants, and part of that work is spending time learning the botany and more about the ecology of these different species. So, to my eye, when I first came across Dudleya farinosa, it sort of looked to me like an everyday Echeveria that you might find selling for five bucks at a garden store. It has evolved, over time, to understand it as a really incredible species. It's a species of succulent plant that has a wide range in terms of living all the way from the south near Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara in California, all the way up into across northern California, up into Oregon. However, within that context, it only lives within a very narrow ecotone and band between the ocean and the tops of seaside cliffs. It's a plant that really thrives in the vertical world of these cliffs, on cliff edges, where they are exposed to occasional ocean spray but never inundated completely by waves, but they live within a very well-draining system. So, something that's important to the physiology of Dudleya farinosa is they aren't plants that like to be water-bound in terms of their roots. They like well-draining soils, and so they live in this kind of very steep, narrow ecosystem that stretches very much along the entire West Coast of the United States.

Jane: There's been a lot of poaching of this particular succulent. What is it that makes it so desirable? Have we managed to pin down why people are so mad for it?

Jared: I became aware of Dudleya farinosa because I was first made aware of another species, Dudleya pachyphytum,which is a truly rare and endangered Dudleya species that only lives on the north-facing cliffs of Cedros Island, off the coast of Baja, California; an incredibly beautiful species. If you haven't seen an image of Dudleya pachyphytum, do look it up. I'm not trying to incite more desire for people to collect the species, however, it is a very rare and endangered plant and it needs protection. In many ways, Dudleya farinosa is a closely-approximating species that looks a lot like Dudleya pachyphytum but there's more of it available and existing both within the commercial trade but also in habitat. So I actually became aware of the Dudleya farinosa trade while I was already in the midst of studying other forms of illegal succulent trade and I saw a variety of articles come out in major media outlets, like the New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, talking about this emergent new trade in Dudleya farinosa and I was already in California at this time and so I decided to make more time and I spent about a month doing interviews with law enforcement agents, with conservationists, with botanists up and down the California coastline, trying to understand the emergence of this trade, understanding why it occurred and why it was happening. Ultimately, in doing that work, I came to realise that there was really a lack of understanding about what was driving what appeared to be the sudden demand for these plants. So, for that reason, about a year later, I ended up going to South Korea for another month of research, looking at the demand side of this trade because, at least according to who had been caught stealing these plants and also what the media was reporting, the primary site of consumption for these plants was in South Korea and there were a number of individuals who had been caught stealing Dudleya farinosa plants up and down the California coastline, the majority of whom were from South Korea.

Jane: Obviously, portability is an issue here. Do people get a pick-up truck and come in and take out massive cacti, or is it really the tiny ones that you can take without being spotted? I'm just having an image here of somebody putting a giant column of cactus on the back of a truck! I guess it's easier to smuggle something that's nice and small, like a Dudleya, and transport it?

Jared: I should clarify, I'm writing a book on the illegal trade in cactus and succulent plants globally, so stay tuned for that, and one of the things that I'm thinking a lot about in particular, in learning more about these plants, is in fact how succulents and cacti, in particular, have evolved makes them more lootable. So, I'm writing about their lootability through their evolution in ways in which they survive in these extreme climates, for instance. The fact that cacti can survive for months on end both in extreme temperature fluctuations but without water makes them especially vulnerable to being able to be quickly scooped up, thrown in a box, and shipped around the world. In the same way, as ridiculous as it sounds, what you described with a Saguaro ending up in a truck, is exactly what cactus wrestlers in Mexico, in the US South West, have precisely done. Of course, that's a different trade because it's really for the landscape architectural market, but the fact that Saguaros have evolved to survive in the desert means that, unlike, say, trying to rip up a maple tree that's the same age as an incredible Saguaro, Saguaros don't have these massive deep root systems that, for instance, trees do. The majority of their roots stretch out far and wide from the plant itself but at very shallow levels, in order to very quickly be able to absorb water from the desert landscape in which they grow, which, in part, makes them all the more vulnerable to relatively easily, given their size, be ripped up and covered in burlap and thrown in the back of a pick-up truck.

Jane: So if we've got listeners in the southern states of the US or Central America being offered a cheap cactus off the back of a truck, probably best to say no to that one. I imagine it does happen. It happens here in the UK with landscapers. Obviously there's many legitimate landscapers, but people do... I think it's particularly olive trees here, actually, where somebody will be doing something in their garden and a landscaping van will pull up and say, "Oh, we've got these leftover olive trees from a landscape project. Would you like to buy them at a bargain price?" and the same story applies in the sense of they haven't gone through the right avenues in order to reach the UK, or whatever.

Jared: Cycads are another great example of that and, I think, in terms of plants that are really affected by the landscape architectural trade and it speaks to the temporality of plants in the fact that one of the major threats, I think, to succulent plants is the fact that so many of them are slow-growing species. The rate at which they grow, in relationship to the desire of individual collectors to have a mature and beautiful specimen, produces these possibilities for illicit trade and this is exactly what happened with Dudleya farinosa in the sense that the plants, in part in relationship to the rise of a sort of Instagram culture and the sharing of social media about these species because they're really beautiful, they photograph very well, there was a rise in interest in purchasing these species. There was a disjuncture between the number of individual plants available at certain sizes on the market and the sudden increase in desire and demand for these plants. This produced an opportunity by which people felt compelled to quickly make a lot of money by poaching plants from the California coastline, shipping them en masse to South Korea, in order to feed this increasing demand for Dudleya farinosa. But it's important to note, in doing the research that I did, that unlike what a lot of media articles and law enforcement officials assumed, namely that collectors were actually desiring of wild-collected specimens, or the fact that plants came from California gave them more value or made them more desirable, this didn't actually hold water. In fact, it had more to do with the desire for plants, especially ones of a certain age and maturity, so there's nothing specifically about the fact that they're wild or came from California that was inciting desire for collectors in South Korea or China or Japan and, importantly, it's worth noting that this is actually rather a global trade. Many of these plants were ending up in South Korea, not to stay in South Korea, but to then be raised up and to be grown out more, at which point they were sold literally around the world. There are certain instances of them ending up back in the United States! So this really is a global trade and it does speak to the fact that something, I think, that also needs to develop within the community of collectors, is an ethics of respecting plant time and finding joy in the slow temporality of plants relative to our own, becoming excited about growing plants up from seed and watching them grow slowly over time, rather than immediately wanting a plant that's already 30/40 years old.

Jane: One of the things that occurred to me, going back to my point about the "professional" poachers versus people who are just dabbling, at the moment, with the global pandemic, perhaps we're all rather too restricted in our travel for this to be possible, but I'm sure this does happen, that there are people in different parts of the world who might come across a plant, a cactus, or a succulent that they think is new to botany and dig it up and take it home and start propagating it and selling it, or go on holiday and take things from the wild. Is the rule, basically, just don't do that, wherever you are, whatever you're doing, just don't do any of that, unless you've got CITES documentation coming out of your ears? Is there any guideline for anyone who lives in a place where some of these amazing plants grow, or might be visiting those places, as to, "Okay, I'm not gonna dig up that plant, but I'd like to take some of the seed from a seed pod". Is that okay? How do I go about navigating this world of desirable plants as somebody who's trying not to do wrong but might actually be very desirous of cultivating these plants so they can go on existing and so on?

Jared: It's a bit of a practical, as well as ethical, quagmire you are entering into.

Jane: I suspected you might say that!

Jared: Yes, the simplest answer is, if you are thinking about transporting live plants or seed, viable seed, across international borders, it is immediately complicated and will be dependent on the family or genera of plant. So, the entire cactus family of plants, for instance, is listed on CITES. So without appropriate CITES permits, there is no legal means to transport cacti internationally without export and import permits. It becomes more complicated at the level of seeds. All Mexican cacti seeds, for instance, are listed on CITES, so the same would apply to them, but there are also national regulations. So, for instance, it would also not be permissible, due to national regulations legislation within Brazil, to take Brazilian cacti seeds, for instance, and travel internationally. So, different countries have different customs rules, so unfortunately I can't give a straight answer to that. It's also worth noting that while it's certainly reasonable to assume that many species would be perfectly fine if you went along and, for instance, found a plant that was putting out fruit and had viable seed on it and you took a few home, that population of plants might be perfectly fine, but we also need to think about the scales at which this is happening. Are you the only person visiting that population of plants over the year? Some species don't actually produce... they may produce a lot of seeds, but many of them won't be viable, especially within the context of seeds actually being viable and then actually becoming fully-grown plants that in the future will also reproduce. So the extraction of seeds can have a long-term effect on the populations and ecologies of these species. So it is species-specific, it is context-specific and it is country-specific, so, unfortunately, there's not a simple answer to that question.

Jane: Yes, I guess it's a question of "If in doubt, then just don't do it!". I guess this is where societies such as The British Cactus and Succulent Society - which I know you were involved with when you were in the UK - and in the world of Aroids, the International Aroid Society, those societies are a fount of knowledge and can help and, indeed, do run their own preservation projects for the plants that they deal with. So, again, those societies are really important, aren't they?

Jaerd: Absolutely and I do want to recognise that I understand that there are a lot of grey areas here. We use the term "grey market" to sort of refer to the ambiguity between the black market, or the illegal market, and the white market, the legal market. In the sense that, a lot of times, even if you're buying seeds or plants that are cultivated, say you live in the UK and you buy a plant within the UK, there are, of course, interesting questions that we could ask about the longer history of those species. At some point, some plant material, say from Mexico, came to the United Kingdom, right? Perhaps it happened before CITES, so the trade or the movement of those species wasn't illegal because, at the time, there was no international trade convention occurring. Or perhaps it did happen after CITES, where that single plant was illegally or illicitly moved across international borders, but we're talking about the seeds of a plant four generations later. So, I recognise that there's ambiguity in all of this for collectors and it can seem quite complicated, but I do think turning to societies like The British Cactus and Succulent Society, for instance, is a really excellent place to start. Local clubs as well, where there are so many people with so much knowledge about these species that can help folks, whether you're new to the hobby or becoming more interested in more rare and more endangered species, helping folks find plants that they can feel good about purchasing, I think.

[music]

Jane: Thank you so much to Jared for joining me today and if you want to find out more about some of the things we talked about in the interview, whether that's the fascinating succulent Dudleya farinosa, Floraguard, the UK-based project that is tackling the illegal trade in endangered plants and contact details for the BCSS, The British Cactus and Succulent Society, all of those things are in the show notes, so do go and use those valuable resources and, before long, you'll also find full transcripts of every episode after episode 100. I hope you've enjoyed this week's show and I'll be back next Friday. Have a great week. Bye!

[music]

Jane: The music you heard in this episode was Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day, Gokarna by Samuel Corwin and Fire Tree by Axletree. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons. Visit janeperrone.com for details.

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Rare cacti and succulents are being ripped out of the ground and sold illegally all over the world. Dr Jared Margulies of the University of Alabama joins me to discuss the issue of plant poaching: from what to look for when you’re buying rare succulents, to who is behind the illegal trade. And I answer a question about storing Xanthosoma corms.

This week’s guest

Dr Jared Margulies is a political ecologist in the Department of Geography at the University of Alabama. You can find him on Twitter.

Check out these resources as you listen to my interview with Dr Margulies…

Dudleya farinosa growing in California. Photograph: StephanieFalzone on Flickr

Dudleya farinosa growing in California. Photograph: StephanieFalzone on Flickr

Question of the week

Joshua wanted to know how to store the corms of his Xanthosoma sagittifolium ‘Frozen Planet’ if and when they go dormant over winter. I suggest that, if the worse happens and the plant dies back, Joshua leaves the corms in their pot and stores the pots until spring when they can be sparked into life with some water. Otherwise, corms can be dug out of the potting mix and laid on vermiculite or wood shavings in a tray, and covered over with the same. This way it’s easier to check on them regularly for rot or wrinkling caused by drying out, but bear in mind that they are less likely to dry out if left in the pot.

No idea what a corm is? It’s just a term for an underground storage organ, used by the plant to store water and nutrients if resources are scarce.

Want to ask me a question? Email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. The more information you can include, the better - pictures of your plant, details of your location and how long you have had the plant are always useful to help solve your issue!

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CREDITS

This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, An Instrument the Boy Called Happy Day, Gokarna by Samuel Corwin and Fire Tree by Axletree.

Cacti & succulentsJane PerroneDudleya, Aroids, rare plantsComment