Cactus Land

When I told my friend John O'Sullivan that I had just been to Cactus Land he replied,

"Let me think. I wonder what they have there".

It's one of those rare places that does just what it says on the tin. They grow cacti; thousands of them in huge greenhouses that cover several acres. Does that grab your interest? It did mine.

I know nothing about cacti really. I saw my first wild ones on the rain-shadow side of Washington State along the Columbia River. It was a shock because we were way north, almost in Canada and I did not expect desert, sumac and cacti here, so near to a snaking blue river in the mountains of the Pacific North West.

Later I would find cacti in the Caribbean, Costa Rica and Africa, but I never really asked any questions about them. To me they were just cacti, though some of them (as it turned out) were not actually cacti at all. It didn't matter because I could never see myself owning one.

Our son Nicholas has a very highly tuned visual cortex. He just homes in on things that others simply do not notice, like the man selling tiny cacti outside a London tube station.


Like me, Nick had seen cacti before, but that was all. But something happened in his head (as it so often does) and The Nicholas Stevenson Finchley Cactus Rescue Centre was born. It continues to grow and may yet engulf whole streets and neighbourhoods.

It's Nicks birthday tomorrow, so we thought we would buy him a cactus. Hanna searched on-line and found Cactus Land, less than an hour from our home, just north of Stamford, at Bourne in Lincolnshire. We set off.

I expected a huddle of greenhouses and a lot of cacti but I was not prepared for the experience of seeing thousands of cacti arranged on tables in the sunlight. I went into a sort of sensory overload.


They are a photographers dream, of course, but the overwhelming thing about cacti is the desire to ruffle them up with your hands. And you just can't!

There they are, like green pineapples but with a halo of geometrically patterned fuzz that you just want to fondle. They are so tactile.

We lost well over an hour in the greenhouses and still had no idea what to buy. We knew what Nick already had and we knew he didn't have a big sausage cactus, or a fuzzy cats-tail cactus. We bought the round hairy one because??? I've forgotten why but I like it.

See http://cactusland.co.uk/main.php


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