“I think storytelling is part of the appeal,” says Christian Cummings, 43, a partner in the Cactus Store with Carlos Morera, 38, and Max Martin, 36, who founded the business with the architect Jeff Kaplon, 41, in 2014; Cummings, Morera and Martin all have backgrounds in art and design and have expanded the platform beyond horticulture to include clothing, lawn furniture, ceramics and books. During a recent visit to their studio, Cummings gestured to an Aztekium ritteri, a tiny, wrinkly cactus with fractalized swirls that he describes as “Yoda-like.” The native version of the plant grows so slowly in the crannies of the cliffs of Nuevo León, Mexico, that for the first few years of its life, it never gets bigger than a grain of sand. Cummings estimates that his store’s specimen took 25 years to reach the size of a blueberry.
TO LIVE WITH and lend pride of place to such a curious and unassuming life-form is “ego slaying,” says Cummings. It is also, perhaps, an act of defiance against the superficiality of the botanical zeitgeist on Instagram, which has done for certain plants what it has for certain places. Over the past decade, glossy tropical species like Monstera deliciosa and familiar, friendly ones like the fiddle-leaf fig have become prop styling clichés for direct-to-consumer brands, a millennial design trope on par with (and often paired with) pastel gradients or terrazzo.
Plants have, of course, long followed their own cycles of fashion, as has been observed by Loney Abrams, 36, and Johnny Stanish, 40, of Wretched Flowers — a New York- and Connecticut-based floral and object design studio with a droll goth sensibility — who in 2021 shared on their Instagram account a pair of slide shows tracking 20th-century potting trends (hanging vines softened the sharp corners of midcentury architecture; bamboo was big in the ’90s, when designers were looking to China for inspiration). Though the Wretched Flowers duo offer only cut bouquets and vessels, they subvert industry standards by emphasizing plants that are regarded as pests, such as love-in-a-mist (also called devil in the bush) and milkweed, or ones that have gone to seed. It’s a political as well as an aesthetic strategy. “Plants that are known as native weeds are the most abundant, available and environmentally friendly,” says Abrams.
