Xerophile

An updated edition of the cult classic, featuring stunning archival photographs of hundreds of the rarest and most spectacular plants on Earth, taken by a motley crew of cactus obsessives

“A catalogue of wonders that most of us will never get to see in person.”—The New Yorker

From the people behind Cactus Store comes Xerophile, a photographic collection of these improbable desert wonders in the wild. Drawing on the archives of twenty-five cactus obsessives—from PhD botanist to banker, art teacher to cancer researcher—this revised edition spans eighty years and features new and expanded descriptive notes for all 350+ photos.

Xerophile brings together eighty years’ worth of these explorers’ remarkable images from some of the world’s most remote habitats: a peculiar two-leaved plant that lives for millennia in the deserts of Namibia; succulents whose poisonous sap is used by hunters to fell large game in Angola; and cactus that live on snow-covered mountains in Bolivia, sink below ground level to survive droughts in Mexico, are pollinated by bats in Brazil, and grow in pure lava fields of the Galápagos Islands.

Cactus Store is a botanically minded creative collective with locations in Los Angeles and New York City. Founded in 2014, the group mines the cracks between disciplines to help broker and deepen interspecies relationships between plants and people. Cactus Store designs botanical garden spaces and greenhouses, produces gardening clothes and products, and is currently developing a television show about plants. It has been featured in the New Yorker, Surface, Atlas Obscura, Los Angeles Times, Gardenista, GQ, Purple magazine, Apartment Therapy, and more.