My recent week-long visit with Steven Hammer culminated on Monday January 9 with a trip to The Huntington to visit John Trager. We arrived in time to have lunch with John and Karen Zimmerman, who together cultivate and propagate The Huntington’s famous succulent collection.
After lunch we went down to the nursery and marvelled at Karen’s first-rate Aloe hybrids, a collaboration she's undertaken with Kelly Griffin. The plants are a toothy riot of colors: red, orange, and most impressively, yellow. The variability is astounding. From this succulent confectionery, Karen selects her best clones for tissue culture for issuing through International Succulent Introductions (ISI).
From the nursery we were guided by Sean Lahmeyer through The Huntington’s new micropropagation laboratory and then off to the botanical library to check a few references for my own research on Stomatium. Somewhere along the way John invited Steven to give the after-dinner talk for this years Huntington Symposium, and Steven said “for you, John, anything.” Sweet!
It was a rough week for John. He had just gotten back from Monaco to see Myron Kimnach receive the Golden d’Or Award and landed back in San Marino in time to get ready for The Huntington’s annual spring sale. It was an honor to have him give part of his day to showing us around.
It wasn’t until we were rushing out the door that we handled the main business of the day, to gather up the entirety of John’s mesemb slides. In the early 1990s John made about ten trips to visit Steven Hammer, who was then at Mesa Garden in Belen New Mexico. Those trips were dedicated to intensive photography sessions, and on those visits Steven and John accomplished all of the photography required for Steven’s first book on Conophytum (The genus Conophytum, A Conograph, Umdaus Press 1993). They also photographed hundreds of other mesembs from Steven’s collection. Little Sphaeroid Press will be scanning and preparing this invaluable photographic resource for inclusion in our planned series on mesembs.
From The Huntington we headed down to Fullerton to visit Chris Barnhill. Chris worked with Steven at Mesa Garden back in 1994. He is an accomplished photographer whose work forms the cornerstone of Steven’s most recent books, Dumpling and his wife: new views on the genus Conophytum (EAE 2004) and Lithops, treasures of the veld (British Cactus and Succulent Society 2000).
Chris is Living Collections Curator at the Fullerton Arboretum and Botanical Garden, which probably doesn’t quite give you quite the right impression: he’s a plant geek of the highest order—our favorite company! We sat around in his lovely little garden and ate falafel, chatted, drank some beer, and then got down to business: reviewing slides! Chris sent us home with a stack of photos relevant to our upcoming book and a promise to send us his more recent digital images, a small sample of which we drooled over before getting back on the road to Vista.
I’m now sorting through over 1000 slides and marveling at the beauty and breadth of the work already accomplished. It’s a real pleasure to have the support of such talented people. These books are going to be beautiful!