Stuck on cactus? He's your man

BELEN, N.M. — Living stones and baby toes. Creeping devils and elephants.

Welcome to Steven Brack's kingdom of cacti, which resides on a sandy patch of desert atop a mesa in the heart of New Mexico.

Never heard of his Mesa Garden? Not surprising.

But to connoisseurs of cactus, he's the prince of prickly, the sultan of succulents, who keeps them flush with seeds both rare and common.

Brack reckons he's about the only full-time producer and exporter of cactus and succulent seeds in North America.

And his business could be slaking the thirst for rare cacti plucked from the wild.

"It's not worth it anymore because of all the work tramping around in the heat and the hard conditions," Brack says.

"Another factor is the ethics of the growers. Most growers won't touch the selling of wild plants," he says.

His 14 greenhouses -- which he cobbled together with boards and sheets of plastic -- hold about 15,000 kinds of plants. The plants come in a rainbow of colors -- except blue -- and range in size from BBs to 14 feet. Most of them are little guys.

Each year, Mesa Garden ships about 150,000 packets of seeds and about 35,000 live plants -- "wild guesses," Brack says.

On this summer day, packages were ready to be mailed to Ukraine, Great Britain, Brazil, Romania, South Korea and China.

The previous day, he sent 500,000 seeds to China, which accounts for almost 40% of his business.

"They're crazy about American culture in general and there's a lot of interest in American plants," he says. "There's a lot of growers growing stuff for their local markets."

Sales to Europe total about 30%, while Russia accounts for about 20% and the U.S. makes up the rest.

"I think people want to have something new and exotic and unusual. The American deserts are very exotic to the European psyche. It goes back to the lore of the Westerns and cowboys," Brack says.

The seeds can be as big as peanuts. Or as small as? "Gnat dander," says Elsie Chavez, who has been separating, cleaning and stuffing them in envelopes for 11 years.

Brack says nearly all of the seeds are sent to private individuals. "They are completely passionate about it and stick to it for a lifetime," he says.

Brack, 58, started the business 37 years ago.

"We started as a nano-business and made it up to micro," he says. "I started on a shoestring. Then it just snowballed."