"A catalogue of wonders that most of us will never get to see in person." - The New Yorker.
Ditch the dead-end human supremacy scene we're all stuck in, it's making you, me and all the plants and creatures miserable and extinct. Let's hang out and get familiar with our prickly plant pals from all around the world instead!
The most succulent book around, a newly updated edition of the cult classic, featuring stunning archival photographs of hundreds of the rarest, most improbable and spectacular plants on Earth, documented in their natural habitats by a global community of cactus aficionados.
Fuelled by rumours of ancient plants on forgotten hilltops in Brazil, legends of fields of living fossils deep in the arid deserts of Chile, the cactus seekers' relentless drive to find and document cacti in some of the most remote landscapes on earth has resulted in this extraordinary collective body of photographic work, one which has rarely, if ever, been seen by the public.
A Bolivian cactus smaller than a fingernail; a massive cardon that stands more than seventy feet tall; a warty specimen resembling a large toad; a Melocactus that looks as if it is wearing a bristly red hat. Some shrink below ground level to conserve water, others spiral toward the sky, grow along in the sand like snakes, or are draped in flowing white hair. Angolan cactus with poisonous sap, a Brazillian breed pollinated by bats, cacti up on snow covered mountains and growing in pure lava fields.
500 photographs spanning 80 years with new and expanded notes, Xerophile is not a field guide or a book of photography in the traditional sense. Rather, it mines the space between science and art, between gravity and levity; a space in which plants that by many measures should not exist, and may very well cease to. You have to check this one out!