Life doesn’t come much more easycare than a cactus. If you want to make a cactus happy, give it sunshine, sand, and – have I forgotten something? Oh, yes, water. Well, don’t worry too much about that, it’ll survive. Humans must be doing a good job of caring for cacti because cacti, and images of cacti, are sprouting in all corners of our culture. They have become the pop-up plant of our desolate age.

People seem intent on remaking all their everyday objects in the image of the cactus. Considering a romantic meal at home? Hang the cactus bunting, light a cactus candle, flick the switch on your cactus lamp, set out the cactus plates and cactus glasses and don’t forget the cactus salt and pepper. Depending on how things go, you can show your guest the cactus doormat or your Luxe Hawaii Cactus condoms which, if nothing else, make a welcome change from the ubiquity of the saguaro, although you might spoil the atmosphere if you explain it like that.

Cartier cactus bracelet. Photograph: Cartier

In fashion, the cactus has spread with a speed which is inherently uncactus-like. There are 48 results for cactus on John Lewis’s website, and only one of them is alive. Cacti proliferated at the Coachella festival last year. There are cacti for all pockets. You can buy fake ones from designer Abigail Ahern or real ones from Aldi. You can buy £30,000 cactus bracelets from Cartier, cactus socks for £3.50 from Topshop or alabaster cactus sculptures by Ben Russell at the Hignell gallery. Cacti were plentiful at the Chelsea flower show last week. This might be coincidence, but Theresa May actually unveiled the Conservative party manifesto in the posture of a two-armed saguaro cactus. Last summer the band Glass Animals filled their stage set with the plant and the UK got its first “cactus boutique” when Gynelle Leon, 31, opened Prick in Dalston, east London.

So can Leon explain why cacti are proliferating?

We sit in the shop – though with its white walls and minimalist shelving, it feels more like a gallery. It’s an hour before opening time and four large cacti in the window – the ones that are most in demand – are waiting for 11am for the shutters to rise and grant them sunlight. They are priced at around £350 but each weekend Leon sells at least one. She says the shop is busy, and not just with people asking for peyote. Lots of homeowners now in their late 30s or 40s had a cactus – that classic beginners’ plant of the 70s – as a child.

‘They suit people of our generation. I could put in minimal effort and a plant will thrive’ ... Gynelle Leon, owner of east London cactus shop Prick. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Leon, 31, in a flight jacket and Nike sneakers, swipes through pictures on her phone – a cacti colouring book for adults, cacti on a billboard for the Affordable Art Fair, cacti at the Hockney retrospective. But why?

“They suit people of our generation,” she says. “They want to do less and get more. I could put in minimal effort and a plant will thrive.” She had a fear of death as a child, but cacti never die. Added to which, they photograph well. “We’re in the whole Pinterest era. You have to have nice plants as well as nice art.” (On Pinterest, the Plants On Pink board has 1.08 million followers.)

It was this passion for photography that took Leon to Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech where, “surrounded by these huge plants”, she first encountered large cacti. She took some shots and, back home, realised that she wanted one. She didn’t care what: “Just something big and spiky.” But in London such a thing was hard to find. The idea of Prick was born. Leon set off on a world tour of cacti hotspots.

Abigail Ahern’s faux cacti. Photograph: Graham Atkins-Hughes

One of the stops on Leon’s tour was Hot Cactus, “a shoebox” of a store, according to its co-owner, “jam-packed with plants” in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Like Leon, Carlos Morera, 32, regards himself as belonging to the next generation of cactus aficionados.

“There’s definitely a cactus revival,” he says on the phone from California. “But I can’t say how superficial it is. I can’t tell whether people are into the iconography of it and maybe just having these plants as a cool sculpture… [or] into all the background information about the plants.” Morera would like the latter to be true. He says that with cacti, “what you’re looking at in front of you is not just what you’re looking at. Yes, these plants are cool, but all this other information really makes them.” That’s how it was in the cactus’s 1970s heyday, he says, when people didn’t just keep plants, they knew them.

“Most people are used to seeing the cliched two-armed saguaro-esque emoji cactus. What we were really into was everything but that. And more so, just exposing the incredible vast variety of form and shape and attribute that existed beyond the cliche.”

Morera’s favourite cacti are the ones that have grown with their owner. “These plants have a particular quality that you don’t see [in] plants that have been grown en masse in a greenhouse. They show signs of age, of wear, signs of struggle, signs of immense care. The idea was to bring that to the public.”

If you want to buy this kind of cactus, you can look for clues that a plant has been allowed to age naturally. It might have “corking”, where the trunk has become dense and wooded at the base. (I would include a Google link to an image but when you search “cactus corking” it comes up with a cork cactus organiser for £12 from the Conran Shop.) It might have thick spines. It might have moss growing on the soil, “because this plant has been sitting there so long it’s developed another microsystem of plants on top of it”.

Yves Saint Laurent’s giant cacti-spiked Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech. Photograph: Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images

Take, for example, the Copiapoa cinerea ssp. columna alba from the Atacama desert, which Hot Cactus is selling for $900 (£700) and which Morera estimates is 400-500 years old (he says the plants “stopped seeding” centuries ago). It is only the size of a baseball. A clump of the Copiapoa cinerea was recently listed on eBay for $24,000. Or take the Opuntia galapageia, the store’s most expensive plant at $3,000, which is native to the Galapagos and impossible to own now.

Some customers balk at the prices but, as Morera says, “Maybe we bought that plant for 15 bucks at a weird old nursery that didn’t know what it had. But it’s like an antiques store. That plant we can’t get again. You can’t find it. It’s worth it.”

Once he had a tip-off about a woman who was selling her late partner’s cactus collection, and went out to “this completely unassuming home” to take a look. The woman opened the back gate. “I literally had to put my gloves in my mouth to stop myself screaming. It was the craziest collection of plants I’ve ever seen held by an individual. Some of the rarest desert plants on earth, he would have, like, eight of them.” Morera bought the lot.

This makes him sound like a cactus dealer, a job I didn’t previously know existed. “I guess when you’re in the selling of these plants you sort of have to act I guess like a dealer,” he says. (Many species cannot be obtained from the wild because they are protected by Cites, a treaty that prohibits the movement of endangered species. But still many slip through: at Heathrow airport last year, 12.7% of confiscated plants were cacti.)

Morera is clearly skilled at unearthing spectacular finds – and he needs to be, because growers cannot easily perpetuate a cactus trend. Fashion is all about speed. A cactus cannot be rushed. Those cute plants in 5.5cm pots that you see in garden centres and florists are already three years old. By their nature, cacti are anti-fashion. This conundrum has not escaped the notice of the people who grow cacti.

Cacti are brilliant survivors, adapting to adversity or change ... Cactusland in Lincolnshire. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

It is a damp day. The sky is a low, grey lid and the fields that flank the drive from Peterborough station to Bourne in Lincolnshire are a glossy green. In the middle of this verdant lushness, in a sort of reverse oasis, sits the UK’s largest cactus nursery. Cactusland is the work and passion of Bryan Goodey. He declines to share his age, but it is safe to say that unlike Leon and Morero, he represents the older generation of cactus enthusiast. Enter the greenhouse and the first thing a visitor sees is not the sculptural shapes of cacti but their flowers. The glasshouse is a mass of gaudy blooms redolent of chrysanthemums more than cacti. Like many people I talk to, and like many of Leon’s customers at Prick, Goodey’s love for cacti began with a single plant on a childhood windowsill.



As a boy, Goodey loved cacti for their spines; he bought his first plant at a Lincolnshire show (“Fred”, now well past retirement age and observable by visitors only from the door of Goodey’s private greenhouse). But in adulthood it’s the flowers that draw him, and he hybridises his own plants especially to improve their display. He has just had “his busiest ever Malvern” show. So the cacti fervour has reached here too, but in many ways Goodey’s cacti are resistant to trends.

In a dusty corner of the greenhouse, a few tall Espostoa ruficeps cluster, the sort of tall plants that Gynelle Leon would sell in a flash. But here they are unloved. “We used to grow them, and at the time we couldn’t sell them,” Goodey says. His wife Linda quips, “If we’d known 20 years ago that it was going to be tall plants this year, we’d be doing all right!”

But you can’t grow a cactus to order, and cacti growers cannot keep up with demand. (Don’t phone up about those Epostoa ruficeps because they have already been sold.) To keep Prick stocked, Leon travels regularly to France and Holland. But she knows she will soon have to go further, “to the Canaries”, if she is to satisfy her customers’ demands. “You know the fishbone cactus?” she says. “That’s almost impossible to find now.” The Goodeys’ phone is ringing with wholesalers desperate to buy plants.

Cactus candles

Business has been brisk, too, at the Ubink nursery in the Netherlands. Hanneke Ubink says they sold over 10m plants last year. “We are actually not able to produce as many plants as the market is asking for,” she says. “That’s becoming kind of a problem right now, because we are selling a lot and the demand is so high. We are trying to expand our nursery on the Canary Islands but it takes a while.”

Back at Cactusland, Goodey shows me a tray of cactus seedlings, each one a tiny eruption, like the bubbles in a sourdough starter. It will be three years before they are large enough to sell. The Ubinks, meanwhile, with their industrial-scale cultivation, can get a plant to the smallest pot size in a year. But in the rush to meet demand, is something being lost?

Maybe it is the slowness of cacti that makes them appeal.

Of course, cacti are easycare, striking to look at, and “green” because they require little water: sustainable interior decoration in a pot. They are night-workers, producing oxygen while we sleep (nice for a bedroom). They have been prized in the UK since they arrived early in the 16th century, after the discovery of the Americas.

Cactus emoji

There is something appealingly human-like about them. They reproduce in generations. The tall, single spur plants throw long shadows like bystanders, one-armed saguaros like a person waving. Some, says Elisa Biondi, supervisor of the Princess of Wales Conservatory at Kew, are like “a fat man”, others “have got crazy spines or white hair”. There is pretty much a cactus for every taste.

But they are also brilliant survivors, adapting to adversity or change. They look as if they have mastered life, and maybe humans feel that’s something they could learn from.

“I think they are a reaction to how fast everything moves,” Morera says. “You have this plant — like a copiapoa – that will not change from the moment you get it till the moment you die… They are a rebellion against modern times, efficiency, production, results. They act as testaments to the opposite.”

For a long time, Morera resisted having plants in his own house. “When you step out into the Mojave desert and its 120 degrees and it sucks the moisture out of your eyes, you know that that plant on the windowsill is not where it should be.”

But after a while, he realised he needed to “explore” the experience that he was providing for his customers. He brought a couple of pots inside, and now all his windowsills “are filled with cactus”. That’s how it begins: with a cactus, in a pot, on a windowsill. And who knows, it might spur another generation of cactus collectors.

• This article was amended on 1 June 2017 to correct the species of cactus which was listed for sale for $24,000 on eBay.