Prickly business: Steve Braunias infiltrates the NZ cactus community

Martin Walker of Coromandel Cacti. Photo / Michael Craig

SB previews the gardening event of the year

New Zealand’s greatest living grower of that singular, bristling, half-insane plant, the cactus, turned up at my house on a recent Wednesday morning. Martin Walker’s presence was the loudest thing in my street since the time I saw Grant Dalton stomping along it with a face like thunder. The sides of Martin’s truck were advertised with a vast panorama of a cactus plantation somewhere in the deserts of the Americas, and the sign of his business, which turns 40 in December, COROMANDEL CACTI. He doesn’t actually live anywhere near the Coromandel. He lives in the Auckland lava fields of Mt Wellington, up high on a ridge leased from Transpower, on a cactus plantation that looks even more lethal and spectacular than the power pylons that march across his property. Lethal spines, electric volts - to visit Coromandel Cacti is to walk into a kind of hot, thrilling valley of death.

I hopped into his truck and we set off for the North Shore. He had sold a really beautiful hand-tooled stereo cabinet on TradeMe to a woman in Birkenhead. It was in the back of the truck and I said I’d give him a hand to deliver it because that seemed to be the decent thing to do for a man who has Guillain-Barre syndrome, a neurological disorder so wicked and downright traitorous that it persuades the body to attack itself. The autoimmune system turns on the nerves. He went to see a doctor about it in 2017 and was prescribed Panadol. Strangely enough, it had no effect. His muscles are wasting away and the outlook is not good. Martin actually looked in the pink, although that could just have been the rosy hue on his shaved head.

We met to discuss the greatest event of the gardening year, the 2022 Cactus and Succulent Society of New Zealand (Auckland branch) show, held this weekend in Albany. There are plants for sale but the show is more about art than commerce; about 40 exhibitors are competing for best cactus in show and best succulent in show. It will be epic, spectacular. Garden centres routinely only ever sell tiny little cacti and even tinier little succulents, grown and sold in bulk by the Castle Rock nursery in Heathcote Valley, Christchurch. They’re nice additions to the windowsill but they’re also generic. This weekend’s show is devoted to plants you will never see anywhere else, the handiwork of experts, finely and patiently crafted.

Of course Martin Walker will exhibit; he is the all-time event champ who has won bests in show more than anyone. “I would place him,” said Gorakh Silvester, vice-president of the Auckland branch of the Cactus and Succulent Society of New Zealand, “right at the top of the tree.”

Martin talked about how it was that he got hooked on cacti as his crazy truck crossed the harbour bridge. He was working in the paint industry in 1981. “My boss was a cactus collector and at lunchtime on the way to the pub, he’d stop in at a garden centre. He kept on at me to start collecting, too. I said to him, ‘Look, I’ll get one cactus and two succulents so you can stop hassling me.’ A week later I bought another cactus and two succulents. A month later I had 20….”

There was something obsessive about him. Collectors are masters of strange universes, assemblers in pursuit of objects but really what they’re pursuing is beauty and meaning. (Martin also collects shells.) As we approached Birkenhead, Martin talked about how he was one of the original founders of the Moehau commune in Sandy Bay, Coromandel, in the 1970s. “We built dams, water systems, orchards, timber buildings; we had a farm with stock, and shearing days; I didn’t want to be locked into a little section and a mortgage.” It’s where Gorakh Silvester first ran into him. In an extraordinary coincidence, he later realised that both his father and Martin’s father were conscientious objectors in World War I. “We never worked out if our fathers knew each other.” He feels sure they would have at least known of each other. Both men were Christian pacifists. Extraordinary, too, that their sons should both become enraptured by xenophiles, plants that love dryness.

Martin Walker got hookes on cacti in 1981. Photo / Michael Craig

Our destination was the old Birkenhead Licensing Trusts Hotel on Mokoia Rd. A plaque in the foyer commemorates that it was opened in 1970 and that Rob Muldoon, who lived in a nearby peaked roof house with views of the Chelsea Sugar Works, opened its extensions in 1990. The Trust sold it in 1992 and the complex is now office space, and an upstairs apartment in place of the former Bass Bar. The tenant who took possession of Martin’s stereo cabinet for a bargain bid of $75 lived in a nice little nook up a few flights of stairs and along corridors and through double doors. She led the way. I lifted it with a man who lived there; the couple bickered throughout the journey (“Open the doors!”; “I can’t be in two places at once!”), but we got there in the end and her vintage wood-panelled 1970s turntable was going to look awesome in Martin’s beautiful cabinet.

Back in the truck, this time heading for Mt Wellington, Martin talked about how he once tried growing 15 different varieties of bamboo at the commune. “I thought I’d be a bamboo nurseryman, and make things. Flute-diameter bamboo for fly screens, large timbery ones for garden windbreaks…It never happened. I never sold anything. The soil was unsuitable; you want friable soil that falls away from the roots, but it was a very heavy clay soil, a loam-coloured clay. The top layer was loam-clay and then clay-clay. The bamboo is still there. It’s a bit of a mess now but I heard the New Zealand Bamboo Society held its AGM at Sandy Bay because my bamboo grove was nearby.”

The Bamboo Society, the Auckland Shell Club, the Cactus and Succulent Society…The mysteries and complexities of the natural world exert a strong hold on all of us; the strongest hold is sometimes felt by curious, gifted characters. The president of the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Cactus and Succulent Society, Max Croft, is a former ballroom dancing champion. Vice-president Gorakh Silvester (“I’m a good deputy, but a poor leader”) talked of society members over the years: “There was a cross-dresser who would show up in very nice floral dresses. He was heavily overweight. I’d have wonderful conversations with him about restoring aeroplane engines. And there was a Scotsman with a broad Glasgow accent but he had an accident with a cactus which dampened his interest, and I haven’t seen him in a while.” A cactus spine hooked into the man’s Achilles tendon; his wife found him in a pool of blood, and called an ambulance, which transported the man and the attached cactus to hospital for an operation. “He liked ugly plants. The more scarred and damaged, the better he liked it. He said it gave them character.”

Gorakh himself was an interesting fellow, already retired at 58 (“Life is short”) to tend his cacti in glasshouses at his home in Henderson. The reason he had met Martin Walker in the commune nearly 40 years ago is that he was just passing through: “I had the idea at school that I would hitchhike around the country,” he said, “so I spent five years doing that.”

I asked him to describe Martin back then. “Much the same,” he said. “Fairly grumpy.” It was the word Martin had used himself, several times, in a rueful and quite abashed manner, to describe his employer relations at Coromandel Cacti. Gorakh had worked for him, and said, “Well, I wouldn’t argue with that. He’s funny that way. He can be extremely rude and gruff but also has a fantastic sense of humour.

“I’d come in on Monday morning and find he’d smashed plants all over the floor of the greenhouse. He’d rip them out of trays and scatter them everywhere. He’d get wild and go bright red in the face. With his bald head, he looked like a red balloon. I decided I’d had enough. I walked out one day when he started screaming abuse at me and told me to get out of his sight.

“But I didn’t cut my ties with him altogether. I don’t bear any grudges. It all springs out of his real passion for the plants. He’s grown a lot of different cacti and he learned from the old-timers in cactus who are all dead now. His expertise is that of repotting all day every day for four decades. It’s hard work. And there were whole days when a customer didn’t come in and sometimes a whole week. When Transpower ordered him off his land, he dug in his heels and fought them every inch of the way. It caused him quite a lot of stress.”

He meant the long battle that Martin fought with Transpower, which leased him the Coromandel Cacti property, and then demanded he take down all his greenhouses to make way for an underground cable. He lost. It took the heart out of his business. The nursery remains one of the great wonders of Auckland but it’s seldom open. We walked around the place and he pointed out where the greenhouses used to be (“There were agaves right up to the ceiling”), the path of the underground cable (“They rolled the grass all to buggery. Summer comes and it goes all yellow”) and its progress at the end of his property to run beneath the eastern line railway track (“They had concrete trucks with a big boom hung over the track, guys standing there all day and all night with bright searchlights, to put a massive block of concrete under the railway line”).

Coromandel Cacti is the remains of a dream. He said, “It was too much happening too fast for a small outfit. Everything was 75 per cent off for months. We’re just trying to get a few sales now but we can’t do it full-time anymore. I no longer do the North Island runs. I once had heaps of ambition and no longer have any. It’s been thrashed out of me. The GBS [Guillain-Barre syndrome] hasn’t helped. I get fatigued just bending and I can’t carry weights.

“It’s almost like a hobby now. We have domestics about it. The wife says, ‘Sell the business, you’re too weak and too old!’ But I’m still planting.”

It had been a sad tour and then it began to rain in this wonderland of xenophiles. And yet the cacti all around us still seemed to burn in the dark sky, to give off heat. They transformed a corner of dowdy Mt Wellington, with its Vision Asia TV satellites, its shopping trolleys used as wheelbarrows in front gardens, its litter and cracked windows and humming pylons, into the bright deserts of Brazil, Mexico, Arizona. We shook hands goodbye and I said to this living legend of pulp and needle, “See you in Albany.”

The Cactus & Succulent Show and Sale is held at the Albany Village Community Hall this Saturday and Sunday. Entry fee $5.