There’s a global black market in rare cacti and succulents, and Margulies spent years inside it — with collectors, growers, smugglers, customs officers, and conservation scientists across Europe, Asia, Mexico, and South Africa. Plants poached out of the ground in the Chihuahuan Desert end up on Instagram and in living rooms in Seoul and Prague. What the actual, man. Margulies takes the desire seriously rather than treating collectors as villains; he’s a geographer interested in what it is about these particular plants that makes people lose their judgment.
The Cactus Hunters