When John Trager talks about the plants available through The Huntington’s International Succulents Introductions (ISI) program, it’s almost like he’s trying to find homes for beloved pets. “This one will end up with big prominent teeth,” he says of the beauty called Agave guiengola ‘Moto Sierra,’ referring to the serrated edges of the long leaves.“And this one has great coloring,” he says, describing the Aloe ‘Vulcan’s Fire.’ “It’s modest in size, good for a residential landscape, and it stays clean.”
His final selling point is straight out of the plant propagator’s handbook, “clean” being the term for disease-free. Trager is the director of ISI, a Huntington program that has been around for decades and is well known to conservationists as far away as South Africa and Germany. Each year, he and a small team of staff and volunteers propagate and distribute dozens of rare succulents to collectors, scientists, and researchers. Each spring, a new list of offerings is published in the Cactus and Succulent Journal and posted on The Huntington’s website.
The 2011 crop is notable for the emergence of a number of plants produced by The Huntington’s Tissue Culture Lab (11 out of 31, to be exact). In “A Clean Start” (Huntington Frontiers, Fall/Winter 2009), we introduced readers to the concept of micropropagation, a technique in which small containers of sterilized plant tissue produce hundreds of plants far more quickly than if the plants had been propagated by traditional methods such as grafting or hand-pollination. Trager and ISI were also profiled in the article “Quietly to the Rescue” (Huntington Frontiers, Spring/Summer 2006).
Even with the amazing new method, Trager still warns that plant cultivation is not about instant gratification. The small ‘Vulcan’s Fire’ won’t bloom into rich reds and oranges until, say, 2019. The 75-year-old “mother” plant in the Desert Garden is proof that patience will be rewarded.
When not preserving the fate of a species, Trager has fun naming the plants. A contest among staff produced the name ‘Vulcan’s Fire,’ which is not a nod to Star Trek but rather a reference to the Roman version of the Greek god of fire and smithery, Hephaestus. Trager is mindful that some might question his god-like role intervening with nature, especially when propagating an open-pollinated hybrid like Huernia ‘Foma,’ which means the plant that produced the pollen is unknown. ‘Foma,’ it turns out, is a name inspired by the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle and means “harmless untruths,” from the fictional religion Bokonism. “This plant seems harmless enough,” says Trager, satisfied with his choice.
