Inside a Hidden LA Greenhouse Full of the World’s Rarest Plants

Architectural Digest

Today on Architectural Digest, we're joined by AD100 landscape designer Carlos Campos Morera to tour the Geoponika greenhouse. Tucked away in a former truck loading bay within a Los Angeles industrial estate, this extraordinary urban greenhouse is home to some of the world’s rarest and most exotic plants. Carlos takes us behind the scenes of this one-of-a-kind space, sharing insights into what it takes to care for and maintain such a remarkable collection of plants.

Transcript

00:00We started coming into contact with unbelievable plant material and it was

00:20like Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, plants that you had

00:24dreamt about or only read about in books. It was like, you know, the craziest

00:31dream come true to be able to take care of some of these plants. It's a whole

00:37different world back here. My name is Carlos Campos Morera and I am a landscape

00:43designer at Geoponica in Los Angeles. This is our private greenhouse slash plant

00:51orphanage. It's about a 2,000 square foot greenhouse that used to be a truck

00:57loading bay. The greenhouse sits in a very industrial part of Los Angeles where it's

01:04just literally factory building after factory building. Set back from one of

01:08those factory buildings is this greenhouse which, you know, holds one of the rarest

01:12plant collections definitely in Los Angeles and maybe in the country and

01:17it's totally hidden from the street. You would never see it if you were driving

01:21by. There's about 10,000 plants in here, probably more. It's so expensive to maintain

01:29it's ridiculous. I mean, our accountant has like a meeting with us once a month and

01:34and every single meeting brings up the question of why the fuck do we have this

01:40space and how can we make it make money? I mean, and people who walk in here are like,

01:45so these are for sale and we're like, no. Every century or so plant collections

01:53change hands because that's sort of the lifespan of human beings. So about 15

01:59years ago we became the beneficiaries of a lot of plant collections that people

02:05had become too old to care for. A lot of these collections and plants would have

02:11just gone into the hands of people who didn't know how to take care of them and

02:16they would have died. We call it the non-human teachers, which is our non-profit

02:22Orphan's Greenhouse. How many microclimates? It's like endless. I don't know. Thousands.

02:30As many plants as there are, there's microclimates. I mean, one plant growing over another plant

02:36creates a bit of shade and that's a microclimate. And one plant that's on two

02:41pieces of wood instead of one piece of wood, two pieces of wood collects more

02:45moisture than one piece of wood. You know, the shelving, the place in the greenhouse,

02:51its proximity to fans is just on and on and on and on and on. Here are some of our most

02:59poisonous plants, one of which is Euphorbia abdelkuri, which is from Abdelkuri Island, a small

03:07island off the coast of Somalia. You can no longer get to this island where it grows because

03:13the waters are infested with Somali pirates. Only a handful of botanists have been to that

03:19island to study this plant. One of which was our late friend, John Lavranos, who brought back two

03:26cuttings in the seventies. He got to the island by impersonating a British naval officer and

03:32everything that you now see in existence comes from his original two cuttings. A friend of ours was

03:38propagating some of this plant in his greenhouse and got a small speck of it on his stomach,

03:44said he was driving home and pulled up his shirt and there was like a giant black circle with a hole in

03:51the center on his stomach from where the sap had sprayed out. You look at the color of that sap and

03:57you're like, that will kill me. It's like the gnarliest neon alien green. And you, if you went to a

04:05hospital and you were like, oh, I got Euphorbia abdelkuri sap on me. I mean, no one would know what to do.

04:12This cactus is, I'd say the rarest plant in this greenhouse. And it's unimpressive at first glance,

04:20but I'd say it's priceless. Its habitat is about 10 by 10 feet in the middle of nowhere in Peru in a

04:28sand dune. The closest thing next to its habitat is a chicken farm. We had thought it was potentially

04:37this plant, but we couldn't ID it. There was no tag. There was nothing that came along with it.

04:42And one day, maybe two years later, after having the plant in the greenhouse, we turned around the

04:47original cutting of this plant and there was three chicken feathers stuck to it. So that's the way

04:54we ID'd it. Some people think that it is, there is no genetic diversity in this plant. It is a single

05:01individual that just produces offsets in habitat. So, ostensibly it is the only one of its kind on earth.

05:11I've been stabbed by a cactus about 150,000 times. I have three in the back of my calf that have been

05:21there for probably 11 years now. At first they'd send like electric shocks up my leg. You can still

05:29feel them from the outside of the skin, but I've just like, it's just become a part of me.

05:35This is one of the driest, second hottest areas in the greenhouse. Its natural orientation tended to be

05:45the one that was the hottest and the driest. So we're both creating microclimates inadvertently

05:50or on purpose, and then responding to what actually just exists naturally here.

05:56These are two crazy plants, Wolwichia mirabellis. They're some of the oldest plants

06:01plants on earth. They can grow to be estimated 2,000 to 3,000 years old. They're from Namibia and

06:08they're from Angola. We're stacking old sewer pipes on top of each other to keep up with its root growth.

06:15Because in habitat they have a taproot that goes down to a water table that nothing else can reach.

06:22And to have a female in a collection is incredibly rare. You know, they take 80 years or something to

06:29find out whether they're a male or a female. And most everyone that has one has a male. So about two

06:35years ago we found out this was a female. And so now we can start producing seed between these two.

06:40So Copiapua come from potentially the driest desert on earth in Chile in the Atacama desert.

06:54Parts of the Atacama desert haven't received rain in like a million years. It's where NASA did most of

07:02its testing for Mars rover because the habitat so closely emulates Mars.

07:08This individual could probably be somewhere between 250 and 300 years old. In habitat it

07:15could be up to 500 years old. They are only watered by a coastal fog that comes into Chile from

07:22Antarctica. Comes over the mountains and blankets the desert for a few hours in a thick fog. And the

07:30fog lands on its spines and drips down to its root system.

07:34This is the hottest place in the greenhouse. It's a transitional space for plants that need the

07:41hottest temperatures at their growing times during the year. So we'll cycle things in and out of here.

07:47In the summer it's insanely hot. It gets about 130 degrees. So it's like an insulated box inside of an

07:57already hot location. And so it's just it's a fucking oven is basically what it is.

08:06These are alpaca podiums which need incredible heat and hate the cold. I think that we probably

08:13lose like 20 percent of this collection every year and it's not even that cold in LA. And so they're the happiest

08:20at 120, 130 degrees here during the summer. And this is just like a good spot to observe everything from above.

08:31I don't talk to the plants but I don't look down on people who do. To each their own you know. I think

08:37the music that I play they enjoy. They got their own thing going. I mean if you come in here at like

08:4311 o'clock at night and the lights are off like the vibe is strong. I mean it's palpable. There is

08:51never like a state of perfection. There's always this fluctuation of issues arising. But it is

08:58it's a feeling of being outnumbered in a really great way. You know there's there's only one of me and

09:06there's thousands and thousands of these other incredibly special beings that are beautiful and

09:12smart and interesting and come from all these crazy places. So it's an ego killer. It makes you feel small

09:19and lame. This is Syphostema jute which is a large cadisiform succulent. So this is all

09:33water inside here and these also grow in Africa and they are part of the grape family actually. And so

09:41they grow these giant blue leaves with the most unbelievably translucent pink grapes that suspend

09:50off the top of them. If you were stranded in a desert you'd go and eat one of those grapes but they

09:55actually are also a neurotoxin and horrifically poisonous. I feel like maybe some of these plants

10:04because there are a lot of them are incredible survivors somehow they've transmitted this

10:11desire to us of wanting to collect them and to propagate them and have them make seed and then

10:16make more of them to continue their species. But either way we are the guardians of them. It's an

10:24incredible fucking bone crushing weight on your shoulders to keep all of them alive to keep all of them happy.

10:34So these are diascoria elephantepis and this is diascora mexicana which obviously illustrates

10:46pangea in a wonderful way. This is from Mexico. This is from Africa. It's extensively the same plant.

10:53These are aqueducts. They filter right into the plant's root system that only runs along the exterior of the

11:00plant. So it's a hyper-efficient watering system that has very little waste. So it's catching the water and

11:08bringing the water directly to the root. All of these plants have been around for far longer than human

11:15beings have existed and some even before the dinosaurs. Some of these plants in here are the oldest plants

11:21on earth. This is like more tropical stuff and our infirmary. So it's got misters running all around it

11:31and the wood also holds moisture in a different way. These mermecophytes are pretty amazing. This is a

11:39incredible sort of example of symbiosis. The interior of these plants are basically ant colonies. So all those

11:47holes are for where ants enter and exit and then the internal structure is just a crazy habitat for ants.

11:55This is a very, very rare cactus. This is Selenocerius wittii, which Margaret Mee was an amazing illustrator and

12:06British botanist. Spent her life trying to see this plant flower. No terrestrial roots. It just grows on these

12:15grove of trees in Brazil that's habitually flooded. So they're suspended halfway up the trees in midair.

12:24And only on the last trip to the Amazon, she finally got to see it flower. It flowers once a year.

12:33We're outside of the main greenhouse now. This table is one of the brightest locations

12:39plants in the entire area. And this is a bulb from South Africa. Bulbini alveoleta. Maybe there's three

12:49people in the U.S. that have it. These flowers are probably only in effect for two days, maybe three

12:59days. I mean, with all of the plants in here, if you somehow miss its flowering that year, you'll have to

13:04wait another year to pollinate it. So we keep a close eye on it. I mean, to take it on was like

13:13the greatest, most exciting thing we ever experienced. It's a lot of different emotions.

13:20It's wonder. It's a diminutive feeling of I'm not the most important creature on earth. And there's so

13:30many different life forms. And they all have their unique sort of character and spirits and beauty.

13:37And so to keep these things together and to keep them alive was and is an incredible gift. I mean,

13:46it's my favorite space in the world.

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