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

[metal door creaking]

[bright music]

We started coming into contact

with unbelievable plant material

and it was like Indiana Jones, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

You know, plants that you had dreamt about

or only read about in books.

It was like, you know,

the craziest dream come true

to be able to take care of some of these plants.

It's a whole different world back here.

My name's Carlos Campos Morera

and I am a landscape designer at Geoponika in Los Angeles.

This is our private greenhouse

slash plant orphanage.

It's about a 2,000 square foot greenhouse

that used to be a truck loading bay.

The greenhouse sits in a very industrial part of Los Angeles

where it's just literally factory building

after factory building.

Set back from one of those factory buildings

is this greenhouse, which, you know,

holds one of the rarest plant collections

definitely in Los Angeles

and maybe in the country.

And it's totally hidden from the street.

You would never see it if you were driving by.

There's about 10,000 plants in here.

Probably more.

It's so expensive to maintain.

It's ridiculous.

I mean, our accountant has like a meeting with us

once a month

and every single meeting brings up

the question of why the fuck do we have this space

and how can we make it make money.

I mean, and people who walk in here are like,

So, these are for sale?

And we're like, No.

Every century or so,

plant collections change hands

because that's sort of the lifespan of human beings.

So about 15 years ago,

we became the beneficiaries of a lot of plant collections

that people had become too old to care for.

A lot of these collections and plants

would've just gone into the hands of people

who didn't know how to take care of them,

and they would've died.

We call it the Nonhuman Teachers,

which is our non-profit orphans greenhouse.

How many microclimates?

It's like endless.

I don't know. Thousands?

As many plants as there are, there's microclimates.

I mean one plant growing over another plant

creates a bit of shade,

and that's a microclimate.

And one plant that's on two pieces of wood

instead of one piece of wood,

two pieces of wood collects more moisture

than one piece of wood.

You know, the shelving,

the place in the greenhouse,

its proximity to fence

is just on and on and on and on and on.

Here is some of our most poisonous plants,

one of which is euphorbia abdelkuri,

which is from Abdelkuri Island,

a small island off the coast of Somalia.

You can no longer get to this island where it grows

because the waters are infested with Somalia pirates.

Only a handful of botanists have been to that island

to study this plant,

one of which was our late friend, John Lavranos,

who brought back two cuttings in the '70s.

He got to the island

by impersonating a British naval officer.

And everything that you now see in existence

comes from his original two cuttings.

A friend of ours

was propagating some of this plant in his greenhouse

and got a small speck of it on his stomach.

Said he was driving home and pulled up his shirt

and there was like a giant black circle

with a hole in the center

on his stomach from where the sap had sprayed out.

You look at the color of that sap

and you're like, That will kill me.

It's like the gnarliest neon alien green.

And if you went to a hospital and you're like,

Oh, I got euphorbia abdelkuri sap on me.

I mean, no one would know what to do.

This cactus is, I'd say the rarest plant in this greenhouse,

and it's unimpressive at first glance,

but I'd say it's priceless.

Its habitat is about 10 by 10 feet

in the middle of nowhere in Peru in a sand dune.

The closest thing next to its habitat is a chicken farm.

We had thought it was potentially this plant,

but we couldn't ID it.

There was no tag.

There was nothing that came along with it.

And one day, maybe two years later

after having the plant in the greenhouse,

we turned around the original cutting of this plant

and there was three chicken feathers stuck to it.

So that's the way we ID'd it.

Some people think that it is,

there is no genetic diversity in this plant.

It is a single individual

that just produces offsets in habitat.

So obstensively, it is the only one of its kind on earth.

I've been stabbed by a cactus about 150,000 times.

I have three in the back of my calf

that have been there for probably 11 years now.

At first, they'd send like electric shocks up my leg.

You can still feel 'em from the outside of the skin,

but I've just like, it's just become a part of me.

This is one of the driest,

second hottest areas in the greenhouse.

It's natural orientation

tended to be the one that was the hottest and the driest.

So we're both creating microclimates inadvertently

or on purpose

and then responding

to what actually just exists naturally here.

These are two crazy plants, welwitschia mirabilis,

they're some of the oldest plants on earth.

They can grow to be estimated two to 3,000 years old.

They're from Namibia and they're from Angola.

We're stacking old sewer pipes on top of each other

to keep up with its root growth

because they, in habitat,

they have a taproot that goes down to a water table

that nothing else can reach.

And to have a female in a collection is incredibly rare.

You know, they take 80 years or something

to find out whether they're a male or a female,

and most, everyone that has one has a male.

So about two years ago,

we found out this was a female,

and so now we can start producing seed between these two.

So copiapoa come from,

potentially the driest desert on earth in Chile,

in the Atacama Desert.

Parts of the Atacama Desert haven't received rain

in like a million years.

It's where NASA did most of its testing for Mars Rover

because the habitat so closely emulates Mars.

This individual could probably be somewhere

between 250 and 300 years old.

In habitat, it could be up to 500 years old.

They are only watered by a coastal fog

that comes into Chile from Antarctica,

comes over the mountains,

and blankets the desert for a few hours in a thick fog.

And the fog lands on its spines

and drips down to its root system.

This is the hottest place in the greenhouse.

It's a transitional space for plants

that need the hottest temperatures

at their growing times during the year.

So we'll cycle things in and out of here.

In the summer, it's insanely hot.

It gets about 130 degrees,

so it's like an insulated box

inside of an already hot location.

And so it's just, it's a fucking oven,

is basically what it is.

These are all pachypodiums which need incredible heat

and hate the cold.

I think that we probably lose

like 20% of this collection every year,

and it's not even that cold in LA.

And so they're the happiest at 120,

130 degrees here during the summer.

And this is just like a good spot

to observe everything from above.

I don't talk to the plants,

but I don't look down on people who do

to each their own, you know?

But I think the music that I play, they enjoy.

They got their own thing going.

I mean, if you come in here at like 11 o'clock at night

and the lights are off, like the vibe is strong.

I mean it's palpable.

There is never like a state of perfection.

There's always this fluctuation of issues arising.

But it's this feeling of being outnumbered

in a really great way.

You know, there's only one of me

and there's thousands and thousands

of these other incredibly special beings

that are beautiful and smart and interesting

and come from all these crazy places.

So it's an ego killer.

It makes you feel small and lame.

This is cyphostemma juttae,

which is a large caudiciform succulent.

So this is all water inside here

and these also grow in Africa

and they are part of the grape family actually.

And so they grow these giant blue leaves

with the most unbelievably translucent pink grapes

that suspend off the top of them.

If you were stranded in a desert,

you'd go and eat one of those grapes,

but they actually are also a neurotoxin

and horrifically poisonous.

I feel like maybe some of these plants,

because a lot of them are incredible survivors,

somehow they've transmitted this desire to us

of wanting to collect them

and to propagate them and have them make seed

and then make more of them to continue their species.

But either way, we are the guardians of them.

It's incredible fucking bone-crushing weight

on your shoulders

to keep all of them alive, to keep all of them happy.

So these are dioscorea elephantipes

and this is dioscorea mexicana,

which obviously illustrates Pangaea in a wonderful way.

This is from Mexico. This is from Africa.

Extensively the same plant.

These are aqueducts.

They filter right into the plant's root system

that only runs along the exterior of the plant.

So it's a hyper-efficient watering system

that has very little waste.

So it's catching the water

and bringing the water directly to the root.

All of these plants have been around

for far longer than human beings have existed,

and some even before the dinosaurs.

Some of these plants in here are the oldest plants on earth.

This is like more tropical stuff and our infirmary.

So it's got misters running all around it,

and the wood also holds moisture in a different way.

These myrmecophytes are pretty amazing.

This is a incredible sort of example of symbiosis.

The interior of these plants are basically ant colonies.

So all those holes are for where ants enter and exit.

And then the internal structure

is just a crazy habitat for ants.

This is a very, very rare cactus.

This is selenicereus wittii which,

Margaret Mee was an amazing illustrator and British botanist

spent her life trying to see this plant flower.

No terrestrial roots.

It just grows on these grove of trees in Brazil

that's habitually flooded.

So they're suspended halfway up the trees in midair.

And only on the last trip to the Amazon,

she finally got to see it flower.

It flowers once a year.

We're outside of the main greenhouse.

Now, this table is one of the brightest locations

in the entire area.

And this is a bulb from South Africa, bulbine alveolata.

Maybe there's three people in the US that have it.

These flowers are probably only in effect

for two days, maybe three days.

I mean, with all of the plants in here,

if you somehow miss its flowering,

that year you'll have to wait another year to pollinate it.

So we keep a close eye on it.

I mean, to take it on was like the greatest,

most exciting thing we ever experienced.

It's a lot of different emotions.

It's wonder.

It's a diminutive feeling

of I'm not the most important creature on earth

and there's so many different life forms

and they all have their unique sort of character

and spirits and beauty.

And so to keep these things together

and to keep them alive

was and is an incredible gift.

I mean, it's my favorite space in the world.

[bright music]