Beautify Your Cacti With These Custom Planters
There are roughly 2,000 species of cacti found around the world. The speciality plant store Hot Cactus, run by a collective of creatives in Los Angeles, stocks some of the rarest breeds online and at its shoebox brick-and-mortar in Echo Park (they also run a second outpost on New York’s Lower East Side, though both locations remain momentarily closed due to Covid-19). In addition to plants, succulent lovers and enthusiasts can also find a bevy of custom cacti-oriented goods: apparel, gardening tools, books, and a range of planters shaped to accommodate particular species. One such vessel, an oblong stoneware pot designed by journalist Hamilton Morris (host of the docu-series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia), is made expressly with the elongated napiform root of peyote in mind. For $70, you can nab one of Morris’s Peyote Pot grow kits: Each comes with four seeds so you can germinate your own Lophophora fricii, a cactus species that’s native to Mexico and commonly referred to as “false peyote.” That is—sorry to disappoint you—not the hallucinogenic kind that’s apt to get you tripping, though no less reason to get your green thumb going with this uncommon houseplant.