SAN ANTONIO — Barbara Schulze knows a lot about cacti.
Cacti have been her prickly passion since 1978, and she shares it with others as a member of the San Antonio Cactus and Xerophyte Society (SACXS).
“We’re basically just a group of people that love cactus and succulents.” Schulze said.
But this group does more than just meet once a month and occasionally show up at garden shows to talk shop and sell products.
“We focus on three things: conservation, propagation and education,” said Schulze.
The education comes in the form of teaching people how growing from seed, though time-consuming, is much better than going out and digging up cacti and keeping them.
“What we call field collecting, and putting them in a different environment, is not extremely successful,” Schulze said. “We’ve learned that it’s better to leave them where they’re at.”
That sounds fine until you consider the growth that’s happening across the state of Texas.
“The constant disruption of natural environments due to building roads, building homes, we’ve decided conservation has to be a big part of what we’re doing,” Schulze said.
That conservation starts with the black lace cactus. Native to South Texas, the plants are endangered, and the fear is that they could become extinct. So SACXS joined forces with other groups and jumped into action.
“There were two collection expeditions. One in January when the Native Plant Society went out and collected over 2,000 of them, and then we went out in February and got the rest of these,” said SACXS member Ron Andring.
The black lace cactus that were gathered are now at the San Antonio Botanical Gardens, having been recovered and re-potted, with the ultimate goal of returning them to the area from which they came.
“They’ll be planted back in the ground along with several thousand others that we’re hoping to grow from seed,” Andring said.
The black lace wasn’t in danger because of new development, but the unearthing of resources.
“The habitat for these is being threatened by mining,” Andring said.
The permanent survival of this native plant will still take years.
“They’re going to be held here for about a year and then they’ll be transferred down to a facility at the mining site,” said Andring. “They can acclimate there for several years while they finish the mining and then do the reclamation of the land.”
The black lace cactus seems to have averted disaster, but this is just the beginning as other cacti and plants find themselves in a similar predicament.
“I suspect this is going to go on for a very long time.” Andring said.
It’s a process that’ll take patience, being carried out by patient people who want you to know that cacti have a greater purpose than just taking up space on the windowsill.
“The cactus are there for food, for shelter, their roots help hold the soil in place. They’re part of the environment,” Schulze said.
