Father-daughter duo educate community on cacti
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Beginning with one small succulent, one Fountain Valley resident saw his small gardening hobby quickly turned into a passion, lifestyle and full-blown website to help others learn more about these important plant types.
Brian Kealer, 41, began gardening cacti during the COVID pandemic when a small lithops, otherwise known as a living stone — a small stemless succulent native to southern Africa — was gifted to him by a friend.
Receiving a great amount of excitement from his young daughter, June, who was 3 at the time, the singular plant quickly turned into a small shelf of succulents, and eventually a greenhouse in their backyard.
“When you’re able to do something on your own, and it’s your own little hobby project, you get a lot more creativity and freedom to work with,” Kealer said. “I think that’s where this all came from, which was probably me not being fulfilled so much at work and really just starting something fresh with my daughter that allowed me to get a lot closer to her.”
A full-stack developer in the tech and video game industry with over 20 years’ experience, Kealer found a way to mix his profession and his hobby to create Rare Cactus, a free reference site for rare cacti and succulents.
The multi-leveled website is constructed across three main moving pieces: an illustrated encyclopedia of 32 genera checked against an open database of 59,132 collector field numbers from 280 collectors, and a reading of the 2.3 million CITES trade records for cacti since 1976.
“As people want to know more about different genera and species, I just keep adding more and more and more. Every week I find something new, learn about something new, and then add it to the site,” Kealer said. “Hopefully, it’s just like its own sort of Wikipedia for these rare cacti and succulents.”
Visitors to the site are able to click onto and look over tabs including the encyclopedia, where they can search cacti and succulents by name or look under the genera for new species, learn about a plant’s rarity under the “rarity index” tab, learn how to care for the plants and find helpful articles or resources under “plant care,” “articles” or “community,” and for those already deeper into the hobby, a “field numbers” tab is available to identify wild specimen by searching for collector acronyms and field numbers.
Still actively working in tech, Kealer enjoys free evenings tending to his plants with June in their greenhouse, attending cactus society meetings or preparing for upcoming competitions. According to Kealer, getting involved in local societies, such as the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, is not only helpful for himself, but a way to get younger generations mingling with older generations as they have an opportunity to become more interested in looking into the earth as opposed to their phone screens.
“I realized that when you have a toddler, you’re competing against phone screens, computers, TV and whatnot. So, in a world where there’s so much screen addiction for adults and children, I think it’s a really healthy thing to just get out there, get in the sun and watch the bees pollinate some of your cacti that are blooming,” Kealer said.
For others looking to begin a hobby in cacti and succulents, the Cactus and Succulent Society recommends starting plants from seed as a conservation effort. Succulents and other native plants, like animals, have endured decades of poaching and other visible destruction to their habitats through development and climate change. More information on a plant’s rarity and how these succulents can be grown and maintained can all be found through the Rare Cactus website, or the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
— Carroll is a contributor to the Daily Pilot.
