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Coordinates: California, USA
Foreword: As a self-media of succulents, Encyclopedia Jun usually occasionally reads some foreign succulent-related news or introductions, a few days ago Encyclopedia Jun accidentally saw an article in the United States comprehensive literary and art publication "New Yorker" magazine, entitled "California: The number of succulent smugglers declined", sensitive I clicked to read, the article mentioned China, of course, is not a good thing, but I think it is necessary to let the Chinese people, especially domestic succulent lovers and practitioners also understand, So I entrusted "Shelly", the owner of the Encyclopedia Overseas and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Meat Friends Group, to help organize the full text translation, and I have this article tonight! Special thanks to the friends who participated in the translation of this article! What is particularly rare is that "Shelly" also added some of their own thoughts when translating the report, let's take a look!
(Fairy Cup native environment, translated by "Shelly" near Big Sur, California, USA)
"The Wandering Earth" is popular in China, and it also burns to all the places where Chinese people live on the planet. While enjoying the film on the weekend, I can't help but feel uneasy in my heart. Our only planet, if one day humanity can only wander with this already polluted and destroyed home, should we now have enlightenment and change?
In the past few decades, many wild plants we know are in danger of extinction, Tianshan snow lotus, turtle shell peony and rock peony, fairy cup... As described in the film, the last self-help of mankind is the establishment of the "Noah's Ark" seed bank, which makes a "backup" for the earth's tomorrow. Over the past few decades, scientists, governments, and private companies around the world have also worked for "backups." As ordinary people, we may feel that the terms that appear in science fiction films such as "Wandering Earth" and "Noah's Ark Seed Bank" are far away from us, but in reality, as succulent lovers with conscience, not digging or buying wild plants is the last bottom line we insist on. If you love succulents, respect them, cherish them, buy legal garden varieties, and stay away from smuggled wild succulents.
(Translated by "Shelly" near Big Sur, California, USA)
In translation 'Succulents—drought-friendly, fireproof, angular, Zen—long ago attained the status of design cliché, a living version of the shag rug, Heath mug, Eames chair. In order to more accurately understand the author's intention and describe the succulent, several of our friends launched an interesting discussion, and finally 3 versions appeared:
Standard Edition: Succulent, a drought-tolerant, heat-tolerant, angular and Zen plant that has long been used in design, it is a living coarse carpet, a mug, a stylish chair, decorating all corners of life.
Literature and art small fresh version: succulent, this drought-resistant, heat-resistant, masculine Buddhist plant, has long been ingenious, a living succulent carpet, a cute mug pot, or a chair full of succulents, lighting up the neglected corners of life.
Popular Version:
Succulents are a treasure, and there is little heat-resistant watering
The leaves are pointed and, like a lotus flower
There is a large area on the floor, and there is a small cup in it
If only there were an old chair, you could still plant it
Hurry up and buy it home, life must be good... Must be good!
Finally, I would like to thank Guan Xin, Xi Xi, Lao Li Kitchen Knife, Imogen and several other good friends for their great help and inspiration in the translation process.
--Shelly
Here's a translation of the story from The New Yorker:
California: Number of succulent smugglers declines
By Dana Goodyear
February 12
Fairy Cup First Frost (commonly known as: Immortal Flower with Pink), a pink wild plant with spectacular yellow peduncles, has become a target for thieves.
Succulent, a drought-tolerant, heat-tolerant, angular and Zen plant that has long been used in design, is a living coarse carpet, a mug, a stylish chair that decorates all corners of life. But now this particular succulent variety, the Fairy Cup First Frost (commonly known as the Pink Immortal Flower), a pink wild plant that thrives on coastal cliffs in California, USA, with silver-gray foliage, pink leaf edges and spectacular yellow peduncles, is now a target for succulent thieves. Last week, in Monterey County, a couple who stole a fairy cup pleaded guilty to a court-based indictment of two felonies of gross theft and vandalism, indicting more than 1,800 wild plants they had poached from Garrapata State Park in Big Sur. This is the fourth successful prosecution of Fairy Cup thieves in California in more than a year.
"I think it's a trend of theft," Patrick Foy, an official with the California Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Protection, told me. Thieves are driven by profits to steal because the Fairy Cup is in high demand in the emerging Asian market. In Asia, a single Fairy Cup can cost as much as $100. He said, "There are people who book tickets, fly over from South Korea or China, rent a car, buy a lot of boxes, and drive all the way along the coast." "From Oregon to Mexico you can find different varieties of fairy cups." They dug up plants, disposed of stolen goods in hotel rooms, and transported them back to nurseries in Korea and China. According to The Guardian, "In South Korea, raising succulents is considered an 'addictive' behavior and is popular among housewives, students and those living in cramped spaces." The South Korean article refers to this trend as "succulent fever" and quotes wives saying to husbands who complain that they collect too many succulents: 'Don't worry, when I leave you, I'll take all my succulents with me.' ’
In fact, the problem was exposed at the end of 2017, when a whistleblower in Mendocino County thought she had found someone who was digging abalone, and she called the Protection Bureau and inadvertently found a fairy cup thief. Since then, the Fairy Cup investigation has begun to take up manpower in California park guards.
In 2018, Adrian Kamada, deputy district attorney for the Humboldt County district of California, convicted two South Korean men and a Chinese man for stealing 2,300 fairy cups, the same year that the California Fisheries Commission awarded Adrian the title of Prosecutor of the Year. (Their plans began to be discovered when local post office workers noticed dirt leaking from packages destined for Asia.) ）
Foy, who has worked to investigate illegal cannabis cultivation, told me that unlike the large-scale, highly divided drug trafficking system, plant thieves usually act alone. "Like the Fairy Cup, because a single person can dig up a lot and do a lot of damage, they don't need a huge network of middlemen," he said. Along the coast, the Catch Bureau's rangers are highly vigilant about the whereabouts of thieves. "They stay in the parking lot for long periods of time, or park suspicious vehicles in places that don't fit to park, or someone is standing on the edge of a cliff," Foy said, "and if they come down from a cliff and get dirty — like they've been digging — their backpacks are full and thrown straight into the trunk of a rental vehicle." If they parked halfway and dropped a few people, used the lookout, or went out at night with a rope. Wildlife officials already know very well how to capture these details. ”
Debra Lee Baldwin, a floral photojournalist living in San Diego, California, has been a special correspondent for Sunset Magazine for decades and has a responsibility for driving the trend of succulents. "I probably drove the whole succulent trend," she told me. In the early days, she said, "I had to do what I called myself a quick photo while driving." I would take my camera to the streets of the noble community and photograph the succulents outside the window. They are hard to photograph. Not quite now. Beginning in 2007, Baldwin's book Succulent Design became amazon's best-selling gardening book for 19 consecutive weeks; a second edition was launched last year. "The most appealing to gardeners among succulents is the genus Limesis because they look like roses, have flower-like shapes and symmetrical patterns of beauty, and they have no spines and no potential dangers," she said. "Planted in pots, they give you the look of an artistic flower arrangement and combine perfectly with flowers. The wedding industry is also driving them into a newer trend. ”
(Image: BAILEY BEDFORD)
The Fairy Cup is cousin to the stone lotus. "When they're in the midst of perfection, abundance, and colorful light after the rain, they're certainly very beautiful plants," Baldwin said. "They stand like lotuses, with an incredibly silvery white, and their leaves are covered with white frost, which is their protective mechanism in the sun. You really shouldn't touch them, it's like touching a butterfly that leaves fingerprints that never go away. They are picky about their habitat, used to cliffs and cliffs, and spend most of the year in dry conditions. In the summer, she says, when the Fairy Cup looks to be at its peak, "the planter thinks, oh, it needs water." "Don't water unless you want rotting plants; the fairy cup only absorbs water in winter. In nature, the parent plant uses gravity to allow longer stalks to grow down the slope. As the stems wither, they remain connected to the mother, like an umbilical cord, and the subplants that grow in the rock niches are far enough away from the mother plant to not create nutritional competition with the mother plant. "Try replicating it in your garden!" Baldwin said. "The Fairy Cup can survive in very tough conditions, and they love this challenging environment. If you want to plant fairy cups in a pot, you have to simulate its living environment in a pot, and when they start to look bad, I look at the other side. It's a bit like wild animals. You can tame it, you can raise it at home and have fun, but it will never be as happy as a pet and integrated into your life. ”
Law enforcement is one way to crack down on smugglers, and so far, california has imposed very harsh penalties: fines of tens of thousands of dollars, visa revocation, incarceration. Another way to combat smuggling is to destroy markets. That's the goal of Kelly Griffin, a fairy cup expert working for Altman Plants, a nursery based in Southern California that is a major supplier of succulents in the United States. (The company supplies several large stores such as Home Depot, Costco and Lowe's.) "I think of myself like a cactus ball seed," Griffin told me. "I'm the one who spreads cacti and succulents everywhere."
Griffin legally collects plant material — pollen, seeds, and samples — around the world — using them for hybridization and tissue culture cloning, allowing people to enjoy plants without damaging their sensitive habitats. He also quietly went online to observe that a few years ago he discovered that rare agaves that had been illegally obtained were being sold on eBay for thousands of dollars per unit. So he cloned thousands of agaves of the variety and supplied them to nurseries for $5 each. "I deliberately ruined the market," he said. "As an activist, you can say, 'This looks like a collector's-grade plant, and you shouldn't be selling a collector's-grade plant.'" ”
Griffin is now working on the fairy cup hybrid, a vibrant, inexpensive and readily available domesticated variety that he hopes will reduce the theft of wild, rare and irreplaceable native plants. Ironically, these stolen plants can only survive in their native habitat; stolen fairy cups are unlikely to survive in the humid and hot environment they are sent to. "They're being sold into a cycle of death," Griffin says, "and taking away native plants is the worst thing you can do to the ecology." When you take the mother plant away, its DNA will disappear from its native environment forever. ”
~~~~END~~~~
Finally, let's take a look at a video about local law enforcement replanting the stolen wild fairy cups back into the original environment!
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Chinese translation of the video: Today we planted the pirated fairy cups back into the cliffs off the coast of California, their native land. Thanks to our law enforcement, we blocked this international theft involving more than 2,000 Fairy Cups. It took a few days for 31 volunteers, with the help of botanists, to replant the fairy cups back to their native land to continue their beauty. They are like abalones in the plant kingdom, with similar habits, preferring to grow in the crevices of the cliffs along the coast. This habit avoids survival competition from scrubs on eroded rocks. They are not suitable for planting on slopes, because they will be washed away by the current and cannot survive, so they can only be planted in recessed stone crevices. Although the fairy cup can not be said to be rare but very sensitive to the environment of growth, they are long-lived plants, can breed a large number of seeds, but the seeds must be attached to the stone crevices to find a glimmer of life, crazy digging will make them on the verge of extinction. Our task is to protect them and let them continue to thrive here.
Translation: Shelly, Guan Xin
Proofreading: Hee-hee
Encyclopedia Jun Fragments: First of all, thanks to the author, translator and several friends mentioned in the article who have helped us, let us understand the efforts made by the local California on the protection of wild fairy cups and related wild plants, and also through the three photos taken by "Shelly" himself to see the fairy cups in the native environment, I hope that everyone can take a serious look at this article, reprint please also fully indicate the source and translator and other information.
A few days ago, the tweet of the encyclopedia public number "The same is selling succulents, this flower shop has made headlines in the central media!" "Let us see the warm and honest side of human nature. Sometimes the same succulent lovers will be tempted to face their favorite plants, but the choices they make often determine what kind of person you will become. As Shelly puts it, "As a succulent lover with a conscience, not digging up or buying wild plants is the last bottom line we stick to." If you love succulents, respect them, cherish them, buy legal horticultural varieties, and stay away from smuggled wild succulents. ”
I hope that people who see this article can forward more, let more people know about the protection of the Wild Fairy Cup, and reduce the activities of indirectly participating in the smuggling of wild plants due to lack of understanding! This is also the original intention of this article! If you accidentally touch the interests of some people, please calm down and think about it, money can be earned slowly, but wild plants are in a crisis of extinction, don't let the "wandering earth" be staged in advance in reality!
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