Growing up on a small family farm in Wisconsin I became interested in horticulture at a young age, grew plants as a kid to enter in the local county fair. While in college studying physics after seeing some cacti and succulents at a friend’s house on the windowsill, I went to the library to find some books on these strange plants. I started reading these books and found the plants just fascinating. I used interlibrary loan to borrow hard to get books and a big world opened. In some of these books various clubs and Societies were mentioned, so I wrote away to join a few and then found seed lists from the groups.

I started to grow cacti and succulents from seed and acquired a few plants back in 1970. Soon was on the hunt for seed lists, and what was amazed me was to get seeds with a Latin name and the geographic source. Then I read a series of articles in a British journal about the travel adventures of an English tourist that visited New Mexico. At this point I was interested in seed growing and the idea of moving to New Mexico to start a nursery really took hold. I wanted a life working with seeds. My wife accepted this weird idea instead of becoming a physics teacher, and we moved to NM in the spring of 1973. After 3 years of working on the project we started Mesa Garden in 1976.

Since 1973 we have taken many trips to collect seeds to grow stock plants for the nursery, it has been a great life of desert camping, hiking and seeing plants in nature. After 41 years of running the nursery, we sold it to a couple that were employees and are busier than ever in retirement.

Mesa Gardens has unquestionably been the premier source of cactus and succulent seed over the last half century—having offered more than 10,000 taxa at one point or another. Steve Brack has undertaken over 30 trips to South Africa over the last half century—and has unparalleled knowledge of that country. One of his little-known claims to fame was that he was a mentor to Karel Du Toit—launching Karel as a field botanist.