Buck Hemenway: Introduction To Survival of the Fattest

Join us Wednesday, April 6th at 6:00 pm PST

Buck Hemenway and his wife Yvonne are enthusiastic growers of succulent plants.  Their one-time hobby turned into the Prickly Palace nursery, which supplied cacti and succulents to the retail nursery trade in Southern California for 15 years.  He is Past President and Lifetime Member of both Gates C&SS and San Gabriel Valley C&SS and served for 10 years on the board of Cactus & Succulent Society of America.  They are long time members of the British Cactus & Succulent Society and the Succulent Society of South Africa.  Both are “Northern” people.  Yvonne is Canadian and Buck was born and raised in Portland Oregon.

They traveled to Southern Africa on several occasions, visiting southwest Namibia as well as the Karoos in South Africa.  They have a continuing love affair with South Africa and have purchased property there and are living in Calitzdorp in the Klein Karoo.

They saw the need for a Succulent Club in their area, so formed the Calitzdorp Succulent Society with the help of several friends there.  The Society now produces Vetplantfees which is Afrikaans for Succulent Plant Festival, which attracts thousands of visitors and hungry buyers from all over southern South Africa.

Buck’s talk will be an introduction to the film:

The Survival of the Fattest

A Film by Neil Curry

The documentary “The Survival of the Fattest” takes a close look at how succulents plants survive in the wild against all odds. The documentary follows three intrepid plant explorers as they take us into the Karoo for a close look at many South African indigenous plants and explore how and why these plants survive when other plants cannot.