Walking around a well-stocked greenhouse is like being spritzed with a museum dose of some wonderful drug. The air is perfumed and feels heavy, like all that glorious photosynthesis has weighed it with excess oxygen. The plants themselves seem to radiate energy. A vibey plant shop or succulent boutique can offer a taste, but this is a purer form of the vibrancy spike.

This particular network of greenhouses, outside Aurora, Oregon, holds heartbreakingly beautiful flowering cacti, cultivated over a series of years, and funny little lithops, a.k.a. “living stones,” which resemble nothing else so much as the backside of a toad. There are jade plants and mesembs, Pachypodium and Tylecodon, Stapelia and Haworthia and Agave guadalajarana. All told, Rancho Cacto grows thousands—“maybe even tens of thousands,” says Molly Malecki—of individual and hybrid cultivars from hundreds of plant genera.

Malecki is Rancho Cacto’s founder, proprietor, horticulturalist, curator, marketer, and delivery driver. Originally from Whidbey Island, with a graduate degree in art history from the University of Washington, Malecki started as a hobbyist gardener, haunting plant shops around the Pacific Northwest and layering the patio of her student apartment with various buds and tendrils. Gardening became an outlet for her academic stress, and soon, an all-abiding passion. “There’s something about moving at the rhythm of things growing that reflects who I am,” she says.

Among the many unexpected knock-on effects of the COVID-19 pandemic was a houseplant boom: Nearly 80 percent of garden centers in the US and Canada saw an increase in houseplant sales in 2021. After years as a plant broker—connecting wholesale plant growers to nurseries and landscapers—Malecki struck out on her own, launching Rancho Cacto in 2022.

Today she sells direct to more than 50 plant shops across the region, with buyers as far away as Seattle. It was her plant tags that first caught my eye while browsing flora emporia around town—little white plastic spikes bearing thoughtful copy in black block font next to the shadowed silhouette of a single saguaro. I kept seeing them: at Portland Nursery, Arium, Hammer & Vine. Finally, one day, while considering a Cereus forbesii ‘spiralis’ at Solabee, I had to ask: What’s the deal with Rancho Cacto?

“Oh,” said the staffer. “We call her the Cactus Lady. She brings us the most amazing stuff.”

And because Malecki personally delivers every plant she sells, she can check out lighting and store conditions and tailor selections to each shop, from more daring and atmospheric specimens at a small shop like Solabee (like that spiral cactus, which looks like a spiky green double helix) to an army of baby agaves lined up by the trayful at the vast Portland Nursery.

Wandering the greenhouse with her, I ask, as a home plant enthusiast with a few accidental kills in my past, how on earth she keeps track of it all. When to water, how much sun is enough—surely there must be some master spreadsheet or blueprint? Turns out, nope. “I spend time with these plants every day,” she tells me, “and watch the weather, and pray hard I don’t kill everything. It’s more intuitive than anything else.” This is a huge relief to hear—the Cactus Lady, she’s just like me! But however much I might dig weird plants, Malecki has taken things to another level.

“This business is really just me doing what I love,” she says, as we linger over a Brighamia insignis, a type of Hawaiian lobelioid known as ʻŌlula or Alula in Hawaiian, and by some as vulcan palm or cabbage on a stick. “Sometimes, I think I’d almost rather have a greenhouse than a regular house.”