Cactus Slim's Moorten Botanical Garden
Near Palm Springs, California
On South Palm Canyon Drive sits a one acre jungle of thorns that is one of the oldest attractions in Palm Springs, and one of the most personal. This is the Moorten Botanical Garden, home to more than three thousand kinds of desert plants packed into a family run oasis. Its founder was a Hollywood character in the most literal sense.
Chester Moorten, nicknamed Cactus Slim, had been one of the original Keystone Cops, the bumbling silent film policemen. Chester, like so many others, came to the desert to heal. He recovered while panning for gold and collecting cactus out near Joshua Tree, and in nineteen thirty-eight he arrived in Palm Springs as a cactus salesman.
There he met Patricia, who shared his love of desert plants, and together they founded the garden as a nursery around nineteen thirty-nine, opening it to the public in its present form in the mid nineteen fifties. Patricia coined a word for the Quonset hut greenhouse where they raised their rarest specimens. She called it a cactarium, said to be the first in the world.
The garden is still run by the family today, a living time capsule of old Palm Springs where towering cactuses, some older than the garden itself, crowd the winding desert paths.
