Life Lessons With The Cacti Uncle of Sri Lanka

“Leave it alone and it knows how to grow,” says Uncle Nimal. “If you care too much, it will die.”

It’s the day of Diwali and I’m in Katunayake, a few miles north of Bandaranaike International Airport. It’s ten in the morning. Google Maps is of no help, so I walk through the streets, eager to find any sign of the nursery. Residential houses, with big leafy gardens, sit next to one another. A motorbike passes by with two kids on the back seat—the smaller kid on the front, clasping his father’s shirt.

Sandwiched between two houses, there is a small assorted shop, selling things from Sunsilk shampoo sachets to white sugar, biscuits, and fresh vegetables. A hundred meters away, there it is: a tall cacti head, behind a moss-clad cement wall, peek-a-booing as if in invitation. One of the playful wards of the nursery, the Cacti Uncle’s nursery.

But, as it turns out, there are some oldies in the nursery as well. “This fella must be older than twenty-five years,” says the Cacti Uncle, pointing to what he calls a Ferocactus, the oldest in his nursery.

“They start like this,” he says, pointing to one of the tiniest potted plants in the yard, similar to its older cousin, with large spines and small flowers. Though the twenty-five-year-old Ferocactus, due to its sheer size, now grows freely on land, protected by a block wall.

A few other potted cacti remain nearby, providing the oldest of the bunch some much-needed company. “They grow even bigger. You progressively transfer it to bigger bigger bigger pots,” explains the Cacti Uncle. He then proudly shows us another one of his cacti friends, who bears a large yellow flower. It is a rare occurrence. It blooms only once a year.

The Cacti Uncle’s business started about a decade ago, but the cacti themselves have been a part of his life for the past forty years. He first bought seeds of over seventy different varieties of plants from Mlesna Gardens in Florida. Sixty percent of the Florida-bought cacti turned out successful.

“Some of them died.” the Cacti Uncle says. “It was very long ago and I didn’t know about cacti as much as today.” Today, he has a nursery in his home in Katunayake, with six hundred species and over ten thousand plants.

Apart from the nursery at his home in Katunayake, the Cacti Uncle has a second nursery in Welimada, where the air is much cooler and the sun shines mildly. It’s a false belief many of us possess that cacti only grow in hot, dry conditions. They can grow in very cold conditions too; some are even found in the Swiss Alps. Lithops, popular as living stones, is one such genus of ice plants.

The high levels of humidity in Colombo aren’t quite adequate for Lithops, so the Cacti Uncle has shifted them to the Welimada nursery. He also paints his own pots. He shows me a bunch. I quickly like one little pot, painted in yellow. Today, it quietly sits on my work table.

Cacti are in demand more than ever before, partly because they’re Instagrammable and absorb radiation when kept near the computers. Like with anything else, there are myths surrounding cacti. Some people believe they’re poisonous. In Vastu Shastra, thorny plants such as cacti bring misfortune. In feng shui, it’s advised that you avoid placing cacti in the kitchen, bedroom, dining room, or office.

The Cacti Uncle, however, rejects all the myths. “I have been living with these thorny things. They have been in my house for the last forty years and I’m doing well. I’m over eighty.”

Lovely and bald, the Cacti Uncle, also known as Uncle Nimal, spends his weekends at the Diyatha Uyana plant haul. There, he starts his haul every Friday, where other vendors buy one of the big plants from him for 1500 rupees (9 USD). They break it into 100 more little plants and sell each one for 200 rupees (1.5 USD). They make 20,000 LKR (110 USD) having spent only 1500.

I was introduced to Uncle Nimal by my friend Minaali, who also shares a great love for cacti. She now has her own home-based plant business named Nidikumba Shop in Nawala. But I, on the other hand, am an occasional cacti buyer. In 2015, Minaali took me to Uncle Nimal’s and I bought three little succulent plants. They died in two months.

Just as there are people with green thumbs, there are those, like me, who love cacti despite a knack for killing them. Uncle Nimal’s grandsons are similar: “When they come home, they ask me, ‘seeya, seeya, can we have a cactus?’ In two weeks, it’s dead. Then they take another.”

Out of the nursery and into the Cacti Uncle’s living room. His bookshelf is filled with hardcovers, containing information about succulents, their lives, and how to take care of them. Tiga, a furry Persian cat with green eyes appears in the doorway. He quickly runs back when he sees two strangers on his favorite couch. Tiga is a couch-cushion-scratcher.

Uncle Nimal picks up his wedding photograph. His wife, once a great netballer, now holds a senior position in the Sri Lanka Netball Federation. At the moment, Mrs. Ramachandra is at a netball tournament. Soon, Uncle Nimal will be joining his wife on an official trip to Bangalore.

“Sometimes, I show my wife an orchid and ask her, it’s a nice cactus, isn’t it?” Uncle Nimal tells us, smiling. “She looks at it and says, yes, yes, nice cactus.”

Mrs. Ramachandra doesn’t share his love for cacti. Similarly, Uncle Nimal Ramachandra knows very little about the difference between a netball and a throwball.

“Sometimes, I show my wife an orchid and ask her, it’s a nice cactus, isn’t it?” Uncle Nimal tells us, smiling. “She looks at it and says, yes, yes, nice cactus.”

Before he was the Cacti Uncle, tending to things of the earth, Nimal Ramchandra was a man of the skies. At first, he was a pilot at Ratmalana Domestic Airport. Then, the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA), Sri Lanka’s first international airport, opened in 1971. Uncle Nimal was one of the first five people to go to BIA’s control tower to launch the first Boeing aircraft.

“The other four people are not here today.” He laughs. “Only I remain.”

His many professions in the aviation industry took him around the world, something which remains only a dream for many Sri Lankans due to financial status and an unprivileged passport. He was trained in England, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Egypt.

For a time, he worked as a consultant at the Sri Lanka Civil Asian Authority, on a project launched by the European Union for the whole of South Asia. The head office was in Colombo and Uncle Nimal would commute to the commercial capital daily. But after two closely-timed bomb explosions in Colombo in 2008, his family began to worry about him.

“From there,” he says, “I came home.” After serving as a superintendent at an aviation training school in Kandawala, Uncle Nimal officially retired about five years ago.

Throughout all the ups and downs, his succulents at home only grew bigger and happier. They were only hobbies to Uncle Nimal, but once he retired, he had more time to spend with his plants. With the motivation of his friends, he started his cacti business by first setting up a stall in Viharamahadevi Park, a green, tree-clad park in the middle of Colombo, one notorious as a couple-hiding spot.

Uncle Nimal grew up in Sabaragamuwa, one of Sri Lanka’s lush and rainy provinces, and lived in Ratnapura during the time of the Second World War. It was a difficult period; there was very little rice for consumption. However, for little Nimal and his friends, their childhood was merry. During flash floods, they’d hop on boats to pluck thambili—king coconuts, a type native to Sri Lanka.

His after-school ritual was to cycle through paddy-fields and fly bandura leaves. Bandura (Nepenthes distillatoria) grows in abundance in the wet zones of Sri Lanka. It’s a tropical pitcher plant, a carnivorous one that absorbs nutrients from the insects it traps. But for young Nimal, bandura leaves were his alternative to kites.

“I’m happy when I look back,” he says. “In this situation, there’s no looking forward. You either look back or look now.”

He inherited his love of plants from his father, who was a great agriculturist. He and two of his close friends inspired the young Nimal to develop his love of cacti from the time he was a student. The plants teach him even today, now in his old age.

“When people retire, they die within a year,” says Uncle Nimal. “People retire to bed, and from there, they go to the grave. You must always have an alternative plan, a hobby to keep you busy and entertained, even when you are young and working. When I wake up, I have a list of things to do, to keep me going.” And that’s why he’s the Cacti Uncle.

“You must always have an alternative plan, a hobby to keep you busy and entertained, even when you are young and working.”

In addition to cacti, a tiny corner of Uncle Nimal’s nursery is dominated by Tillandsia, air plants, which are his son’s favorites. Tillandsia is native to parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and the Mesoamerican region. They are epiphytic, meaning the leaves contain specialized cells to absorb ambient moisture and nutrients. Like cacti, air plants are hardy and require much less attention.

While the demand for cacti has increased over the years, it is still very much rare to see in households in Sri Lanka. Cacti certainly aren’t as popular as anthurium, roses, or cannas. It’s one reason Uncle Nimal loves cacti.

To him, “cacti are very interesting” and “a peculiar, intelligent, clever bunch.” Their thorns aren’t there to prick you. Of course, they’re a defense mechanism, but their primary function of thorns is to collect and retain moisture. They’re a way to survive.

One of the mistakes we make as plant owners is to overwater cacti. The deciding factor is the size of the container, certainly not the size of the plant.

“If you don’t water them at all, they will be ugly,” Uncle Nimal says. “They will wrinkle like me. They will not show this young, oily, lively look. See, all my plants are shining and happy. If you don’t give them water, they will become an old man.”

Of course, the Cacti Uncle himself had to learn these lessons the hard way too, had to start from somewhere. When he was a kid, and his father was teaching him to care for plants, his wards only ever lasted a few weeks, or occasionally a few months. Perhaps he was too kind to his plants—which was to fly in the face of the biggest lesson Uncle Nimal teaches us.

“Leave it alone and it knows how to grow,” says Uncle Nimal. “If you care too much, it will die.”