[Intro]: Sonic Snippets, from the Sonica Botanica archive

[Pip Wright]: My name is Pip Wright and I am an enthusiast of cacti, succulents, and let's face it, all plants. 
Honestly, perfection is a cactus or a succulent.  Perfection is seeing that new shoot and seeing its perfect form; seeing the patterns and the interplay amongst the leaves; seeing the cycles and just the perfection of some of the flowers. You just can't imagine that nature has made this stuff up! It's perfect. 
Human beings always seek meaning. You see a completely perfect object in nature, and you think there must be some kind of higher design, or you think that there must be some kind of inherent beauty in our surroundings.
If you look at mathematics, the Fibonacci sequence.  Succulents in particular, have spiral patterns that conform perfectly to the Fibonacci sequence, and you just think, well, the plants are not mathematicians, there's this inherent structure and beauty and ordering of nature. And I think the fascination with cacti and succulent, is just that. They're spectacular and perfect and I think sometimes we just completely forget that nature has come up with everything we could conceive of. And when we stare at some of these beautiful specimens it's really nice to be reminded of that sometimes.  And also, you know, beware, we'll prickle you if we don't like you!