Xerophile is the first book of its kind: a selection of over five hundred photographs of arguably the rarest and most spectacular plants on earth, photographed in their natural habitats over the past eighty years by a global cadre of obsessed cactus aficionados, amateur and professional, from Ph.D. botanists to bankers, art teachers to cancer researchers. Fuelled by whispers of ancient plants on forgotten hilltops in Brazil and legends of fields of living fossils deep in the arid deserts of Chile, their relentless drive to find and document succulents in some of the most remote landscapes on earth has produced an extraordinary collective body of photographic work that has rarely been seen by the general public. Compiled by the proprietors of the Cactus Store in Los Angeles, it is not a field guide or a taxonomy, nor a book of photography in the traditional sense: it mines the space between science and art, gravity and levity, where plants that should not exist, and may cease to, live on in dusty slide carousels and forgotten hard drives, and in the eyes of those who devoted their lives to searching, after weeks of false turns, stuck jeeps and steep mountain paths, for the plant they so desperately sought.