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I believe that I started buying plants from Abbey Gardens in 1984 and was a fairly frequent mail order client of theirs until the early 1990s. Sadly, I see online that the nursery was sold or broken up in 2015 after the owner's death. They were the bomb way back when. An excellent source of Huntington propagated succulents for the masses and so forth. It all seems so quaint now; waiting on the new catalogs in the mail, perusing them with a glass of scotch and a good cigar and then filling out the order forms and a paper check to international snail mail to them for your plants. Since all of my purchases were sent to US postal addresses, I had the further hassle of arranging export dox for them to get to Guatemala. Probably six weeks or more to get the plants to my door from order date. To contrast, I think I had my last Arid Lands order on my doorstep in California within four days after clicking the "Confirm Order" button on my screen without ever touching a piece of paper or a bottle of single malt.
Rainbow Gardens appears to still be around as a bookstore and they published Dimmit, et. al. excellent book on adeniums about six years back. I'm not sure whether they still sell epicacti. I got a small cutting of a Cuban Selenicereus cf inermis from them more than three decades ago that I grew to immense size up and on a huge Mexican Cypress in my garden in Guatemala. Must have had at least several hundred lbs of stems on the tree when I left and was amazing when in flower.
Happy Trails,
J
