American horticulturalist and editor, for 26 years, of the Cactus and Succulent Journal (U.S.). Charles Glass was born in New York City into an artistic and musical family: his mother, Lillian, was an opera singer who sang on the radio and his father, Beaumont, was first violinist in the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowoski and founding conductor of the Monmouth Symphony Orchestra. Later, his sister and brother had successful careers in fine art and opera.

Glass spent his childhood in Spring Lake, New Jersey, attended private school in New Hampshire, went to Paris after high school to study French at the Sorbonne, and dropped out of Yale University after only one year. In 1953 he enlisted in the Army and served for three years as a radio operator in Nurnberg, Germany. After his military service he studied drama at Paul Mann's Actor's Workshop in New York and in the summer of 1958 attended master classes by opera diva Lotte Lehmann at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where he first made the acquaintance of Mme Ganna Walska, the opera singer-turned-horticulturalist who had opened a private botanical garden, Lotusland, in Montecito.

Back in New York, Glass found a job at Columbia University and in his spare time took courses, eventually earning enough credits for a degree in theatre and German. He moved to California in 1960. Shortly after settling in the Los Angeles hills he took up cactus collecting as a serious hobby, and the following year he bought a small nursery in the San Fernando Valley, which he named "That Cactus Shop". In 1964 he took over from Scott Haselton as owner of Abbey Garden Press and editor of the Cactus and Succulent Journal. He had just started graduate studies in botany at Pomona College in Claremont, but by the end of his first year had decided that his responsibilities to the Journal took precedence over a degree.

His friendship with Robert Foster, another cactus collector from the Los Angeles area, began in 1963, soon after Glass had returned from his first collecting trip to Mexico (to Puerto Peñasco, Sonora). Five years later, the two friends went into partnership, as co-owners of Abbey Garden and Press, co-editors of the journal, co-authors, and co-collectors. Their plant explorations in Mexico – 18 expeditions between 1964 and 1980 – resulted in the discovery or description of 28 species of cacti and the reclassification of 26 others. After the pair published an article on Lotusland in 1972, they began to receive calls from Mme Ganna Walska begging them to work for her. In late 1973, after several months of commuting between Santa Barbara and their home in Reseda, they sold their nursery and became full-time co-directors of Lotusland. Within a year they completely redesigned the cactus, aloe, bromeliad, and succulent gardens and had created a cycad garden. Glass remained as director of Lotusland until 1983, but Foster left in 1975 to oversee their other business concerns, which from 1980 included a new enterprise, Abbey Specimen Shells.

Glass was a keen scuba diver as well as shell collector and pursued these hobbies around the world. He also served as editor of the Conchologist (now The American Conchologist) for four years. Proficient in half a dozen European languages, over the course of 19 diving trips to the Philippines he taught himself Filipino and translated some 300 folk songs. He gave performances on television in the Philippines and in Los Angeles and appeared on stage with some of the best known Filipino performers, both in the United States and the Philippines.

In 1991 Glass resigned from the Journal to become curator of El Charco del Ingenio, a small reserve in San Miguel de Allende. In addition to managing the herbarium and creating a botanical garden of cacti and other succulents, he was responsible for organising plant exploration expeditions and overseeing government-sponsored plant-rescue activities. While building up the collection at the botanical garden, he and his associates discovered 42 new species and subspecies, including Mammillaria marcosii W.A. Fitz Maur., B. Fitz Maur. & Glass and Turbinicarpus alonsoi Glass and S. Arias. After five years, however, his field research had come to a halt because the Mexican government had denied him a collecting permit. In 1997 he left the employ of the botanical garden and began work, with his long-time associate Mario Mendoza Garcia, on a new not-for-profit plant research organisation based at his home in San Miguel, Rancho Alcocer. His death came unexpectedly, as the result of a heart attack, only a few weeks after their first grant proposal was submitted.

Glass was the author of four books: The Cactus and Succulent Journal 1966 Yearbook: Family Album (1966); Cacti and Succulents for the Amateur (1975, with Robert Foster); the cactus and succulent sections of Wise Garden Encyclopedia by E.L.D. Seymour, and Cacti (1991, with Clive Innes). He was an honorary life member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Cactología, a vice president of the California Cactus Growers and of the African Succulent Plant Society, and a member of the International Organization for Succulent Research. He organised the first IOS North American Congress, in Santa Barbara, in 1974, and chaired the panel on cacti and other succulents at the first Mexican congress in 1980. At the 5th Congreso de Botanico Latino-Americano in 1990, he was elected an honorary Latino-Americano. He is commemorated in the name of his first botanical discovery, Mammillaria glassii R.A. Foster, and in the name of a shell, Bathyliotina glassi J.H. McLean.

Sources:
B. and W.A. Fitz Maurice, 1998, "Charles Edward Glass 24 May 1934-23 February 1998", Cactus and Succulent Journal (U.S.), 70(3): 115-116
L.W. Mitich, 1993, "Cactus, Shells and Music - the Charles Glass Story", Cactus and Succulent Journal (U.S.), 65: 3-11.