Stuck on Cactuses : Tarzana Couple’s Collection of Succulents Draws Wide Praise From Cactificionados
Ed and Betty Gay live in the San Fernando Valley’s largest cactus patch.
It’s no scruffy, sandy plot of desert, though. It is a 28,000-plant collection hidden away in a quiet Tarzana neighborhood.
The Gays call their home “Cactus Ranchito,” and it has attracted visitors from around the world--with rave reviews to match.
One Northridge expert on succulents describes the backyard of the Gays’ Topeka Drive residence as “truly one of the best collections of cacti in the world.” A novice cactus lover has a more succinct description: “It’s heaven.”
The collection began much more modestly than that, however. After the Gays married 31 years ago, they figured on acquiring perhaps a dozen cactus varieties.
“We started out to have something that reminded us of home,” said Betty Gay, a 66-year-old retired accountant. “We both grew up on ranches outside Tucson.
“When Ed was a boy, he had a little collection. I didn’t cultivate them, but my dad appreciated them. He’d take us on nighttime hikes to look at the night-blooming cereus.”
“We’d had 12 or 15 different cacti growing on our ranch in the foothills,” said Ed Gay, 70, of his boyhood. Gay is a retired movie studio special-effects expert who helped part the Red Sea in the “Ten Commandments.”
“I thought maybe there might be maybe 30 or 40 different kinds altogether,” he said.
It turned out there are about 3,000 cactus species. And, over the years, the Gays have amassed about 2,000 of them at their half-acre Tarzana home. They have always pursued their hobby with enthusiasm, and last year even landed in trouble with the law in a dispute over the importation of endangered cactus species from Mexico.
The biggest cactus displayed in the Gays’ backyard is a giant called a Myrtillocactus geometrizans . It is a hedge-like plant that sports dagger-sharp spikes.
The smallest cactus sits on a table an arm’s length away from the giant. It is the fragile, soft-spined Manmillaria saboae, which is the size of a pencil eraser when fully grown.
In between, there are thousands of others, carefully lined up in the Gays’ backyard beneath plastic and mesh shades.
In one corner, there’s the Morangaya, a spindly specimen discovered by the Gays during a 1970 trip to Baja California. Without a name when the pair found it, its designation came when they submitted the specimen to Dr. Reid Moran, a senior botanist from the University of California, Berkeley, for official classification.
In the center is the pride of the Gays’ collection: a row of carefully potted Chilean cactuses collected over a dozen years with the cooperation of the government of Chile.
“We’ve been to Chile four times, each for one month at a time,” Ed Gay said. “We had a permit from the Chilean government to collect three of each species. We’d travel with a Chilean university curator.”
Gay said they have collected about 300 Chilean species--about 85% of that country’s cactus varieties.
The Gays’ original collection is planted on a special spot on a hill at the rear of the couple’s home. Seeds from occasional flowers on the plants are saved and propagated as new plants.
The originals are carefully tended, and even more carefully labeled: “5 km east of Mina Esmeralda,” states the tag stuck in the pot next to a 25-year-old Copiapoa esmeraldana.
Like each of the other original cactuses in the Gays’ collection, it is numbered to correspond with a detailed journal that lists the date the plant was collected, its original soil conditions, elevation above sea level and surrounding vegetation.
To the Gays’ chagrin, however, none of those plants has brought them the notice that a Mexican cactus called the Aztekium ritteri has.
Unwelcome Recognition
This nondescript plant, about the size of a quarter, brought the Gays unwelcome recognition in March, 1986, when an agent for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service spotted it during an unannounced visit to the Cactus Ranchito.
The officer identified the tiny cactus as a rare and endangered plant protected by the federal Endangered Species Act and a 91-nation treaty adopted in 1973.
In short order, the Gays found themselves among nine cactus collectors named in a first-ever cactus-smuggling indictment filed by Arizona-based federal prosecutors.
Charges against Betty Gay were dismissed. But Ed Gay pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts of importation of an endangered specie and possession of an endangered specie unlawfully imported into the United States.
Last August, Gay was fined $2,000 and ordered to turn over to federal officials the keys and pink slip to the 1982 pickup truck he’d used to carry the plants into the United States. Six of the others who also pleaded guilty were likewise fined; another collector also forfeited his vehicle to the government.
Federal officials acknowledged later that Gay and the others were prosecuted as a signal that the government was prepared to take the endangered-species laws seriously.
“These people were all law-abiding, for the most part, very respectable people,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Philip G. Espinosa, the Tucson-based prosecutor in the case, said last week.
“I can’t stress enough that they’re very nice people. I would have objected if the judge wanted to put anybody in jail. We felt that bringing the prosecution forth and bringing fines would serve the purpose of enforcing these statutes.”
Betty Gay said that, when her husband brought the Aztekium ritteri across the Mexico-Arizona border, he “had about 40 of them sitting in plain view on the front seat of the truck,” she recalled Friday. “He was ready to declare them at the border, but he was never asked about them. . . . It was bad judgment on Ed’s part.”
If the prosecution was designed to catch the attention of cactus collectors, it succeeded. Said Espinosa: “People aren’t going to mess around when there’s going to be criminal prosecution.”
One of the undercover agents involved in the case was invited later to address Los Angeles cactus grower groups. At smaller cactus hobbyist group meetings, the ethics of cactus collecting became as popular a topic as proper watering techniques and control of cactus mealy bugs.
‘Learned Our Lesson’
“We certainly learned our lesson,” said Betty Gay, a quick-smiling woman who spends about eight hours a day tending her garden.
Minus the troublesome Aztekium ritteri, the Cactus Ranchito remains a showplace.
It was created 24 years ago when the Gays decided to move from Sepulveda in the flat center of the Valley. They had searched for a large, sloping lot in an area zoned for residential-agricultural usage.
The size was important to house their growing collection; the slope was necessary for drainage to keep the cactuses dry, and the zoning, in case they ever decided to sell their prickly crop, they said.
The Gays, who are childless, say they plan to live out their days at the Cactus Ranchito. “After we’re gone, we trust that our executor will sell it to a cactus collector,” said Betty Gay. They never have put a value on their collection.
Their garden remains a standout in their neighborhood, and beyond. Recently, the Gays have had visitors from Japan, Germany and Austria.
“Their plants are very restful and neat, and they are wonderful neighbors,” said Ruth Hertz, who lives next door. “Personally, though, I like more colorful things, like azaleas.”
Marisha Norman, a Canoga Park resident, said she frequently visits the Gays’ garden to admire it and acquire seedlings for a cactus collection she’s starting.
“For cactus lovers, this place is heaven,” Norman said.
Manny Singer, a Northridge grower who specializes in succulents, caudex plants and cactus-like African euphorbia, said the Gays are “fabulous growers.”
“Theirs is an excellent, outstanding collection. It’s truly one of the best collections of cacti in the world,” he said.
