Passion in Full Bloom : Business has taken root for desert flora specialist David Bernstein. About 100,000 succulents, including some spiky monsters, thrive in his Reseda greenhouses.
Cactus-grower David Bernstein’s most painful brush with his merchandise occurred just after he had delivered a truckload of gold barrels to a Hollywood nursery. “I missed my step swinging back up into the truck,” he recalls, “and got 30 spines in my hand. A co-worker had to pull them out with pliers.”
Someone else might have taken this as a sign from God, but Bernstein was too hooked on the plants to consider a career change. Since 1976, when he raised a greenhouse full of succulents and foliage plants for a high school science project, he’s been in love with desert flora and made it his business to produce them. His company, California Nursery Specialties, which began as a back-yard operation, is now one of the largest of its kind in the San Fernando Valley. A good 100,000 succulents thrive in his Reseda greenhouses--club-size cacti, fleshy aloes, monumental euphorbias--to say nothing of the adjoining display garden that he maintains or his other greenhouses in San Diego.
During the week, he travels to retail nurseries delivering what he grows, and on weekends, he invites the public into his 1 1/2-acre patch of suburban desert to get their hands on his prickly product. “I love to share this place, to talk to people about the plants,” he says.
Although some might find them loathsome, Bernstein has a lot to say in praise of hairy, spiky monsters that twist and writhe or sit like rocks in their pots. “They come in so many bizarre shapes, textures and colors,” he says. “Some of the ugliest plants suddenly send up the most beautiful flowers. And there are so many unusual varieties, you think, what next?”
In recent years, the popularity of the Southwest look, along with drought-tolerant landscape plants in general, has increased the public appeal of cacti and succulents. Bernstein’s crop is all nursery-grown (“We don’t dig plants out of the desert,” he says) and it forms a mind-boggling array of plants that crawl and dangle from the shelves and ceilings of his greenhouses.
Hoary old man cacti rub shoulders with golden crowns and split-rock succulents (hardly discernible from the gravel in which they grow) under the creepy fronds of rat tails. Buddha’s temple, a cross between two varieties of crassula, resembles a small, high-tech apartment building, while a “living oddball” looks like a softball clothed in Guatemalan fabric.
Come spring, Bernstein says, 10,000 to 20,000 of his plants explode into bloom, but the rest of the year the show is pretty good too. For the weekend visitor, the fun starts with the first glimpse of an outdoor display garden, where old familiars such as opuntia get mixed up with odd, crested euphorbias on either side of a driftwood bridge.
Dennis Modica of Granada Hills says Bernstein’s operation was “instrumental in getting me going when I redesigned my front yard.”
Other weekenders come to Bernstein’s just to gawk: parents entertaining restless children; an entire busload of green thumbs from a Palos Verdes garden club. Invariably, they stay longer than planned. Usually, they come away with new respect for the rugged denizens of the desert.
Where and When What: California Nursery Specialties. Where: 19420 Saticoy St., Reseda. Hours: Open to the public 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
