A Gift That Keeps on Giving
Eric Nagelmann is slowly circling around a large planter box that, because it is filled with dozens of cacti, resembles a giant pincushion. Nagelmann, who is normally unflappable, is looking a bit alarmed. “This is going to be complicated,” he says, as if the breadth of the project he has agreed to undertake is finally sinking in.
What one of the hottest landscape designers in Southern California will be doing is artfully arranging a massive cactus collection in its new acre-and-a-half home at Lotusland, a massive Montecito estate devoted to plants. Nagelmann is donating his services, a boon that frees Lotusland to focus on raising the funds--Nagelmann guesstimates it may be as much as $500,000--needed to properly set up the garden. The estate of the late Ganna Walska has spent roughly $115,000 to transport the prickly gift from its former residence in Fallbrook and then keep the cacti healthy until their final planting. But no one is begrudging a cent. Collections like this, Lotusland curators agree, come along once in a lifetime.
It took that long for 95-year-old Merritt Dunlap to amass this striking array of 300 New World species. Dunlap’s thing for cacti was one of those first-sight affairs. One Sunday night in 1927, the USC senior drove to the Coachella Valley, and his heart was lost forever. During the Depression, Dunlap worked as a surveyor and engineer for the Metropolitan Water District, spending two years living in tents in the desert. For a cactus lover, it was heaven. By the collection’s heyday in the 1970s, when he moved it from Glendale to his current San Diego County home in Fallbrook, he had 1,000 plants, including the rare Galapagos opuntia, which he grew in the early ‘60s from seeds from the Charles Darwin Research Station.
What’s amazing, says Lotusland horticultural consultant Paul Mills, who is in charge of maintaining the collection, is that Dunlap managed to trick the now-impossible-to-get opuntia into taking root. In their native habitat, the seeds won’t sprout without passing through the digestive system of the Galapagos Islands’ giant tortoises. “He put them in a tea bag that he suspended from a faucet so that the water could drip on them,” leaching the plant’s inhibitors in a way that soaking did not, Mills explains.
Although heavily armored, cacti are easy to injure. The Herculean task of moving the plants fell to Mills and a Lotusland staffer, Esau Ramirez. The bulk of the collection arrived at Lotusland late last year, and Mills chuckles at the memory of the enormous, cactus-laden flatbed trucks giving freeway motorists yet one more only-in-L.A. memory. Nagelmann is also grinning. He has just rattled off a plant name only to be corrected by Lotusland Foundation curator Virginia Hayes. That was the old name, she explains, bantering with him over how DNA testing and other advances in plant classification are making it harder for everyone to keep track. And this very collection, with its range of subspecies and advanced age of the plants, makes it a potential research bonanza.
Dunlap met Lotusland owner Walska in 1941, when he was stationed as an Army engineer in Santa Barbara. “Madame,” as she was affectionately known, and “Sigs,” short for Sigsbee, his mother’s maiden name, bonded over their mutual love of plants, and three decades later he bequeathed the collection to his old friend.
Nagelmann and Hayes are now at the newly restored topiary garden next to a field filled with wild grasses and a couple of ceanothuses--the cacti’s final destination. There’s a look in Nagelmann’s eyes that says big plans. There will be the predictable concerns, which plants can go in the sunnier spots and which might need relief from full sun. But there’s an aesthetic issue too: “What looks good next to what.” You could say these plants will soon be ready for their close-up. Just don’t get too close.
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