Such harsh beauty

IN a world of numbing moderation, there is, luckily, Al Richter. The Glendora homeowner believes that if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. “If I like something, I really go overboard,” admits the tall, seventysomething, still-rugged retired business owner.

It’s not hard to figure out one of Richter’s extreme tendencies as he strides over to a giant tangle of lime-green limbs rippling and swimming for the sky. If we were underwater, seals would be darting through this would-be kelp forest. But we are distinctly on dry land on a hillside in Richter’s cactus garden. The wild tree with the fluttery branches frozen in undersea formation is a Euphorbia ammak -- a succulent from Eritrea that can grow to 40 feet. It’s a good halfway there now.

“This is one of my original plants,” says Richter, as we crane our necks up at the Euphorbia’s twisted, knobby branches, edged in black detailing.

The behemoth helped unleash an uncontrollable urge in Richter that would not be denied, turning him from an ordinary, lawn-abiding citizen into a full-fledged cactus fanatic. Today his collection tops 1,000 plants, sprawling in a dumbfounding array of shapes and prickliness in a show that he could charge admission for. Columns of tube cactuses rise in clusters of blue-gray, ash and khaki, with a burst of giant golden barrels holding center court. Bulbous, baobab-like succulents from Africa share the stage with the pink blooms from a silver dollar Opuntia, miniature Madagascar palms, stately Peruvian torches, and a Noah’s ark of everything spiky and rubbery. It’s a scene out of some lost epoch of natural history, one inexplicable form after another.

Richter’s obsession is driven not by ballooning water bills or a vendetta against mowing, but by an aesthetic. When he prowls his garden, he doesn’t see plants looking back at him. “Cactus is art. They’re like living sculptures. You get all these different looks. It’s almost like you can’t even believe they’re alive,” he says. Like others attracted to shapes pleasing to the senses, the former packaging company entrepreneur collects his prizes for the art of it.

Until the cactus takeover, Richter had never been involved in art. But the strange, ethereal forms with the creative needle-points and barnacle pups awakened a passion for these novel shapes that shows no sign of waning. “You get to the point where you just want to do more,” he says. “I always want to put cactus everywhere.”

Richter isn’t the only one who’s flipped for this once-fringe flora. Succulents and cactuses are showing up in more and more Southland yards. Sales have tripled over the last five years at the California Cactus Center, reports Molly Thongthiraj, who with her five sisters, runs the pioneering Pasadena nursery devoted to all things succulent. She designed Richter’s garden. “Realtors used to say, ‘Take all the cacti out if you want to sell your house,’ ” she says. “Now they’re coming in with the client, saying, ‘Put them in front of the house and your house is going to sell.’ ”

“Cacti are really growing in popularity,” echoes Joe Clements, director of the arboretum at Pitzer College in Claremont and former curator of the desert garden at the Huntington Botanical Gardens in San Marino. “People have latched onto the idea that they look good all year round.” Pitzer has installed drought-tolerant landscaping around the campus, and the school’s president, Laura Skandera Trombley, recently ripped up an H2O-gulping lawn for a mix of local cactuses and succulents.

Experts say that desert plants are catching on because homeowners want to conserve water, spend less time on upkeep and can now tap an array of plants that go well beyond yuccas. There are more than 10,000 species of cactuses and another 10,000 varieties of succulents, the rubbery plants without needles. And now there’s the artistic attraction. “People seem to want more architectural appeal and color,” says landscape designer Ivette Soler, who specializes in cactus gardens that blend succulents and traditional plants. “The eye of the average homeowner has become more attuned to shape and color than it used to be.”

Increasingly, a new palette of plant textures is challenging lawn hegemony, as homeowners cast off the Bandini yoke for a more individual expression.

“A lawn is fine if you want to play golf,” says Richter. But “if you want to do something interesting, you need [succulent] plants.”

UNTIL recently, any yard deviating from turf bordered on disorderly conduct. The lawn has been sacred ground -- right up there with mom, apple pie and monster trucks -- an icon of suburban citizenry, the green moat around the castles of the American Dream. Except it’s not our dream. The well-clipped lawn is a legacy of 17th century British gentry, a remnant of mannered culture that didn’t translate immediately to our rugged individualist shores. It took concerted marketing in the early 20th century by the Garden Club of America, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United States Golf Assn. to persuade homeowners that it was their civic duty to let a thousand blades bloom, according to Virginia Scott Jenkins in “The Lawn: A History of an American Obsession.”

And the rest is lawn-care industry history. One NASA researcher found that lawns blanket 32 million acres in the U.S. -- the largest irrigated crop in the country, triple that of corn. About 50% to 70% of all residential water is now used for lawns and gardens, reports the American Water Works Assn.

The scale of the guzzling inspired a backlash in the ‘80s, a move to a more drought-tolerant yard, the xeriscape. But the early stabs at a lawn-free home tended to be sparse, monochromatic affairs with rocks and forlorn cactuses marooned like lone “soldiers,” as Clements calls them. For most people, these plants remained the opposite of lawns -- devoid of color and lushness -- until landscape designers showed that a diverse mix of succulents could create density and luxuriance.

“It’s very easy to buy into the stereotype,” says Soler. “You think of the desert with a few plants that are spiky and blend into a brownish gray scene. The reality is, the color is out of this world. I’ve got blue violet succulents that are next to an Echeveria that is a beautiful chartreuse green with red tips, next to a blue-gray Echeveria, sitting next to a purple one. When you start investigating, there’s a whole range of plants that give you so much color and texture. They allow you to play in a way that other plant species really don’t lend themselves to.”

The carnival is vividly on display at the California Cactus Center, founded 30 years ago by Thongthiraj’s father, a doctor and cactus collector from Thailand who thought his hobby might translate into gainful employment for his six daughters. The nursery is a hub for exotic plant wholesalers, homeowners, landscape architects and film wranglers (its plants have made appearances in “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Minority Report,” among others).

Thick with flowing aloe leaves, lush succulents and a forest of cactuses, including two giant saguaros weighing more than 2,500 pounds each, the entrance to the place feels more like jungle than desert. Thongthiraj introduces the ‘Crested Blue’ Cereus, a straight-up cactus mutated into a sideways jam of accordion-like pleats. The scrunched squeezebox is a popular example of the artistic possibilities available with an influx of exotic succulents. Customers “treat it as a sculpture and use it as a centerpiece of their garden,” she says.

Nearby is a specimen stranger still, called elephant’s foot. The plant’s base looks like an abandoned tortoise shell with branches flaring out of the top. The aisles here explode preconceived notions about what constitutes a cactus. Coin-sized dots called “living stones” mimic tiny rocks, other plants ape baseballs, and, weirdly, a number of these habitues of aridity resemble reef creatures -- anemones, spiky sea cucumbers, coral heads. There’s a distinct sense of land snorkeling here, peering down into a realm of shapes off the terrestrial rule book.

Thongthiraj and her colleagues bend the cactus image further through what they call “succulent bonsai” and “staged succulents,” designed by house artisans, including her sister Arree. “A lot of the cacti are very structural, so they lend themselves well to a Zen garden or a very contemporary one,” says Arree, a painter. “Some of the succulents resemble flowers, so they can be used in Mediterranean gardens and even traditional gardens.”

The similarity is easy to see in a piece she calls “an homage to Monet.” A bouquet of mauve, yellow and green saucer plants swims in a turquoise birdbath, with blue rocks simulating water. In a minimalist piece inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, a mother-of-pearl tile mosaic path splits two spare rows of ‘Little Zebra’ plants. On another aisle, Arree has arranged ‘Golden Ball’ cactuses into a furry yellow square floating in a Zen sandbox.

The Getty Center designers took this concept to a grander intersection of art and spines with the dramatic streak of cactuses on the south promontory of the building. When the art palace wanted “to turn up the volume,” it turned to cactus, says Dennis McGlade, a landscape architect with Philadelphia-based Olin Partnership, which created the highflying garden. “It’s a collage effect, different species used in a composition -- golden barrel cactus running down the middle, edged with blue Senecios. It was about color and color composition and form contrasts. You have round, globe-like cactus, then you have tall, tube-like cactus.”

As interest in the aesthetic lines of the cactus grows, landscape designers are bringing the emotional hook of art as well as the logical sell of water conservation, sustainability and low upkeep to clients. “You can be more expressive as an artist using cacti and succulents than a lawn with azaleas,” says Tim Johnson, a designer whose company, Mama Mountain Productions, works with the Cactus Center and manages Richter’s garden. Internationally known sculptor Jorge Pardo, a client of Soler’s, was so taken by the plants’ expressive possibilities that he’s now using it as a medium in his work.

HOMEOWNERS who have taken the plunge love the plants’ ability to put an individual stamp on the premises.

Meg Sullivan, a landscape architecture student at UCLA who has two cactus gardens at her home in Rancho Park, says “there’s nothing like the forms of cacti.” She’s currently building a fence out of prickly pear.

“I like that they look so exotic,” says Michael Neal, a community development planner, who with his partner Karen Bizzini has created a frontyard like no other on his Larchmont block. “Some look almost alien, but they’re beautiful.”

His dense collection of more than 100 species, which fills the yard down to the curb strip, features plenty of conversation-starters, especially the centerpiece, a mammoth variegated agave with a 15-foot spike masquerading as a medieval catapult. Neal has received mostly favorable comments from neighbors. Most want to know what to call his unidentifiable life forms. Some visitors are too curious. Parts of his ‘Crested Blue’ Cereus have been lopped off by cactus-jackers.

The garden was started by Bizzini, but Neal, in a pattern that seems to go with the cactus adventure, got hooked. It’s his fixation now. He even joined the San Gabriel Valley Cactus and Succulent Club, one of nearly a dozen organizations around town devoted to growing, showing and talking about these light drinkers.

When Neal and Bizzini go on vacation, they don’t have to worry about watering the garden. They have no sprinklers. Some of the plants “seem to thrive on neglect,” says Neal.

Ingrained as identities are with the manicured patch of green, a move to unshorn cactuses can be traumatic, if not heretical, in front of all those neighbors keeping the grassy faith. To minimize separation anxiety, experts suggest baby steps, plugging in a few succulents to get an idea of the color and density possible. “You see that you can have as lush a garden as you have now -- it’s just using different plants,” says Johnson.

And this is where the true art of the cactus garden comes in, with its ability to recast the perception of beauty from a 17th century ideal of domesticating nature to one that encourages untamed, unpredictable, dangerous beauty to unveil itself in oases of wildness. This is why the artistic appeal of drought-tolerant landscapes may be more effective than the environmental or economic arguments. It cuts through the emotional hold of lawn culture offering a beautiful yard while relieving us of the bravado once thought necessary to get it. The gardener shifts from actor to director, picking up a more individualized, authentic creation, and, better yet for the future of sustainability, a little humility.

Although he may be directing the show, Neal knows where the props go for the art in his garden -- his cactuses. “They just do their own thing. They get all the credit.”

Joe Robinson can be reached at home@latimes.com.

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Mix and match for a naturally wild display

OLD habits are hard to shake when it comes to yardwork. Many cactus rookies bring the immaculate-lawn-and-flowers mind-set with them, and the result is over-grooming and over-watering. The first undercuts the wildness of the drought-tolerant landscape and the second is fatal.

Instead of overly linear gardening, “you want it to look natural,” advises Joe Clements, director of the arboretum at Pitzer College. “Nature is regular in an irregular way. Don’t do Chinese soldiers” -- lining up cactuses in rows like the terra-cotta warriors in the famed tomb in Xian, China. And also avoid the lone warrior syndrome, spreading the plants too sparsely.

The key, he says, is repetition of shapes and textures and making changes within that mix. For a starter kit, he suggests beginning with a cluster of five golden barrel cactuses, larger is better -- 6 inches to a foot each -- in a bed of rocks. Add some agaves for height and texture. For softness, bring in Nolina, a meadow-like bear grass, or desert spoon, a bushy blue-silver plant. Top things off with the rubbery leaves of several aloes.

As for watering, most cactuses need very little and vary in their thirst. It’s best to check with an expert at the California Cactus Center or local nursery to avoid sudden drownings.

-- Joe Robinson