One Man’s Passion for Cactus Blooms Into Thriving Business
For David Bernstein, cacti and succulents are not just plants, but a passion. His Cactus Ranch in Reseda has more than 100,000 plants, many now in bloom.
The ranch is a high school agriculture project that has grown into a lucrative business, according to the 36-year-old horticultural entrepreneur who supplies plants to retailers and landscape architects all over Southern California.
On weekends he opens his not-so-secret garden, located on Saticoy Street, to tour buses and the curious. He says he didn’t mean to become an underground tourist attraction. People saw what looked like a huge, xeriscape garden and wanted to know if they could come and look at it.
He says his spread is rivaled only by the formal cactus and succulent garden at the Huntington Library in San Marino.
The outdoor displays feature an amazing diversity of plants side-by-side with 20-foot giants. Now almost all have flowers.
“One of the things that fascinates me is how such beautiful, delicate blooms can come from such prickly, grizzled plants,” Bernstein says.
Bernstein became a green grower his junior year at James Monroe High School. “I was a serious agriculture student thrown in with about 200 people who were in the program just marking time,” he says.
“My teacher, Jack Yost, could tell I wanted to learn, so the summer of my junior year he gave me the keys to the school greenhouse, and told me I could grow whatever I wanted,” Bernstein remembers.
Under Yost’s supervision, Bernstein collected about 1,000 cuttings donated by the plant nursery where he then worked, and he began growing them in the greenhouse. They were mostly houseplants like grape ivy and creeping charlies, with some succulents thrown in.
After high school graduation, Bernstein went to Pierce College and studied horticulture. He spent summers working at Frank’s Nursery on Reseda Boulevard in Northridge while becoming more and more fascinated with growing cactus plants.
“At that time I was using my parents’ yard in North Hills to grow the plants from seeds to full flower,” he says. “So, in addition to working as a clerk at Frank’s, I became one of his suppliers. That was about the time when people started becoming aware of the advantages of landscaping with water-saving plants.
“After a while, John Goka, the manager of Frank’s, told me to stop coming to work and concentrate on supplying plants to his and other nurseries,” says Bernstein, who then, at the age of 24, bought an acre and a half in Reseda so he would have room to spread out.
“I’d saved some money and my mother loaned me some to make the $40,000 down payment on the property. But I was scared because I still owed the rest of the $169,000. Scared but confident. It was something I really wanted to do,” he says.
Bernstein now travels Monday through Friday to nurseries from San Diego to Santa Barbara, not just delivering product and shooting the breeze with his customers, but setting up xeriscape displays that show nursery customers how to use water-saving plants in landscaping.
On weekends, he’s almost always at the Cactus Ranch in Reseda, where he wanders among the visitors and sells his plants, which range in price from $1 to $1,000.
“I never meant the ranch to be a retail outlet which would put me in direct competition with my commercial customers. But the people I supply to don’t mind, so I go ahead and sell things if people want them,” he says.
Bernstein says the seven-day-a-week schedule doesn’t bother him. “My girlfriend and I go away occasionally. We just got back from Hawaii, where the plants are so varied and interesting we were just knocked out,” Bernstein adds.
He says if he sounds like a workaholic, he’s giving the wrong impression.
“What I do every day is fun for me. I feel like I’m goofing off. I see my friends in various professions grinding out the long hours and hating every minute. For them, the weekends are never long enough.
“For me, I watch things grow, talk to nice people and make a good living. It’s my theory that if you do what you love, the money and security will come,” he says.
Bar Stops Serving Free Drinks Because of the Residual Effect
OK, we all know there is no such thing as a free lunch, right?
But every writer, director and actor in the Valley knew you could get $5 worth of free booze at Re$iduals bar in Studio City if you brought in a residual check for under $1. Sad to say that was then and now is different, for all those formerly poor but happy freeloaders.
The owners, like the raven, now say “Nevermore.”
“It was a joke,” says owner-manager Craig Tennis. “How many people would ever get such a check?”
The answer now seems to be, just about everybody.
He doesn’t say it, but Tennis implies that if he kept paying off he’d end up standing outside with a sign that says, “Will work for bar whiskey.”
Tennis used to write for talk show hosts. But he had enough grief when he reached the age of 40 and his agent said he should probably hang up his word processor.
Tennis and some chums opened Re$iduals about eight years ago, and it has since attracted stars from nearby television and movie studios.
This is the place Robert DeNiro and Burt Reynolds hoist a quick one. As a matter of fact, this was the place Roseanne and Tom Arnold chose for their engagement party.
Tennis is usually working evenings and doesn’t watch much television, which is why he recently wanted to throw out a group of what looked to him like teen-agers--until he was told they were the already carded cast of “Beverly Hills 90210.”
Most of the help are working actors.
Waitress Gloria Hylton is in director Garry Marshall’s next feature, “Exit to Eden.” Marshall is a Re$iduals customer.
Bartender Mark Robertson has an ongoing part in television’s “Burke’s Law.” Bartender Ron Lewis has been cast in the stage sequel to “Tony & Tina’s Wedding.”
“I don’t care if they have outside jobs as long as they cover their shift,” Tennis says.
Tennis and his dozen or so co-owners are all in the entertainment business, so when they were bouncing around ideas for bar names they decided upon Re$iduals, because, according to Tennis, “it was the word that we could all emotionally respond to.”
Residuals are payments that people receive for work they have already done.
Overheard:
“The Republicans really know their American audience. They figured out that no one can figure out Whitewater, so they give us Bimbogate, a nice biblical Jim-and-Tammy kind of scandal that no one has to explain.”
--Man at Sherman Oaks newsstand to another customer.
