Scruggs keeps his hefty collection of several hundred cacti through the winter in a small greenhouse attached to his house in East Memphis. In the summer they live outdoors.
His interest in the prickly plants began with a single cactus given to his wife in a basket of several other plants when she was in the hospital 25 years ago.
He doesn't know exactly what attracted him to that small column of sharp thorns and tough tissue.
"I was stationed outside of Phoenix during World War II and was never interested in cacti at all," said Scruggs, the retired owner of a lighting fixtures store in Memphis. Through the years, he kept some of his collection on display at the store.
"I think more people came in to see the cacti than to buy lighting fixtures," he said with a laugh.
Scruggs has thinned his collection in recent years, giving numerous plants to classroom teachers. What he has left are intriguing specimens, such as the corncob cactus that looks just like a corncob but with the characteristic thorns cactus people call spines.
Several examples of crested cacti live in his greenhouse. Cresting happens when the plant becomes infected with an internal virus. "The virus doesn't hurt the plant, but it does distort its growth," Scruggs said. It gives a curlicue pattern that looks so much like brains, some plants with the condition are nicknamed "brain cactus."
In one dish he has three examples of cacti displaying bright colors in the absence of chlorophyll. They are grafted onto host cacti.
Another, dubbed the Old Man cactus, has a shroud of white hairs covering the plant. It's native to the mountains of the Andes. "The hair protects it from ultraviolet rays," Scruggs said.
Flat succulents with a split in their centers reside in a rock- and gravel-filled dish. It's so difficult to distinguish the real rocks from the plants, they are called "living rocks."
"In Africa they grow flush with the ground," Scruggs said, adding that the bloom emerges from the split in the center of the plant.
In the corner of his greenhouse sits a prize-winning monadenium, a succulent from Africa with long trailing arms. Even though it has been transported to shows numerous times, Scruggs said, a piece has never broken off. "That's how tough and flexible it is," Scruggs said.
Scruggs confines most of his collection to cacti and succulents that must be kept indoors in the winter. Only one cactus, the prickly pear, is native to the Memphis area and is thus hardy enough to withstand the region's winter.
The thorny nature of cacti never deterred Troy Robinson from pursuing them as a lifelong hobby. "I always liked the fact that a plant could protect itself," said Robinson, who grows numerous cacti and succulents outdoors in his yard in sururban Memphis.
The spines of cacti, which are modified leaves, protect the plant from animals and also condense moisture that drips onto the ground and around the plant's roots.
The spines, flowers and new growth arise from areoles up and down the plant.
Robinson has been successful in growing cacti not native to the region outdoors all year. He does it by placing rocks in raised beds edged with concrete building blocks. The rocks and concrete absorb heat from the sun during the day and then slowly release it during the night, creating a micro-climate several degrees warmer than in open spaces.
In addition to two types of prickly pears, Robinson grows the barrel-shape hedgehog cactus common in Texas and Oklahoma. Another unusual specimen is a relative of the prickly pear. It has numerous finger-width branches that grow up to 18 inches in a single year.
Most cacti are slow growing. Exceptions are the prickly pear and its relatives.
Robinson, who spent some of his youth in Little Rock, became fascinated with cacti on a trip to Oklahoma when he was about 10. Soon he was taking notes during his visits to a man nicknamed "Cactus Dan," the foremost expert on cacti in Little Rock at the time. Since then he's never been without a few cacti. He also grows a number of succulents as ground covers--hens-and-chicks, several sedums and Donkey Tail spurge, euphorbia with a bluish color and twisted leaves.
All cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. Cacti, which are native to North Central and South America, are either globular or columnar in form. Succulents, which are found in arid climates all over the world, have many forms.
"They can be any shape, so they're a lot more interesting than cacti," Scruggs said. Both types of plants store moisture. "But there's no cactus you can cut open and find water to drink," Scruggs said. "That's a myth."
But it's no myth the spines can hurt. Some cacti have fish hook spines that are difficult to remove even with tweezers. If they get embedded deeply, they have to be cut out.
Scruggs wears heavy gloves and long sleeves when transporting or transplanting his. Rolling the plants in thick layers of newspapers and wearing heavy gloves is recommended when handling cacti. Scruggs suggests handling them as little as possible.
"If you play with cacti," he said, "you're going to get stuck."
(Christine Arpe Gang of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tenn., can be reached at gang@gomemphis.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)
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