By Shannon Hicks

WATERBURY — In the back yard of his Middlebury home, John Spain has a pretty magnificent winter hardy cactus bed which over 100 different plants currently call home. Actually, the bed is outstanding in scale, but to be honest the plants aren’t looking very good these days. They’re a bit withered and wilted, and not exactly ready for public viewing.

Mr Spain isn’t worried. His plants are doing just what they are supposed to be doing at this time of the year. He should know — Mr Spain is the author of Growing Winter Hardy Cacti in Cold/Wet Climate Conditions, and has been cultivating cacti, a member of the succulents family, from seed since 1965. Succulents are the only plants that store water within themselves for the purpose of self-preservation in times of drought.

“They look miserable right now, but they’ll all straighten up in about three weeks,” he said confidently earlier this week.

“They’re all going to get nice and tall, and fat and green. They’re all actually very healthy,” he promised. That garden bed was started in 1972, when Mr Spain and his wife Mary Beth moved from Grosse Point, Mich., into their Bayberry Road house.

Before retirement, Mr Spain’s work kept him on the road quite a bit and his wife, he recalled this week, “didn’t want to be taking care of all these plants for me,” he laughed. Succulents, therefore, were his answer. If Mr Spain needed to be on the road for a few days or even a few weeks, his plants were not going to die of neglect.

“Cacti are actually very hardy,” said the expert. “These plants are very tolerant of temperature, they don’t need constant watering, and they don’t need fertilizing.” The toughest components of raising cacti, he pointed out, are the facts they do need good light and they need good drainage.

Around the same time the Spains moved to Middlebury, Mr Spain realized there were others who were also interested in the same plant he was devoting so much of his time to, but there wasn’t an organized club for cactus and succulents enthusiasts that was any closer than New York City.

Eventually, informal meetings started taking place at Mattatuck Community College, now called Naugatuck Valley Community-Technical College, after Tony Bleach, a horticulture teacher at the school, offered the group his classroom as a meeting location. The group continued to meet regularly, but it wasn’t until 1984 that the club was formally recognized. It took that long for the club’s bylaws to be drawn up, submitted, and approved by the Cactus & Succulent Society of America. Mr Spain was one of the club’s three founders, and served as its first president.

Next weekend, the Connecticut Cactus and Succulent Society will host its 17th Annual Show and Sale at Naugatuck Valley Community-Technical College’s Arts & Music Center. The event is now a weekend-long event, set this year for Saturday and Sunday, April 1 and 2.

Not only is admission free all weekend, but the first 50 families to visit the show each day will be given a free plant. The event offers a judged show and auction, refreshments, and vendors with  plants and reference books. The judged show attracts entries from New England and tri-state area gardeners.

The weekend’s schedule also includes lectures by a number of guest speakers. Lectures begins at the top of the hour and last approximately 20 minutes.

Planned for this year’s show and sale on Saturday will be “Basics of Raising Cacti and Succulents,” at 11 am; “Succulent Bromeliads,” noon; “Propagating C&S for the Beginner,” 1 pm; “I Bought A Cactus… Now What Do I Do?,” 2 pm; “Oddities of the Succulent World,” 3 pm; and “How To Plant a C&S Dish Garden,” 4 pm.

On Sunday, the lectures to be offered will be “Care and Feeding of Succulent Plants,” at noon; “Making A Succulent Wreath,” 1 pm; “Hardy Cacti for the Connecticut Garden,” 2 pm; and “Succulent Plants of Madagascar and Their Care,” 3 pm.

Mr Spain will be among the guest speakers again this year (his is the program on Sunday at 2 pm). He will also be offering a large variety of hardy cacti for sale, which he has been doing for a number of years.

He has remained very involved with the club he helped form, but says he enjoys letting others worry about the organizational aspects of running a statewide club and its annual show. The Connecticut club’s weekend event is now the largest show of its kind in the eastern half of the country.

“We’ve got so many people now that I can sit back and relax and let them do all these job,” he said Monday afternoon. The club is obviously doing a good job in organizing and presenting the event; last year over 1,000 visitors signed in upon entering the two-day show.

Gardens Worth Visiting

A rock garden in the front lawn area of Mr Spain’s residence was inaugurated 11 years ago. That garden, he explained, was designed specifically for cacti. The inspiration for the front garden came after Mr Spain took a gardening course at Naugatuck Valley Community-Technical College in Waterbury, which was then still called Mattatuck College. It now combines dwarf conifers with hardy cacti and some unique garden plants. Adjacent to the cactus bed in his back yard, Mr Spain also keeps hundreds of cacti and succulents healthy in his 32-foot landscaped greenhouse.

Mr Spain’s gardens hold one of the largest winter hardy collections in the country, his rock garden has some of the world’s premiere rock garden plants, and his greenhouse supports one of the largest collections of the more tender cacti and succulents in the Northeast.

The Garden Conservancy, a national organization that works to preserve what it deems “exceptional” gardens across the country, has a program called The Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program. Private gardens, primarily in the eastern half of the country with just a scattered few on the extreme West Coast, are opened by the Garden Host (the private homeowner) to the public on various dates throughout the year.

The Open Days program has been running for six years, and Mr Spain’s Middlebury gardens have been on the tour for five years. His gardens are again going to be opened this year, on Sundays, May 21 and June 4, from 10 am to 6 pm. (Admission is $4 per person, paid directly to the Conservancy; call 914/265-2029 for tickets or additional information.)

Naugatuck Vallery Community-College’s main entrance is at 750 Chase Parkway in Waterbury. Use Exit 18 off I-84; signs will be posted to the CT Cactus & Succulent Society Show & Sale’s location.