STRANGE AND WONDERFUL CONFISCATED EXOTIC PLANTS FIND HOME AT L.A. ZOO.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

The Los Angeles Zoo has a secret garden - a lair of smuggled exotic plants hidden from public view on a remote hill.

Spiny ferns. Ginger-like succulents. Rare or endangered seedlings ripped from their native turf and coveted by plant collectors around the globe.

The zoo, a newly accredited botanical garden, harbors one of the nation's special shelters for confiscated flora once destined for a burgeoning black market.

``Let me show you the big lump out back,'' said Janica Jones, the zoo's horticulturist, gesturing toward a 3-foot cycad amputated of its limbs outside the zoo's unofficial rescue center greenhouse of 750 plants. ``All of these are fronds that were cut off - it's been abused and neglected, burnt.

``We're going to pray it back to life.''

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has pegged the Los Angeles Zoo as No. 35 of 63 plant rescue centers across the nation that care for protected plants intercepted by agents at LAX and other ports.

The plants, on an international list of rare and endangered species, are banned from export from their host countries.

But instead of being returned to tropical rain forests and far-off savannahs at the expense of native nations, species smuggled into the United States find new life within earshot of chimpanzees, black-necked swans and orangutans.

``I think it's wonderful,'' said USDA spokesman Jerry Redding from Washington, D.C. ``We do intercept all kinds of stuff coming into LAX. Our mission is to prevent the introduction of any nonindigenous animal or plant.''

Several times a year, the zoo accepts plants for which it can find room: sarcocaulon inerme, a South African succulent, of which 432 were adopted in January 2001. Or zamia pseudoparisitica, a prehistoric cycad fern from Australia, of which 100 seedlings were adopted in February. Or dioscorea macrostachya, from Mexico, which resembles a tortoise.

Preliminary plans to display them call for placement either in the zoo's Discovery Center, scheduled to break ground Aug. 1, or in a new pachyderm exhibit sometime next year.

``We get calls from all over the country - ports, airports, shipping harbors, wherever there are USDA stations,'' Jones said. ``It's really an important program to save plants in the wild by getting them out of the black market.

``Then we 'accession' the plants into our collection.''

The Los Angeles Zoo's collection of 7,402 plants from 809 species from around the world was certified this spring by the American Association of Museums as the only one in the city classified as a botanical garden.

This month, the City Council will likely rename the lush menagerie on the north side of Griffith Park the Los Angeles Zoo & Botanical Garden.

The moniker was made possible by a sophisticated software program designed by zoo officials to record, classify and map each plant with pinpoint accuracy by way of a satellite global positioning system.

Not a leaf goes unheeded.

Not the flaxleaf paper bark trees shading the kangaroos. Not the camphor and corral trees hovering over the elephants. Not the Chinese maples shading the siamang apes honking like a chorus of Model-T horns.

And not the rare cycads that accompany the Komodo dragon or the staghorn fern next to the office of Interim Zoo Director Ed Maruska, the former head of the acclaimed Cincinnati Zoo.

``It's a good program,'' he said of the zoo's resuscitation effort. ``And as a result, we've attained some rare species. It will really be part of our educational message.

``If it weren't for the rescue operations like this, the Department of Agriculture would have to destroy those plants.''

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Edward Melara, senior park maintenance supervisor at the L.A. Zoo, places a cycad in a greenhouse at the zoo's ``rescue center.''

(2 -- color) A century plant - agave parryl - looks like an alien being among other foliage at the Los Angeles Zoo.

(3 -- 5 -- color) Visitors walk under a canopy of trees at the zoo, not knowing how rare some of the species are and where they came from. It's easy to believe you're on a tropical island when you look up in spots at the zoo, which is home to 7,600 plants, many of them endangered, including gobs of palm trees. Succulents in a greenhouse at the zoo, below left, were confiscated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture at LAX and Los Angeles Harbor.

Michael Owen Baker/Staff Photographer