Sisters sticking to their father's cactus calling.

MOLLY Thongthiraj and her five sisters run the California Cactus Center in Pasadena. The nursery was founded by her father, Zhalermwudh, a medical doctor who started raising succulents at home as a hobby after he became fascinated with the "baseball plant," or euphorbia obesa, a ball-shaped cactus with no needles. By the early 1970s, he had four acres in Bradbury where he grew succulents and sold them wholesale to area nurseries. Soon after that, the family opened its own retail business. Dr. Thongthiraj died in 1998, but Molly said the business he founded does more than $1 million in annual sales.

"It was dad, my morn and six girls. We helped him. Because what do you do with six girls? We would go around to all the nurseries. We wrote the names by hand on a tag. We had our name tag in the back and we put the scientific name of each plant. People found out about us because they saw our name behind the tag.

"People liked anything that was blooming and interesting in shape, like the 'baseball plant,' or 'baby toes.' That looks like little fingers, little toes and is very soft. And larger cacti and succulents, like cereus peruvianus, a columnar cactus. When you look down, it looks like a star and it has white flowers that bloom at night.

"We sold the land in Bradbury and moved to the desert in the 1990s. Now we have 20 acres: three in San Bernardino and 17 in Riverside.

"We grow a lot of plants for landscaping. We sell tens of thousands of plants every month. We plant them 10 years ahead of time, five years ahead of time. We have a good stock.

"We have prices from 99 cents for a bare-root, round 2-inch succulent, to up to $20,000 for a saguaro cactus from Arizona, 15-feet tall. It weighs a ton or two. The aloe, a succulent, can get 12 to 20 feet tall. It weighs one-and-a-half to two tons. We don't sell too many. That's only when we do big projects.

"We try to keep the ants away. The ants bring a lot of pests, like mealy bugs. Cactus and succulents get the same diseases as other plants, like fungus. Some succulents are poisonous. We have to tell people the juice is poisonous so if they have kids they might not want to buy it.

"We supplied plants to the Getty Museum. We wrapped every cactus up and they had to carry them one by one. They're golden barrel cacti, 50 pounds per pot, and the workers had to carry them up the mountain on their backs. It was really impressive. They put in 550 golden barrel cacti. It was beautiful. Looking down you can see a nice grid. They were about 10 years old. We were growing them for seed stock."