Ring the entry bell to Patrick Anderson and Les Olsen’s Fallbrook, California, garden, and the tall, redheaded Anderson is likely to greet you wearing teal-colored trousers and a melon orange shirt. His colorful persona, both inside and out, is only a hint of what’s to come.

Anderson’s tour starts at the streetside garden he designed a few years ago. The gated driveway is flanked with angular planter beds stuccoed dusky sage green. The structure and geometry play off mass plantings with a limited plant palette. Still, each bed is filled with a dramatic combination of succulents and cacti. Yes, cacti. Most gardeners are afraid of cacti, but when it comes to plants, Anderson fears nothing.

This article is an excerpt from “Hot Color, Dry Garden” by Nan Sterman; published by Timber Press; $24.95. It’s the latest book by Sterman, a water-wise garden writer and designer who’s also the host of “A Growing Passion” on KPBS television. Learn more about the book online at timberpress.com and www.plantsoup.com. The San Diego Horticultural Society will celebrate the launch of Sterman’s book at 6 p.m. on Monday, May 14, at Temple Beth Israel, 9001 Towne Centre Drive, San Diego. Free for SDHS Members; $15 for nonmembers. For information, visit www.sdhort.org

In one bed is a stand of Pilosocereus pachycladus (blue columnar cactus) that range from 8 to 10 feet tall. The ridges of each column are lined in what looks like unruly terrier hair. Here and there are enormous grape purple buds that open to papery bone-white flowers. A mass of bright orange Sedum nussbaumerianum (coppertone stonecrop) blankets the ground at their feet. Nearby is a colony of large, round Echinocactus grusonii (golden barrel cactus), whose spines glow gold in the early morning light. Aloe ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (Dawe’s aloe) blooms a bright orange above succulent brick red leaves. A spray of narrow green blades from Dasylirion longissimum (Mexican grass tree) contrast the other plants’ solid shapes and forms.

From the street, Anderson leads the way through the gate and past the Dawe’s aloe and smooth, icy green Agave guiengola set into a soft sea of gray-leaved Arctotis (African daisies) blooming pale pink and pale orange. Unlike the structured and geometric streetside garden, the inside gardens are flowing and informal, yet they also feature an eclectic collection of plants.

A long driveway that leads toward the main house is lined in massive California pepper trees (Schinus molle) that cast a dappled shade over specimen bromeliads growing in oxblood red and cobalt blue pots. All are surrounded in a tapestry of groundcover aloes, more African daisies, and terrestrial bromeliads.

The driveway leads to the heart of the 2-acre property where Anderson and Olsen’s once plain Jane Mediterranean-style home is painted bright gold. The home is surrounded by Anderson’s collection of exotic flowering trees and shrubs, whose colors complement the gold. This is the oasis area, watered just a bit more so it packs a visual punch. Plantings include narrow “leafless” Strelitzia juncea (bird of paradise) that blooms golden orange, as well as a towering 8-foot-tall Crinum with dark cherry red blades that measure at least 5 inches across. Beneath a fringed-leaved Calliandra surinamensis (pink powder puff) grow succulent Aeonium rosettes in green, green and cream striped (‘Sunburst’), and bronze (‘Zwartkop’). There is tight-clumping Senecio serpens (blue chalksticks), chartreuse-flowering Euphorbia rigida (gopher spurge), and purple-leaved Tradescantia pallida ‘Purple Heart’ (spiderwort).

As colorful and textural as this plant combination may be, it’s not what draws visitors from far and wide. Credit for that goes to Anderson and Olsen’s succulent garden sited just across the main driveway. When they purchased the property in 1988, this half-acre slope was a lime orchard. Shortly after moving in, they hired a bulldozer to scrape the tress away. Months of contouring, hauling rocks, making gravel paths, and building wooden bridges followed. When that work was done, Anderson started planting.

For years, Anderson volunteered at the renowned desert garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. There, he got a first-class education on rare and unusual succulents, along with other arid-climate plants. As he says, “When I had the opportunity to have a garden, those were the plants I wanted to use. It was the inspiration of the Huntington, but also a practical decision to honor the climate where we live.”

The garden’s succulents are augmented with other desert, Mediterranean, and Australian plants, all of which thrive in 12 inches of annual rainfall and the occasional summer hand watering.

The garden’s color palette includes soft greens, silvers, coral, red, yellow, chartreuse, and orange. “The plants dictate the garden’s colors,” Anderson says, “99 percent of aloes bloom orange so that is the starting point. ... I like succulents because the foliage colors are so interesting—blues turquoise, orange, grays any shade of green, pink. Then you introduce other elements like backgrounds and walls that you can have fun playing off of.”

Anderson’s ability to play off walls is evident throughout the garden. One of his early efforts is a cobalt blue wall as a deep background against which he planted succulents whose blades and blooms stand out: bright coral orange and yellow Euphorbia tirucalli ‘Sticks on Fire’ (red pencil tree); Hesperaloe that blooms creamy yellow; spiny Aloe marlothii (mountain aloe), whose coral-colored candelabras open in winter; lower-growing Aloe x spinosissima (spider aloe), with red-orange blooms; and bright green aeoniums that bloom yellow in summer.

At the slope’s highest point, the men built a summerhouse and painted it the same deep gold as the main house. Inside is Anderson’s collection of California pottery, most turquoise or orange. Outside are aloes and agaves. One of the most unusual and striking plants near the summerhouse is Eucalyptus macrocarpa (mottlecah), which is shrubby with large, ghostly white leaves. The white is actually a thick layer of wax. Touch it, and the wax sticks to your fingers, revealing the leaf surface as dusky green. Its buds are large, woody capsules shaped like spinning tops, but white and about 4 inches across. As the buds mature, the capsules split and the covers fall off, revealing a brush of deep red fringes with yellow tips.

Turquoise and orange (often in the form of rusted metal) are repeated throughout the garden. A walkway near the bottom of the garden passes by a tall treelike sculpture of rusted metal perched in a bed of turquoise slag and ceramic turquoise orbs. Recently, they added another piece of rusted metal, this one made by Portland sculptor Rory Leonard. The sculpture needed a high-contrast background, so Anderson designed a new wall he painted turquoise, then mounted the piece.

The wall also serves as the backdrop for a sophisticated arrangement of succulents, a gold-and-orange-tone boulder, and bright orange pottery. “The rock was already there,” Anderson says, “it was one of the first things to go in long ago, when garden was first done. Once the wall and sculpture were there,” he continues, “I needed a pop of color, so I started amassing orange pots. ... I had most of those pots sitting around.”

The late English gardener Christopher Lloyd helped inspire Anderson’s love of color. Anderson stayed at Lloyd’s Great Dixter many years ago. In the gardens, he saw many examples of Lloyd’s fearless use of color. As Anderson translated those observations to cacti and succulents, he learned to play bluish leaved agaves, for example, off reddish leaved aloes. “I think about complementary versus contrasting colors,” Anderson explains. “There’s a place for both.”

These days, Anderson watches the garden “make itself.” The purple-flowering Felicia fruticosa (shrub aster), planted years ago, reseeds among the larger aloes and agaves, as does the gopher spurge and the velvet-leaved Abutilon palmeri (Indian mallow). “I like the plants to decide where they want to be,” Anderson explains. “It makes the garden more natural. I even have aloes planting themselves and hybrids appearing. It’s awesome when that happens.”

Euphorbia tirucalli ‘Sticks on Fire’

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