Succulent plants are hard to love. They tend to be parsimonious about offering shade and seem rather pointedly inhospitable so that pleasure-seekers are disinclined to settle among the yuccas for a leisurely afternoon glass of wine.

But their virtues may outweigh their drawbacks, especially now in the age of water concerns and global warming.

For starters, they are endlessly visually interesting, with forms that make green-leafed shrubs seem deprived of imagination. And they are survivors, with a will to live that is in-your-face apparent, meaning they may be more at home here than you think.

''The tropical look here is an illusion,'' says Harvey Bernstein, who has landscaped his front yard with succulent plants.

If someone says his succulent-laden South Miami yard looks like Arizona, Bernstein has a counter argument: ``No, it's more related to what was here, the South Florida pine rockland.''

Pine rockland, now almost completely covered with development, has a limestone base and shallow or even nonexistent soils. In winter, this ecosystem can be extremely dry. So succulent plants that store water during wet weather in order to survive months without rain can grow well here if they are planted in sandy and rocky growing beds that allow better-than-average drainage.

As a plant curator at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, Bernstein has discovered that ``I can fall in love with almost any group of plants, and have. First it was bromeliads and orchids, then palms and cycads, and I have curatorial responsibility for gingers and heliconias.

``But I noticed time and time again that I get attracted to succulent plants because of the form. And they can have startingly beautiful flowers.''

Bernstein and his wife, Barbara Glaccum, therefore grow some of the wildest, most interesting succulents you're likely to find in Miami outside of Fairchild, where the 51-year-old Bernstein oversees the garden's display of arid plants from Madagascar's spiny forest -- as well as the gingers, heliconias and other herbaceous plants.

ARTS BACKGROUND

A fine-arts photographer who grew up on Miami Beach, Bernstein has grown and sold plants and designed gardens for a living, so the visual and floral go hand in hand for him.

Barbara, who works in a family-owned geophysical consulting company, helped construct the berm and build the limestone borders when the couple bought their home four years ago. Harvey took over, arranging plants by ecological association.

That's one of the surprising aspects of this garden: coastal and pine rockland plants of South Florida and the Caribbean live happily with Madagascar species and even plants from the American Southwest. They evolved to endure similarly difficult surroundings.

Bernstein's first succulent acquisition is still with him, sitting in a pot in his garden. It's Euphorbia tortirama, a South African plant. ''It started this whole mess,'' he says. ``I bought it at Kmart and I can't get rid of it. It goes with me.''

It traveled to Montana when the couple moved there in the 1990s so Harvey could take a photography workshop. They fell in love with the countryside, stayed off and on, moved to Missoula to run an art gallery, and finally returned to South Miami. The little euphorbia came back home with its owner and was rejoined by plants that had been left with friends when they went to Montana.

Using salt bush and spiny black olive, trees from Florida and the Caribbean, Bernstein took advantage of the plants' small foliage to create a cloud-like effect separating the garden from the driveway. The trees create a visual screen for a sense of privacy as well. They surround a young Keys thatch palm, a Macrozamia cycad from Mexico, Euphorbia punicea from Jamaica and a rescued Dade County pine.

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