Boyce Thompson Arboretum

Wild cucumber

2011-10-29T10:48:00.004-07:00

This tuberous root of wild cucumber, Marah gilensis, was uncovered accidentally while digging a hole for another plant at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. Dense and pithy, it’s a powerhouse of stored starch that resides just below the soil surface. Quick-growing vines emerge from it each spring and clamber drunkenly through nearby jojobas and hackberries. It’s a botanical oddity that is rarely seen, but never under appreciated. At 50 pounds, this specimen is a granddaddy: a certified, subterranean lunker.

2011-09-24T11:24:00.002-07:00

9-24-11

The autumnal equinox passed without incident.

Review of Kim Hosey Photographic exhibit in Visitor Center Gallery

2011-08-04T08:34:00.007-07:00

During the months of July and August, blogger and photographer, Kim Hosey, features candid images of 50 insects, spiders, and birds -- all objects of her affection. Her photographs allow the unique personality of each subject to emerge, caught by her camera lens in the moment of expression. An elegant, iridescent dragonfly strikes a ballet pose, a Great Blue Heron tiptoes through ankle-deep water, a Jerusalem cricket seems literate-for-a-day as it strolls across the page of an open book.

Many of her photographs are really portraits, lending themselves to a deeper character study of each subject. Insects appear to be aware of her camera and regard it with sidelong glances, birds fly in choreographed symmetry above her head, and a black widow strikes a film noir pose atop a perfectly contrasting white surface.

This collection of images brings up the inevitable proclivity towards personification, forcing one to think, Am I really seeing their emotions, or my own? And then: Is this the way they are, or the way I want them to be?

But over analysis will miss much of the impact because, even at face value, Kim’s images are stunningly beautiful. More importantly, they honor the amazing complexity and diversity of the non-humans that are forever buzzing, swooping, crawling, and capturing our attention. Her photographs impart an intimate side to their lives that we, as casual observers, rarely notice. With close-up, macro photography, her subjects are caught in the act of being themselves, and therefore display a surprising range of emotions that we can't help but relate to: sometimes quirky, or ironic, or a bit scary, but always honest.

Had Gary Larson born a love child, it might have been Kim Hosey -- she, however, has brought her critters to life without a single line of dialogue.

(Reviewed by Kim Stone)

The Need for Seed

2011-07-06T11:18:00.018-07:00

The initial challenge at the start of our recent camping and seed-collecting trip was setting up our tents in a sustained 40 mph wind. We arrived late, close to 5pm, and had just a few hours of daylight remaining. Without a decent windbreak for miles in any direction, erecting the tents was like unfurling a ship’s sail, and it took all five of us deckhands to wrestle each one into position. We staked the corners and then moved onto the complex arrangements of poles.The assembly is different for every tent, and even without the wind, it’s more of an intellectual exercise than a practical one. I’m sure tent engineers laugh until strawberry daiquiris shoot out their nostrils at the annual Christmas party when they watch hidden videos of people like us trying to figure them out.

Once they were in place, we wanted to keep them that way, so we attached rope from the tent corners to eyebolts in the wood frames that surrounded each tent space, as extra insurance against the wind. We based this extra security on the advice of Ken, the ranger at the Visitor Center, who earlier remarked, “We often watch tents rolling end-over-end off into the desert.”

The goal of our expedition was to find one or more of the 188 native Arizona legume taxa that are not yet represented in the seed bank of the Desert Legume Program. Our original plan was to target five of these taxa that likely had seed this time of year in the mixed conifer forests between Nutrioso and Hannagan Meadow in the White Mountains. But that all changed when the 500,000 acre Wallow Fire burned through the area a week before our trip and forced us 100 miles further west to Winslow and nearby Homolovi State Park. Except for a few struggling honey locusts that the park planted at each campsite, we went from 8000 feet in tall timber to nary a plant more than hip-high here at 4800 feet elevation on the southern edge of the Great Basin Desert.

Mark, Matt, and I were experienced campers; Jeff, less so. Lorrie hadn’t been camping in twenty-five years – which meant never. She wanted to be prepared, so she bought a pair of hiking boots, and borrowed a sleeping bag and foam mattress. I helped her with a list of what not to bring: suitcases, furniture, curtains, framed artwork, and no more toiletry or beauty items than a TSA agent would allow through an airport scanner. She insisted on having her own tent, which was reasonable, as long as she didn’t furnish it with any of the aforementioned items.

We laid out sleeping bags and pads, unpacked food and drinks, and readied our flashlights to avoid the rattlesnakes that we were told might cross our paths between the nearby shower house and our tents after dark. Campfires weren’t permitted, which meant that my camping experience was already diminished by half. Reeking pit toilets, mosquitoes, and the threat of bears usually fill in the other 50%, but we had none of those either. Instead, we had hot and cold running water, showers, and flush toilets in the building next to us, so it was shaping up to be more like an three day picnic with sleep-over privileges. There was even a bright, first quarter moon that faintly lit our picnic table and later served as a bedroom nightlight for those inevitable 3 a.m. trips to the bathroom.

Early Thursday morning, before our instant oatmeal, Mark poured us some potent espresso made from his French press. This wicked little device makes coffee backwards: coffee is added to hot water and allowed to steep, like tea; then, a porous plunger is forced down through the mixture. The plunger separates the water from the grounds and allows a potent, black brew to filter up above it. It works like an espresso machine turned inside out. “Drink enough of this,” he said, as he filled my metal camping cup, “and hair will stand up you didn’t even know you had.”

Coffee made like this is an acquired taste, and as I sipped, it reminded me of a trip I made to Australia in the mid nineties. Matt was along for this trip, too, and we traveled for three weeks through the Australian outback looking at plants and plant communities. We stopped the car often to explore, and more often than not, aggressive bush flies came out of nowhere and tried to force their way into our mouths. No matter how quickly we wiped then away, they rushed back to our lips with the speed of cockroaches.

According to our Aussie host, Peter, bush flies helped shape the way Australians speak in the outback. “We keep the flies out by using short sentences and not flappin’ our gums too much,” he told us, his mouth as still as a ventriloquist’s. So good morning or good afternoon was reduced to “g’day” and oh, it’s really no problem at all became simply “no worries.” Lacking the ability to speak in Australian sound bites, we communicated with hand gestures and short grunts, before the flies wore us down and sent us running back to the car.

With bush flies and the three most venomous snakes in the world to deal with, we were pleasantly surprised to see a conscious effort made to create a less hazardous environment inside. Restaurants, in particular, have an attention to detail that is missing in all but the higher dollar restaurants in the U.S. Maybe they are rebelling against a hick image, if such a term even applies, but food quality, presentation, and service were generally very good, even in the far flung outposts.

There is no tipping at restaurants in Australia, so, from our point of view, stiffing the waiter took some getting used to. As one of the few math skills that some Americans have, calculating a 15% tip is hardwired into our national consciousness. It’s automatic. Even after eating in a half dozen restaurants, I still expected to hear the agitated voice of our waiter assail us each time we made our way to the door.

“Hey mates, did you forget something?”

We hadn’t, of course, and my confidence quickly grew to adapt to this and other cultural anomalies, particularly the ones that were in my favor. Matt, however, was harder to break. A week into our journey, and he still wanted to leave a tip: just a little something to show his appreciation for this grand, welcoming country. At a restaurant in Broken Hill, I laid on the guilt and reminded him of the guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets that every Star Trek fan knows by heart. “But Matt,” I reminded him, “aren’t you are about to violate the Prime Directive?”

As a fellow Trekkie, Matt knew it well. The Prime Directive states: “When interacting with an alien civilization, (or, in our case, Australia), there can be no interference with its internal development.” By leaving just one tip, Matt was about to plant the seed that could lead to food server disenchantment, unionization, and violent government protests: just the instability that subversive, sleeper cells were waiting for to propagate their heinous agenda across the continent. A continent that we had only come to observe.

He looked up at me and then back at the $2 Australian coin that he balanced on the table with the tip of his finger. He handled it like he would a tentative chess move while he weighed changing the course of history against providing a tip to someone who neither needed nor expected it. We got up to pay the bill and I circled back to our table to see if the coin was there. Had it been, I would have scooped it up in full view of our waiter, my eyes telling him that I’m doing this for your own good. He would understand perfectly and return my look with a nod and ironic smile that said, Thank you, oh wise American. Balance has been restored. And then he’d turn and attend to his other tables.

We ate mahi mahi, calamari, Caesar salads, and steak sandwiches in sit-down restaurants, and our share of fish and chips, meat pies, spaghetti on toast, and buttered lettuce sandwiches in less formal, take-away establishments. Our most surprising find was that every restaurant or café that we visited, no matter how small or isolated, had a commercial, barista-style coffee machine installed. There was the familiar hopper of black, oily-looking beans on top, and below it, an industrial strength machine that steamed, frothed, hissed, groaned and turned ground coffee into espresso and espresso-based drinks just like the ones on every big city street corner. Finding this in the outback was like discovering a bottle of wine and fruit basket waiting in your room at a Motel 6 – appreciated, but completely unexpected. They were so ubiquitous that at any random café in the boonies of New South Wales, I could order a skinny vanilla, non-fat latte sprinkled with shade-grown nutmeg, and the barista behind the counter would only say, “What size?”

As it turns out, Australia and New Zealand have their own unique espresso specialties. My favorite is called a long black, made from a double shot of espresso added to hot water; it is like an Americano, but made so the espresso crema still floats on the surface. A variation is called a flat white which is served in a tea cup with steamed milk added on top, often swirled with artistic designs created at the whim of the resident barista. A simple, low-tech cup of drip coffee -- that is, boiling water poured over ground coffee beans -- was virtually impossible to find, and I didn’t have my first cup until I found it in Hungry Jacks (the Australian version of Burger King) at the Sydney Airport on the day we flew back to the U.S.

After finishing breakfast at the campsite, we consulted a map and began our search. Our method was a work in progress that became more refined as we became more successful. Not much rain had a fallen during the winter or spring, so, in general, so we had the best luck along the sides of roads where rainwater ran off and concentrated.

“Woo-hoo!” Lorrie shouted, after finding her first legume along the edge of the service road near our campground. Matt, our camp botanist-in-residence, identified it as one of the more than 85 species of Astragalus (pronounced like asparagus) that grow in Arizona. It was a struggling little tuft of gray-green leaves and no bigger than a fried egg. “I’ve got another one here,” Jeff called out from 50 feet ahead.

“And here are two more,” Lorrie said, not five minutes later. “No, wait! There are two others right next to them. Woo-hoo!” With five plants to her credit, she had raised the bar for the rest of us, so a friendly little competition developed. We kept our noses down and spread out, all vying to be the next to add to our total. I had yet to find my first, but I was willing to finish dead last if Lorrie would agree not to shout out that Homer Simpson woo-hoo every time she found a new one.

We used short rows of pebbles on the road to mark each plant that we found and then went back to collect a small percentage of mature pods, leaving enough for natural reproduction of the population. We placed the pods in small, manila-colored envelopes and labeled each collection with a unique identifying number, a GPS location, and the elevation. All together, we found 15 --

“Woo-hoo!”

Make that 16 Astragalus plants, about half of which had pods. We also collected herbarium specimens of several representative plants to take back to the lab for positive identification.

On Friday, we received a tip about the possibility of more Astragalus possibilities in an open desert area close to the front entrance. For these we used a search method usually employed by law enforcement professionals. We spaced out evenly in a straight line, and walked forward slowly, step by step, leaving no square foot of ground un-scrutinized. Mark attended to policing the formation.

“Kim, you’re walking too fast,” he said, waving me back into position. “And Jeff, where are you going? Move over more towards Matt.”

This might be the best method to find a shallow grave, a murder weapon, or what Lorena Bobbit pitched out her car window, but it takes away from the spontaneity and the thrill of stumbling upon a really cool plant completely by accident. In other words, it isn’t any fun. When we began to complain, Mark relented. “Okay, but I am teaching you a valuable technique here.”

“And we’re sorry that we are unable to appreciate it,” we said.

We broke rank and struck out on our own, hoping to show Mark that haphazard wandering would prove more successful than military precision. But, of course, it didn’t, so we moved on to easier quarry: a legume called camel thorn, an exotic invasive from Eurasia that grows by the thousands in the park. It is a naturalized, out-of-control population that not only near grew in great quantities near the road, but also through the road, forcing its way through four inches of asphalt like a photosynthetic drill bit. Charming, it isn’t, but it is yet to be represented in the Desert Legume Program’s seed bank, so we collected seeds and made herbarium specimens from the few that were flowering.

Matt plans to key-out (identify) the Astragalus that we collected – a grueling taxonomic task because of the sheer number of look-a-like plants in this genus. With any luck, he’ll be done in time to verify the identity of Astragalus nutriosensis, aka Nutrioso milkvetch, a rare , species of concern whose seed we plan to target in the next adventure that is planned for late July.

Kim Stone

Picket Fire at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Part 2

2011-06-15T14:33:00.014-07:00

Sunday, May 8, 4:00 pm. The Picket Fire is 200 acres in size and growing fast.

Arboretum staff members on site were now reduced to a core half dozen, paired off into three groups for safety. Mark Siegwarth was quarterbacking staff efforts and interfacing with Morgan, the Incident Commander (IC). Lynnea Spencer was in the Gift Shop monitoring the base station radio and handling telephone calls. Chris Spencer, now donning a bright yellow, official “Nomex” fire shirt, teamed up with Steve Smith to interface directly with fire fighters on the grounds. Steve Carter and Jeff Payne double-checked that the dozens of widely dispersed irrigation valves around the grounds were shut off so that fire fighters would have maximum water availability to re-fill their trucks and fully charge their hoses.

While most fires are managed to protect fire fighter and public safety and to minimize damage to property and structures, the U.S. Forest Service was also aware of the uniqueness and importance of the Arboretum’s trees and other plants. Forest Service briefings for fire fighters included specific instructions to protect the Arboretum’s plant collections as an integral third leg of the top most important priorities. “Buildings can be rebuilt,” Mark Siegwarth explained to one of the television news crews that descended upon the Arboretum on Sunday, “but all of the plants we planted in 1926, 1928, 1930 -- we can’t replace those.”

The anxiety shared by Mark and Lynnea was growing as they watched the distant flames above the High Trail appear to surge closer the south side of Queen Creek. “I can see the fire through the trees!” Lynnea exclaimed, looking through the Gift Shop window. What she couldn't see was that a twenty-foot embankment and a paltry thirty feet of rocky creek bottom was all that separated the approaching fire from a dozen of the oldest and largest trees in the Arboretum. Fire Management Officer Quentin Johnson would later say that there was a 95% chance of ignition if one of the thousands of floating embers made its way into the bone dry mixture of tamarisk and beefwood needles on the “collection side” of the creek.

With things looking increasingly grim, Mark and Lynnea ran the short distance to the Smith Building and yanked cords, wires, and connectors from the two computers that contained our plant records database and the electronic versions of our historical images and documents. Should the worst case scenario occur – and it was looking like that might happen -- it would be a double tragedy to lose both our plant collection and the historical documentation and data that backs it up. As long as they moved quickly, Mark felt confident that they could make at least one trip safely. Between them, they grabbed the two computers, accession books, computer disks and whatever else their cumulative adrenalin and strength would allow them to carry. In less than ten minutes, they had lugged everything back to the Visitor Center on foot and loaded it all into a vehicle in the main parking lot. Computers in the administration office were also removed, ready to be driven off site.

Morgan was keenly watching the potentially explosive scene develop above the High Trail from his command post in the overflow parking lot. Behind him, more engines and crews were still coming in the front gate. The larger body of the fire was spreading out and moving up the north-faces of Pancho Plateau and Picket Post Mountain, but his immediate attention was fixed on the fully engulfed vegetation burning at the doorstep of the Arboretum’s plant collections, just 200 yards away from where he was standing.

It was nearly 6:00 pm now and another air tanker that Morgan had wisely ordered earlier was just minutes away. He also requested that two more be on standby, each ready to be loaded with fire retardant slurry and airborne within minutes of receiving the order. At full capacity, each of these planes can carry nearly ten tons of the thick pink liquid in their bellies.

Thick gray and black smoke continued to belch in irregular pulses as the fire consumed one creosote bush and then another on the slope above the High Trail. Rounded plumes of smoke were pushed upstream by the wind, making the fire appear to be racing up the canyon. Morgan’s view from the parking lot was partially cut-off by the tall trees in the Demonstration Garden, so the high volume of smoke rising above the trees was all he had to go on in deciding his next move. “It was so hot and rolling,” Chris told me later, “that it must have looked to him like all of Queen Creek was on fire.”

That was, in fact, the scenario that was now running through Morgan’s mind. He ran the short distance to the Visitor Center and told Mark to radio Chris and Steve immediately. “Get them out now,” he told him. “It’s running again and we can’t vouch for their safety.” Mark quickly relayed the message to Chris and Steve who jumped into their golf cart, thinking, like the rest of us, that the fire had already made the transition into the crowns of our cultivated trees.

“Ember wash” is the term used by wild land firefighters to describe the burning embers that are the byproducts of an approaching fire, often preceding the fire’s leading edge by a wide margin. They are either propelled by the prevailing wind, by convection from the fire itself, or a combination of both. These floating castoffs of incomplete combustion were launching from the west end of the high trail like the resultant splatter of water dropped into a pan of hot oil. Each ember was a lit match, floating dumbly but maliciously towards new fuels to colonize.

Morgan was able to confirm from the air that the fire had not spread as far up the canyon as he had feared, so he asked Chris to drive Johnny, one of the team leaders, onto the grounds with the golf cart to familiarize him with trails, roads, water sources, and access points for fire vehicles. Once they had passed Mr. Big, they saw through the thinner patches of smoke that the fire had indeed moved up the canyon, but had paused for the moment, smoldering at the base of thirty-foot-tall rock face near the top of the ridge.

The fiercest, most threatening part of the fire was quickly consuming dense fuels on the hilltop just above the High Trial. When Chris and Johnny arrived, intense, creosote-fed flames generated volumes of expanding smoke and spit out embers that drifted into the higher branches of the red gum eucalyptus trees, ready to ignite one of the resinous leaves above their heads or free fall into the tinder dry leaf litter at their feet. Even worse, actual flame tips appeared to be licking the arching branches of the red gums that extended over Queen Creek, but it was impossible to tell for sure through the smoke. Johnny radioed Morgan and requested an immediate water drop.

A helicopter quickly responded with a full Bambi bucket freshly dipped from Ayer Lake. The pilot hovered over the hotspot, made a few brief adjustments to his position as he took aim, and then let loose with a perfectly placed water drop that knocked down the flames as if an airtight lid had been thrown over the fire. “It couldn’t have done it any better,” Chris said. The force of the water instantaneously transformed leaping flames in a harmless, pewter-colored mixture of steam and suspended ash that floated upstream with the wind.

This direct hit on the most worrisome part of the fire proved to be as much of a psychological victory as it was a show of firefighting prowess. After seeing the flames snuffed out directly in front of them, Chris leaned over to Johnny and said, “We have a chance now.” Several successive water drops followed as the fire briefly flared, but the clear and present danger was over. In a conversation a few days later, both Chris and Morgan concurred that the suppression of this hot spot was a major turning point in the fight to save the Arboretum.

With clouds of smoky steam still roiling from the dowsed hotspot, the third slurry bomber that Morgan had ordered rumbled directly over Chris and Johnny’s heads as it made its first reconnaissance pass over Silver King Wash. Not wanting to be prettied in pink, they returned to the safety of the upper parking lot; Morgan verified that all the other firefighters and BTA staff were clear of the slurry’s intended path. At 6:18, the twin engine bomber came in low from the east, barely above the trees, and dropped its load from the Desert Legume Garden to the Outback Bridge and everything in between. With the Eucalyptus trees along the creek thoroughly covered in retardant, firefighters could now use Silver King Wash as a wide, safe corridor for a direct attack from the grounds if needed.

The southward encroachment of the fire had been slowed, and the Arboretum was much safer than it was thirty minutes ago, but the bulk of the fire to the south and west was still far from contained. The fire had come this far and this fast by using the spring season’s left-over and thoroughly-dry red brome grass as a fuse to bridge the gaps from plant to plant. With the strong south and southwest winds, fire quickly incinerated brittlebush and then moved on to ignite the woodier and hotter burning sub-shrubs like flat-top buckwheat, turpentine brush, snakeweed, and fairy duster, leaving nothing but dinner-plate size circles of white ash surrounded by a larger donut of charred black. The somewhat less flammable but more vulnerable pincushion cacti and, to a lesser extent, hedgehogs, were overwhelmed, victims of collateral damage.

As evening approached, the wind had diminished and flames were starting to lie down. The two helicopters continued dowsing hot spots until darkness grounded them. Firefighters worked through the night in Queen and Arnette canyons, but because of the treacherously steep south-facing slope of Picket Post Mountain, they allowed the fire to burn itself out when it ran into the base of the vertical rock bluffs that extend down from the summit. The fire burned up most of the western half of the north face of Pancho Plateau but never ran over the top.

The fire took a heavy toll on native vegetation. The boney, exposed frames of chollas were burned severely but the more densely growing prickly pears suffered less so, many showing signs of green life near the base. Most barrel cacti were roasted a leathery-tan color but with a hopeful amount of insulated green tissue buried deep within the clefts of many of the ribs. Palo verdes look dead; mesquites and catclaws, because of their thicker bark, may have fared better. The only reliably fire-adapted plant in the Sonoran Desert is the jojoba; it was burned to various degrees of completeness but will re-sprout vigorously and reliably from the base in the coming year. Though the wind “fanned the flames” in the most literal sense, it also kept the fire moving so that it rarely lingered too long in any one area, hopefully sparing most of the larger saguaros.

By Monday morning at 8:00 am, the fire was considered 40% contained. The Arboretum remained closed until Tuesday as firefighters continued to establish and maintain control lines, deal with flare-ups, and begin the process of mopping-up. The fire was declared 100% contained early Tuesday with a total burned acreage of 1336 acres, 160 acres of which are Arboretum property.

While firefighters suppressed the last stages of the fire on Monday and Tuesday, Arboretum began using high pressure hoses and stiff brooms to scrub the surfaces that were unlucky enough to be rained down upon by thick globs of pink retardant from the three slurry drops. The iron oxide infused fire retardant was completely indiscriminant in where it landed: unprotected camera lenses, clothing, vehicles, asphalt, concrete, wood, hair, and bare skin were as splattered as the trees and plants for which it was intended. Without prompt removal, the residual pink droplets have the tenacity of those from a can of latex paint of the same color, often remaining visible for years. As a helpful side-effect, slurry is formulated as a fertilizer with added plant nutrients such as phosphorous, so that none of the “scrubbings” that washed away were wasted.

The fire was human caused, though the exact manner in which it began has yet to be determined. The ignition point was several miles west of the Arboretum near a small, open area used for target shooting just off of Forest Road 231 near the Reymert Mine. It is littered with broken clay pigeons, shot gun shells, and other shell casings and is popular with shooting enthusiasts both locally and from the Phoenix area. An investigation is ongoing.

A compliment of 90 firefighters in all capacities participated in battling the fire, and we thank each and every one of them with all of our hearts.

Kim Stone

Image links:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetwrite/sets/72157626683234418/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetwrite/sets/72157626555150481/

Director's Epilogue

I hope from Kim Stone's retelling of the events you get a sense of what a harrowing ordeal the Picket Fire was for all of us at the Arboretum. Although the firefighters had a plan to defend the Arboretum at the 20 yard line, it really did turn into a goal line stand and I cannot say enough about their professionalism and commitment to save the collection. I also want to commend my staff, who not only performed heroically that day, but also over the last year. They cleared brush and debris from around the Arboretum and cut back the red brome that surely would have carried the fire into the Eucalyptus Forest if it had remained.

Kim's tale is how the small actions of many came together to great result. In the next week or so, you will be receiving an appeal letter asking for your help. Once again, the small actions of many can have a great effect for the Arboretum. Although we have survived the worst freeze in memory in February and the Picket Fire consumed over a third of the Arboretum in May, (but not our collection), the Arboretum is now faced with a lack of water for its irrigation system. To repair the water line may take over a month. Until then, we are looking at other options to save the collection. Although an early monsoon would help, it brings the added danger of lightning strikes and fire. There is much to do and we could use your help.

Of the lessons learned from the Picket Fire, three stand out. First of all, our plant collection is the foundation of the Arboretum, irreplaceable and truly a treasure. Secondly, being prepared is often the key to success, and finally, if we pull together, we can accomplish great things.

Thank you for all your thoughts, concerns and support over the last year.

Mark Siegwarth

Executive Director

Picket Fire at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Part 1

2011-06-03T11:09:00.007-07:00

Sunday, May 8 was Mother’s Day, and over 500 visitors were either touring the Picket Post Mansion during the final day of the Open House, or just enjoying late spring in all its glory at the Arboretum. When the fire was first spotted, it was small -- as all fires are at the beginning-- and an unthreatening two miles west of the Arboretum. A visitor driving eastbound on Highway 60 reported the fire to Lynnea Spencer at the Gift Shop and Lynnea immediately called 911. Chris Spencer, who was running a van shuttle to transport visitors to and from Picket Post House, dropped off his passengers and drove westward on Highway 60 towards the fire to get a closer look and report back to Mark Siegwarth on the fire’s progression. Soon after turning south onto Forest Road 231 (the road that links Highway 60 to Picket Post Trailhead), Forest Service engines and their attendant crews began to arrive, quickly catching and then passing Chris on the narrow dirt road.

When the engines pulled up to the scene, it was 12:30pm. The fire had been burning for about an hour and was four acres in size. The structural fire departments of Superior and Queen Valley were already at the site. The Forest Service had planned to fight the fire directly by anchoring and flanking it with water and hand tools, but, because of strong winds, the head of the fire was moving too quickly. They wanted to keep it south of FS 231 and the Picket Post Trailhead junction, but it was a “red flag day” with winds steady at 10mph, gusting to 30mph. These strong southwest winds caused the fire to “come flying across the road,” as Fire Management Officer Quentin Johnson from the Globe Ranger District put it, forcing the firefighters to pull back from their ridge.

This wild-land conflagration was now officially christened the “Picket Fire” by the U. S. Forest Service. Tom Morgan, from the Globe Ranger District, was appointed the Incident Commander (IC) to direct the tactical and logistical efforts in fighting the fire. Preferring to be called simply “Morgan,” we had no idea how much we would be relying on his skills and those of all of the other firefighters in the coming seven hours.

Several miles to the east, Mark Siegwarth was keeping tabs on the developing situation with a clear view of the fire from the promontory of Picket Post Mansion, as he and other staff and volunteers hosted the Open House. Chris had just returned and reported that firefighters were on the scene and working the fire, and there did not appear to be any immediate danger to the Arboretum. However, about a half hour later, Chris made another reconnaissance to the fire area and saw for himself what firefighters were now dealing with: The fire had increased to about 10 acres, more than doubling its size in 30 minutes, and was moving very close to Highway 60. Even more troubling, an eastward push of wind appeared to be driving the fire simultaneously towards the Arboretum. Chris raced back to the Arboretum to inform Mark and told him, “I think we have to do something. It’s coming our way.” At nearly the same instant, Superior police drove through the gate and gave Mark the same appraisal of the fire’s aggressive run towards our direction. With these two corroborating reports, Mark made the decision to evacuate the Arboretum. It was 1:30pm.

Staff reacted quickly by notifying all visitors throughout the grounds to immediately start walking towards their vehicles. The sense of urgency for everyone was palpable, reinforced by the increasingly visible smoke plume growing in the western sky. Picket Post Open House visitors either walked back to the parking lots via the Main Trail or were transported in our shuttle van. All of our trails and exhibits were systematically patrolled by BTA staff on foot or by golf carts and bicycles. Each staff member reported back to Mark Siegwarth by radio. The responses came in quickly.

“Chihuahuan trail. Clear.”

“High Trail. Clear.”

“Picket Post House. Clear.”

“Main Trail. Clear.”

In a remarkable 35 minutes, all visitors were evacuated, leaving the main parking lot clear by 2:05pm and ready to receive the emergency and fire vehicles that were on their way as the fire spread eastward.

To many of the firefighters that began to arrive in the next half hour, the Arboretum was already a familiar place. In May of 2010, personnel from the Globe Ranger District spent two days assessing our fire readiness and helping us to develop a defensive, pre-attack fire plan. Together, we reduced fuel sources such as red brome grass on both sides of Queen Creek, and pruned trees along the creek that could carry fire across their canopies. We identified and improved fire barriers such as roads and trails, and created new barriers where they were needed. Firefighters became familiar with our water sources, vehicle access points, trail systems, and our staff. All this was done so that fire crews “could hit the ground running” if the unthinkable might ever come to pass. Now, just one year later, the Picket Fire was about to put the plan to the test.

The fire had reached 15 acres by 1:30 and hit Highway 60 hard, crossing two wide asphalt lanes into the median. Firefighters had hoped to “burnout” areas in front of the fire to deny it fuel, but the gusty, erratic winds were moving the fire so quickly that they were forced into a more defensive posture of protecting motorists and structures along the highway, and people, collection plants and structures at the Arboretum. As firefighters began to pull back, Morgan, the IC, made the call to evacuate the Arboretum, not knowing that Mark had already given the order minutes earlier. Because of fire, smoke, poor visibility and to ensure firefighter and motorist safety, DPS and ADOT began the process of closing Highway 60. The road wouldn’t reopen again until five hours later.

With all visitors safely evacuated, Arboretum staff turned its efforts towards the five volunteers and staff members who lived in the residences on the west side of the Arboretum grounds and were directly in the path of the western flank of the approaching fire. Propane and electric lines were disconnected from two recreational vehicles, one of which was safely towed into nearby Superior. The owners of the other motor home were away and couldn’t be reached. Their ignition keys couldn’t be found either, so Lacey Pacheco and volunteer Kate Griffith had no choice but to scoop up the dog and cat they found inside and take them home for the night.

By 2:40, the fire had doubled in size again, reaching 30 acres as it continued to burn its way rapidly towards us.

Firefighters and equipment had begun to arrive in earnest after 3:00 and crews started to burnout the fuels on the hillside that led from the shop and maintenance area up to the road that goes up and over water tank hill. Steve Carter and his wife Ruth, along with their vehicles and pets, had now evacuated their residence (the house nearest the highway). Arboretum and private vehicles were moved into the safety of the asphalt main parking lot, adding to the growing collection of emergency vehicles. The leading edge of the smoke plume could now be seen moving around the north side of water tank hill, aiming for a direct hit on Steve’s house and the front gate.

Fire crews had now completed their pullback from the west and were maintaining a defensive position at the Arboretum. Morgan had a radio in one ear and cell phone in the other, barking orders to ground crews and maintaining radio contact with the approaching slurry bomber and helicopters he had ordered earlier. Chris Spencer, along with Steve Smith, acted as primary staff liaisons to the firefighters. They provided maps, and helped them to find water hydrants and negotiate the grounds with their vehicles and equipment. Chris and Steve used heavy equipment to cut a new fire break, at Morgan’s request, from the maintenance shop down to Queen Creek as an added fire barrier.

It was 3:25 and smoke was beginning to blow more heavily across the parking lot. “This,” Mark later described adroitly, “is when things began to get kind of hairy.”

The fire had already jumped Highway 60 to the north in numerous places, consuming a quarter mile of wooden guard rail posts as it moved precariously closer to us. Flames ignited the six inch plastic water line that carries irrigation water from our West well to the Ayer Lake, causing most of it to collapse, melt, and slowly burn for the next several days, leaving only a black “skid mark” on the ground to remind anyone that it ever existed.

Nearly horizontal flames shot across the back side of water tank hill and reached the west side of Steve’s house, briefly igniting old pine needles and eucalyptus leaves that had accumulated on the corrugated metal roof of his garage. That fire was quickly extinguished, as were the flames rising from plastic nursery containers, scraps of wood, and other combustibles that briefly caught fire around his house.

From here, the wind-driven fire quickly sliced across the remaining 100 feet of distance to the west side of the main gate. It ran up the trunks of 20 feet tall date palms and ignited the fronds above. Equally valuable Mediterranean fan palms, large yuccas, agaves, and aloes, along with several shoestring acacias, beefwood trees, and other collection plants were severely blackened before the fire leaped across the highway to the north. With collection plants still visibly on fire, a slurry bomber made its initial reconnaissance pass and then, about 3:35, dropped 2000 gallons of pink-red fire retardant (slurry) across the main parking lot, highway, and the south-facing slope to the north. With the consistency and color of Pepto Bismol, it hit its targeted plants, but also spattered asphalt, vehicles, and anything or anyone else along its path. Because of this timely and accurate slurry drop, and quick work by firefighters, the plants at the front gate were the only accessioned collection plants that were lost or damaged during the fire.

During this time, two helicopters were also actively flying the Picket Fire. They dipped their suspended “Bambi” water buckets into Ayer Lake, and spent most of the afternoon crisscrossing the Arboretum, dousing hot spots with precise hits of 125 gallons of water. With the close proximity of Ayer Lake, roundtrips from water source to fire and back took pilots as little as five minutes. Guided by Morgan and other crew members on the ground, the quick turnaround time allowed the helicopters to hammer the fire hard with each release of their 1000-pound payloads of water.

Morgan called in another aerial tanker that dropped a second load of slurry further north to protect private residences that were located a quarter mile to the east. By 5:30, there were still hotspots, but the fire had slowed on the north side of the highway and the structures were no longer threatened.

The more worrisome fire was now to the southwest, moving across the slopes of the Queen and Arnett Creek drainages. One particularly aggressive prong of the fire was racing unchecked up the hillside behind the far western portion of the High Trail. It topped out and ignited a thick stand of creosote bush, generating tall, crackling flames and high volumes of smoke. Mark and Lynnea could see these flames from the Visitor Center, but they couldn’t accurately gauge the distance because of the many trees that partially blocked their view. Neither of them could rule out the possibility that the fire may have already jumped Queen Creek -- and moved into the Eucalyptus forest.

Kim Stone

March Madness

2011-03-18T12:59:00.003-07:00

By mid-March, the annual spring awakening at the Arboretum is usually in full swing, and this year is no exception. Lengthening and warming days of spring stimulate an unstoppable force of expanding buds, emerging leaves, and opening flowers that once started, is difficult to keep up with. This is not the season of patience. Spring, especially early spring, is fast and it's furious -- and then it's gone. If you're a gardener, a horticulturist, a landscaper, a bird migration follower, or a wildflower enthusiast, spring starts out of the blocks at full speed and sprints to the finish like a runaway steamroller.

If we rewind back to early February, spring just couldn't come fast enough. The toll that the frost took on many of our tender plants seemed to look a little worse every day for the first few weeks. Leaves that we thought might have survived soon turned brown with a Saltine cracker crunch, and many of our most sensitive aloes had the look and consistency of a boxful of month-old bananas. Finally, in the first week of March, both dormant and damage plants began the welcome spring emergence from their winter funk. By mid-March, a large mass of Tazetta Narcissus bulbs were flowering in the Demonstration Garden, and there was no doubt that the game was on. March's march had begun.

Now, near the beginning of the third week in March, the jig is up, and the springtime flood of new growth and rapid-fire flowering is upon us whether we're ready for it or not. Dormant plants are budding, bulbs and wildflowers are blooming, and many damaged plants are surprising us with their resilience. The plants have received their official wake-up call, which means that we have to follow suit. A visit to the Arboretum from now through April will yield just about as much springtime bounty as you can handle. But don't take my word for it.

Kim Stone

A poem inspired by the Svalbard Global Seed Vault

2011-03-04T14:36:00.001-07:00

The Deep Frozen Desert

Beneath the ice light of the northern sky

in a mountain six hundred miles

from the nearest tree,

where frost runs deep into stone

and the only star is a signal

from a disappeared world

the seeds of a desert go along

the blue tunnel for storage

in a vault where they wait

for springtime to flower

from snowdrift and memory.

Here is mesquite and a crystal

of cold to preserve it; here

are prickly pear and sage

held in trust for the day

when the sun reappears; here

are agave and ironwood labeled

with ink that glows in the dark

like each golden segment

in the scorpion’s tail

and the hourglass of fire

on the spider who crawls

between the stacks

of silver packages bearing

the indestructible seal

of night-blooming hope.

David Chorlton, Phoenix, Arizona

February 2011

Biosphere 3

2011-02-13T14:12:00.003-07:00

"The Biosphere,” as most of us call it, is a highly-oxidized, gray Dodge Aspen, proudly manufactured by the Chrysler Corporation in 1977, and driven by Arboretum Lead Groundskeeper Becky Noth.

Becky isn’t proud of it, but neither is she ashamed. It is what it is and that’s what makes it special. Its condition is the direct result of balancing her love for plants with the reality of working two jobs and taking care of an ill spouse. Combined, they leave her little time to rein in the inevitable chaos that results. It’s a good thing, then, that nature is a big fan of chaos. Diversity, complexity, and a tangled web of intermingling components are at play here, all piled high on the red vinyl upholstery of The Biosphere. This vehicle stands proudly as a monument to what we should all be promoting, or at least thinking about.

The car isn’t really a complete biosphere; it’s more of a desert biome, lacking only the life-giving water that brings all deserts to life. Rusted but sturdy metal, closed windows, and bags of every kind stuffed to capacity keep thousands of seeds and seed pods warm, dry, and secure inside. Each accumulated stem, leaf, pod, branch, flower, and root in the Biosphere is bone dry and bleached to the color of standing corn in December. And because no water is ever added, the contents have the potential to remain that way, perhaps for decades, within the confines of what would otherwise be a decent greenhouse environment.

The Biosphere has not evolved over the years to be just a sedan full of dormant, desert ecology, it also serves to fuel the hopes and aspirations of an individual who has surrounded herself with a botanical world that she has every intention of eventually processing, planting, or transforming into something beautiful. Nothing in the Biosphere is arranged; rather, it’s pre-arranged, like a future marriage, but without all the monogamy and long-term commitment. “Someday, I’ll get to it,” she says.

Naysayers have unfairly judged this vehicle by its outward appearance and its contents, sometimes citing its poor resale value, or worse, labeling it as abandoned or a candidate for spontaneous combustion. What they don’t realize is that by bringing nature’s handiwork and its products with her wherever she goes, Becky has created a mobile metaphor for the rest us. Sure, there are some issues with finding room for human passengers, but any car can carry people.

My feelings for this car are like the ones I have for my parents who live a few thousand miles away -- I don’t see them that often, but it’s still comforting to know that they’re there. When Becky told me that she was considering cleaning out the Biosphere, I felt a nostalgic lump form in my throat that nearly brought me to tears. “You can’t,” I said. “Not now. Not ever.” Its familiar presence has always had a steadying influence on me. The Biosphere is an iconoclast on wheels. A reservoir of good intentions. While most of us export the natural and unnatural world from our cars, the Biosphere is a net importer, and Becky is content to allow it to be the vacuum that nature abhors.

As with any historic event, my professional reaction to the dismantling of the Biosphere was to grab my camera and document everything in its original, undefiled state. On the sun-split, red vinyl dashboard, there were Aloe and Iris pods for a future dried plant arrangement, an empty apple sauce container filled with basil seeds, several Brachychiton pods, a small bundle of dried plantain flowers, and a Tupperware container half full of day-old orange peels.

The passenger and rear seats were piled high with black plastic plant trays, pots, paper bags full of seeds, thorny branches, dried Penstemon flower stalks with seed pods still attached, feathers, red chili pods, amaranth flowers wrapped in newspaper, a foam minnow bucket, drift wood, and a dried ocotillo branch that she never got around to rooting, “Whatever is on top is the newest,” she explains. With a shovel and ten minutes of work, there was nothing on the passenger seat and floor that couldn’t be shifted to allow a non-discriminating passenger a few square feet to squeeze in. I would be proud to sit there.

An automobile isn’t just about alloy wheels, leather, and German engineering – though these things help – and it isn’t only about getting from point A to point B as quickly, or as efficiently, as possible. There are higher ideals at work in the Biosphere, like love, hard work, and respect, powered by the raw materials of optimism and hope. If it becomes just another car with comfortable seating for five, the Arboretum will have lost far more than a fire hazard. It will have lost part of its soul.

Kim Stone

Arboretum boot camp

2011-01-28T15:12:00.013-07:00

Two days before he was to ship out to Army boot camp, my son walked the Main Trail at the Arboretum. It wasn’t a “nostalgia tour,” though there is a long history of Arboretum visits while he was growing up. It was more about doing something on his last weekend of civilian life that was less prone to catastrophic injury than riding his motorcycle or snowboarding, which were his first two choices.

While most visitors consider Arboretum staff members to have the coolest job ever, my adolescent son has contrary opinions. This means that the memories of his visits are restricted to the first dozen years of his life when he was less judgmental and still willing to accompany me to work. Even then, he was never particularly enthused. Growing up in a working class town, dads were supposed to drive lifted, four-wheel-drive trucks, drink Bud Light, hunt, work in the mines, and spit a lot. I don’t do any of these things and so he has always considered me and my job as a horticulturist to be lame. “Face it,” he says. “You are so gay.”

Having actively participated in a two decade, heterosexual relationship that has produced two children -- one of whom is my accuser -- I considered his comment to be a little naïve. But, of course, he didn’t mean it that way. He would hardly recognize the word “gay” if it were used in its classic sense, as in the line “gay happy meetings” from the song It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. And he also wasn’t referring to the common and widely accepted use that defines gay by contrasting it with its functional opposite, straight. His intended meaning is what the Urban Dictionary defines as someone who is “stupid or unfortunate.” In other words, I rated as the worst source of embarrassment: a father who is a wine sipping, fuel efficient, plant-lovin’ non-spitter.

It was a spur-of-the-moment trip, the kind of diversion that doesn’t grant enough time for pre-conceived notions or attitudes to gain a head of steam. He was relaxed and memories just sort of popped into his head as we walked.

“I think I saw that kid’s name carved in the tree back there,” he said to me, grinning.

He was referring to a graffiti incident that happened during a tour that I was leading for my daughter’s class about ten years ago when she was in junior high. One of the kids snuck around the back of a large diameter red gum near Mr. Big and used the stiff quill of a Turkey Vulture feather – remarkably similar to the one that I had just demonstrated seconds earlier -- to carve J-U-S-T-I-N into the soft white bark. When I discovered it later that day, I was livid and you couldn’t shut me up about it. Even though the tree shed the bark that was carved, the incident still needles me. And he knows it.

He remembered the collection of 100 crayfish that we had trapped from Ayer Lake and laid out in five neat rows on a concrete slab for a group photo in 2002. We were in the midst of a crayfish eradication program at the time, and we thought that if we framed the resultant photograph and hung it over the lake, the remaining 95,000 would take the hint and surrender voluntarily. Needless to say they didn’t, and we ended up trapping over 25,000 the hard way before we finally gave up.

He noticed the missing boojum tree that died in 2004 and wondered what happened to it. He couldn't remember its name and so, like I've done a hundred times before, I seized on a learning opportunity. I told him that Mexicans call it a “cirio” (candle), botanists call it Fouquieria columnaris, but most Americans know it as a boojum tree because of Godfrey Sykes, a researcher from the Desert Laboratory in Tucson who named it on a trip to Mexico in 1922. "Thanks for that," he responded. "But what happened to it?"

"It died."

We watched the coots paddling in the shallows of Ayer Lake and he asked if we still had the Gila top minnows and Sonoran pup fish. We used the Faul Suspension bridge as a wooden trampoline and leaned over the Benson Outback bridge to look at the 25 feet tall Eucalyptus trees along Silver King Wash that I planted when he was only eight years old.

And no Arboretum visit would be complete without a ride in one of the golf carts. These after-hours jaunts are some of his most vivid memories and definitely rank near the top of the non-gay perks of being the son of an Arboretum staff member.

Connor’s plane landed in Atlanta on January 26, Australia Day, and the first text I received from him was “They have those African statues from the Arboretum at the airport.” He was referring to the Chapungu Exhibit that we hosted from 2002-2003. He was only 11 years old at the time, but there were 66 statues installed throughout the grounds, and at least one of them must have made an impression. I still have his message on my cell phone, and I plan to keep it for a while longer. It has become the last “official” memory that we will share for some time to come.

Kim Stone

Coming out of the (water) closet

2011-01-19T08:37:00.011-07:00

My family's toilets get a lot of use. Day in and day out we’re peeing, pooping, and flushing with reckless abandon. There is really no stopping us. “Be gone!” we say when we’re finished, and we push down a little handle that sends whatever was deposited to a faraway place, replacing the contents of the glistening ceramic bowl with a new batch of clean water.

Our conventional, 22-year-old toilets use a shameful amount of potable drinking water with every single flush. I installed toilet dams in the tanks about 15 years ago, which cut the water use from three gallons per flush to about two. But these toilets weren’t designed to be a third less efficient, so a double flush was often needed, essentially mocking my conservation efforts. I compensated by peeing outside whenever possible but that only dealt with half of the problem. I was considering the installation of a pit toilet when I ran across a more cost-effective solution that took advantage of our indoor plumbing. Available at Home Depot for $216, I purchased the Eco Fusion Dual Flush toilet by American Standard.

Removing a grungy, decades-old toilet and replacing it with a new one is almost as disgusting as it sounds. But once installed, it was as if I could hear the soprano voices of pre adolescent choir boys heralding its arrival. The illumination from the vanity lights that once fell flat onto the tired patina of our old commode now sparkles from the polished surfaces of the Eco Fusion like freshly brushed teeth.

And the flush? Well, that depends on whether you’ve deposited solids or liquids. During the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1970’s, I remember the old saw, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” Now, forty years later, you make a similar decision by deciding which button to push. The button on the left is for liquids, and it does a remarkable job of turning yellow water clear with only 0.9 gallons. The right hand button does a similarly efficient job with 1.6 gallons and rewards your efforts with a satisfying “wooshing” sound as it dispatches whatever combination of solids you’ve left behind.

The only complaint I have about my new toilet is the loss of anonymity. Because of the configuration of the flush buttons, it’s no longer possible to just reach around to the side while you’re sitting and press down the handle. Now, unless you’re particularly dexterous, you have to stand and turn around to flush, which forces you to look squarely at the contents of the bowl. What you find there may or may not surprise you, but I’ve always preferred to make that view optional rather than mandatory.

A new, water efficient toilet like the Eco Fusion Dual Flush can save 50% or more in water use over a conventional toilet. And with the choice of two buttons and a thorough flushing action, it has made going to the bathroom not only efficient, but fun.

Kim Stone

Awesome revisited

2011-01-06T17:22:00.001-07:00

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, CEO, and president of Facebook – and now Time magazine’s Man of the Year – summed up the movie The Social Network by saying that, when it came to portraying his life, Hollywood fundamentally missed the point. He didn’t use money, girls, and access to parties and clubs as the drivers to develop Facebook, nor does he consider such things to be the spoils of its continuing success. Instead, as he puts it in Time, the real motivator is the fact that he thinks “it’s an awesome thing to do.”

Subtract a few billion dollars, and the parallels of his successful personal philosophy and those of the staff at Boyce Thompson Arboretum are closely bound. In fact, career plant professionals in general are notorious for their single-minded commitment to plants, often to the exclusion of what others would consider to be a more typical family enterprise. Not only is power, money, and attending all the right parties not important, neither are the normal imperatives to be fruitful and multiply. It’s amazing how many “plant people” I have known through the years who have chosen to remain single, or are divorced, or, if still married, then voluntarily childless.

At first, I thought that it was an anomaly; that my circle of acquaintances was small and I needed to get out more. But the more widely I travel, the more I am convinced that there is something about plants that, in certain individuals, turns on either a monastic or an addictive gene. For them plants graduate from simple objects of affection – a geranium in a clay pot on the front porch, a 20 year old pothos draped over an end table in the living room – to hundreds or thousands of life-consuming tenants that require daily care and maintenance, leaving little room for a normal life.

For these people, plant-a-holism often affects them at an early age, but others are struck down in the prime of life. Broken lunch dates are the first signs, then emails go unanswered, and finally, brief cell phone conversations become one-sided Latin rants about some endangered subspecies of pincushion cactus found only on a lonely, south-facing hillside in Texas. The terminal stage usually involves the purchase of a distant tract of land and a double-wide trailer, the drilling of a well, and the establishment of a plant nursery. The plants grown are generally unusual plants, either in species or size, and reflect the particular grower’s affliction. It’s a maddening scenario for those of us who want to buy these plants, because the only affordable land is usually a half day’s drive – one way – from just about anywhere.

In all fairness, only a few of the staff at Boyce Thompson Arboretum can be considered to be pathologically plant-centric. What we all share, though, is the willingness to spend our working lives nurturing the thousands of plants that we grow – not because of the vast material gains that we know we’ll never receive -- but because it’s an awesome thing to do.

Kim Stone

Rain inches its way towards the holidays

2010-12-24T01:57:00.001-07:00

There is no better sight to behold during a morning drive to work than to see Gift Shop Clerk and bicycle commuter Chris Evans dodging water puddles on his daily ride to the Arboretum. More puddles mean more rain, so the more Chris suffers, the happier we are. We don't really know exactly how much we receive until we check our official rain gauge, but more often than not, the numbers disappoint. "Only a third of an inch?" we ask. “By the way Chris was weaving around those puddles, I’d have guessed twice that much.” This is why like I to use anecdotes rather than inches to describe rainfall events – they’re just more interesting.

Driving down to the picnic area through the sliding gate is one of the better barometers of rain fall intensity. Light rains will cause a thin veneer of red, decomposed granite from the overflow parking lot to rush down the hill towards the picnic area. A heavy rain will do the same thing but it will also leave two inch deep rills of the stuff along with the fist size rocks that it picks up along the way. I get goose bumps of anticipation when I feel these lumpy rocks under my tires, because I know that I'm getting closer to the collection nursery, where the real proof in the pudding will lie.

   Wheelbarrows and plastic buckets are the informal tools of rain measurement in the collection nursery and we use both as an informal gauge. We can also see how much pooling and runoff has occurred by the locations of tiny, floating bits of mulch that have been dispersed over the area. The real piece de resistance is a ground-level drain near the corner of the Smith Building that, when completely plugged during wildly heavy downpours, has been known to direct water beneath the Lab door, down the middle of the hall, out through the Interpretive Center, and onward towards Queen Creek. When the muddy imprint of the high water line in the Smith Building hallway is higher than the wheels of an industrial-size mop bucket, an official reading from the weather station becomes, well, academic.

   Last night, we received .92" of rain (measured officially at the weather station). In a near repeat performance of last year, we all anticipate that this will be the "germinating" rain for this season's annual wildflowers.

   Even though it started a little late, rain is always a gift -- and its timing couldn't be better, both for this holiday season, and for the year to come. Best wishes to all.

Kim Stone

Camelback Mountain - Above the fray

2010-12-23T11:05:00.007-07:00

I'd long wanted to climb Camelback Mountain, but, like the weather, I just hadn't done anything about it. It’s been on my bucket list for awhile, but it keeps falling through a crack in the bottom, only to get swept under the rug and forgotten.

When my daughter, Taylor, and I finally decided to go, we were confronted with what I had been warned about: The hardest part about climbing Camelback Mountain is the parking. The mountain emerges out of some of the most densely packed and expensive real estate in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and if the small parking lot at the Echo Canyon trailhead is filled, the only alternatives are to wait for a space to open, or take your chances next to the Bentley at one of the five million dollar houses nearby. So we waited.

Even though Taylor is in excellent shape and the very the picture of health, she has long been convinced that some virus or bacteria is lurking right around the next bend, waiting to leap through her nostrils or penetrate her unprotected skin. Each headache is a developing brain tumor and every sneeze or cough is a sure sign that she will soon be attached to a hospital ventilator. “You never know,” she says.

For each new specialist that she visits, she is further informed of the endless parade of loitering disease organisms looking for a host -- and her anxiety increases. Add that to television programs with names like The Monsters Inside You that describe average people becoming the victim of horrible internal parasites, and she is beside herself with concern. The specialists never find anything serious, and I tell her that she will outlive 90% of the population if she doesn’t worry herself to death first.

Today, she brought the results of a recent screening for various environmental allergens that she had been tested for. And, in a rare event, she really is allergic to several plants, both cultivated and native, that are common to this part of Arizona. I’m intimately familiar with all of them but she knows none of them. To her, that means that every plant is a potential threat until proven otherwise. As we pulled into a recently vacated parking place, I watched her reach into her purse and nervously finger what I could only guess was an inhaler.

Camelback Mountain is an extremely popular venue, even on a mid-week Wednesday, so if you love mountains but hate loneliness, you will not be disappointed. Even though the hike is relatively short, it’s a steep climb, covering 1300 feet of elevation change in just over a mile. After passing a long series of broad steps formed by timbers, the dirt track trail surface quickly hardens into solid rock. A long, stainless steel railing is installed in one of the most vertical sections and it’s an indispensable aid to pulling yourself up over rock that has either been polished to a Teflon-like slickness or eroded into a loose patina of gravelly ball bearings from the tens of thousands of feet that have passed over it.

From here, there is a brief saddle and then a final scramble through a half mile of rocks and boulders to the summit. Leave your trekking poles at home for this hike; there is no soil to dig them into and you’ll need your hands just about as much as your feet to negotiate the boulder field, especially on your way down.

Because the mountain is in the city, it attracts a wide cross-section of people who may or may not be fully prepared for its challenges. The vast majority of hikers that we saw were in their twenties and thirties, then a glaring jump through the next couple of decades to 60 and above.

“My gosh, look at some of these old guys,” my daughter said as she followed me up another steep grade.

Her comment struck me as a little naïve. “What about me?” I said, stopping to look back towards her. “I’m old, too.”

I wasn’t more than a handful of years younger than the so-called geezers she pointed out, so I felt a little offended when she didn’t give me the credit that my age had earned. I don’t mind being placed on a pedestal, as long as its height is age-appropriate.

“Well, yeah,” she said. “But not like them.”

She did have a point. The steep railing section required some extra exertion and though everyone struggled, a few of the over sixtyish hikers were bent over like Egyptian slaves dragging two-ton blocks of limestone along the banks of the Nile. Compared to the dozens of runners that passed us during the day with their chiseled quads and tanned pectorals, the older guys really did look like pending defibrillation candidates. Still, you had to respect their perseverance and slow but steady progress.

Far less pitiable were the many svelte girls in their mid twenties that grimaced and grunted through these steeper sections as if they were building the same pyramid. “I’ll bet their boyfriends dragged them along for this hike,” Taylor said while we watched a few of them climb toward us. There are definitely easier “date hikes” than Camelback Mountain, and their painful looks of abject suffering were no doubt exaggerated to remind their boyfriends of that fact.

We made it to the summit in about 50 minutes; not too fast, not too slow, just a moderate pace with a few water breaks and camera stops. The view from the top is a predictable 360 degrees of sumptuous resorts, green grass, swimming pools, and clay tile roofs – unbroken opulence, really, with only a few, small and undeveloped mountains poking through to remind you that this was once desert. High above the smog, we watched the planes at Sky Harbor Airport take off through the same brown cloud that also blanketed the rich and famous; and for a few precious moments of poetic justice, we were able to look down on the less fortunate below us.

Just before starting back down, Taylor noticed a creosote bush a few feet away, and asked me what it was. I told her that it wasn’t on her allergy list and she blew her nose into a handkerchief, saying, “That’s good, because I was starting to get a little stuffy on the way up.” Had I told her the truth, that none of those plants were found on the mountain, it would have only freed her up to think about the slew of other possibilities, like shoulder separations or meniscus tears. So, I just left it at that.

As we carefully picked our way over, around, and between the same boulders that we’d just climbed, I thought again about how much I dislike gravity. Going down is always more treacherous than going up because the bullying effect of gravity forces you to use twice as many muscles and body parts to hold yourself back from its effects. I like climbing hills because I’m in control; with every contraction of my muscles, I’m beating gravity at its own game, forcing it to yield to my upward intentions. But going down, it’s payback time, and the fact that I usually spend half the time using my butt as a third leg only reinforces the righteousness of my bad attitude.

We reached the bottom in a respectable 60 minutes and thought that our time was pretty good until we were passed by one of the same shirtless runners we had seen an hour ago. He was now running back up the mountain for the second time. While my daughter expressed her admiration for his sculpted, youthful exterior, I wearily unlocked the car and prepared to vacate the parking space that would allow the first in a line of six waiting cars to take our place. I couldn’t see how many were in that car, or whether they were male or female, young or old, healthy or frail; I only knew that, for them, parking was no longer the hardest part about climbing Camelback Mountain.

Kim Stone

The peak of fall foliage. Are you worthy?

2010-12-10T16:41:00.002-07:00

    For anyone prone to spontaneous outpourings of raw emotion, this year's fall foliage show might just leave you weeping, with tears falling like the gentle stream of Chinese pistachio leaves gathering at your feet. Every year is different, but this season, every leaf seems hell bent on perfectly complimenting the next. Not just on the same branch, or even the same tree, but inter-specifically, with trees and shrubs of different species singing in perfect harmony. It's not a Coca Cola commercial, it's more like a diorama-in-reverse, as if life is imitating art, and doing a really good job of it. "No, this can't be real," you tell yourself. "It's just too perfect, it must be a movie set." But it is real. There are no painted backdrops and the lingering smell of turpentine, only a fully-developed, three-dimensional wonderland. It's what Alice might have found had her rabbit hole been horizontal. The Main Trail leads you directly through pecans, pomegranates and pistachios with leaves in every stage of transition, vegetatively describing just about every color on the upper half of a rainbow.

   For photographers that shamelessly use software like Photoshop to enhance the world around them - I include myself in this group -- this year's color show has created an ironic problem because un-retouched photographs are so saturated with color that they look fake. It's as if Dorothy stepped out of her house just after it touched down in Oz, took one look and said, "No way." This has forced photographers to make the scene more believable by making it less real, requiring the "saturation slider" to be moved towards the minus side rather than the positive, posing a unique ergonomic challenge. The various hues of orange have been particularly intense, especially at the Faul Suspension Bridge, where no less than four Chinese pistachios came into full fall plumage simultaneously.

   In the Demonstration Garden, the signature pistachio in the Wildflower Meadow is at its reliable best. And the nearby Combretums have colored-up early and more intensely than is typical, with leaves the color of pickled beets in the sunniest exposures. The cottonwoods, ashes, and willows in Queen Creek canyon are mostly at peak, with sumptuous views from the Main Trail at Picket Post House. There is even an extra pistachio, large and full and the color of a roasted bell pepper, that seemed to have come out of nowhere; an over-achieving sapling that broke all the rules and grew from six feet to thirty in one year just to provide a focal point for what would otherwise be a sea of cottonwood yellow.

   Fall isn't over yet and there is still a lot to see. The weather has been warm, clear, and sunny with very little wind. As groundskeeper Becky Noth said to me the other day, "If this weather holds, we might have good fall color until Christmas." I hope she's right.

Kim Stone

Sara Roberts, a visiting student from Washington, finds a comfortable bench beneath the intense autumn color of our most often photographed Chinese pistachio, located near the Wildflower Meadow in the Demonstration Garden. Photo by Paul Wolterbeek.

Widow wins big

2010-11-23T07:05:00.004-07:00

I was walking towards the Gift Shop just before noon on a Sunday last August when I found the entrance completely blocked by a commotion of a dozen people clustered in front of the glass entry doors. The groups' collective gaze was directed towards something - or someone - on the ground in a corner that was hidden from my view. I thought at first that someone was injured, but the group seemed to be generally smiling, chatty, and upbeat, implying that they were watching something more engaging than a twisted ankle or an arm full of cactus spines. I shouldered my way into the pack and when I looked over one of the shorter heads, there was indeed a person there. His body laid stretched out, stomach-side down, completely blocking the entrance. But he was moving. He was propped up on his elbows and was using them to slowly drag his prone body towards a dimly lit, hollow crevice near the bottom of the hinge of the right hand entry door. From where I stood, the shadowy space looked like it contained a tangled shoelace that was suspended in mid-air, encircled with odd, alternating black, white and red bands, like something a clown would wear. When I asked the person next to me what all of the hubbub was about, she said, "It's either a snake eating a spider, or a spider eating a snake. I'm not sure which."

As it turns out, it was a six inch coral snake that had become entangled in the sticky web of a black widow spider, and the black widow was wasting no time in sucking the life out of the unfortunate coral snake. The horizontal man had now rolled over on his side and was aiming his digital SLR camera for close-ups of the carnage. He was later introduced to me as Larry Jones, herpetologist and author of the book The Lizards of the Southwest. The majority of the onlookers were just returning from a Learn Your Lizards walk led by AZ Game and Fish biologist Abbi King, and the real-world, life-and-death scene that was unfolding before them was an added bonus that thrilled everyone right down to Abbi, who was now lying next to Larry with her camera, stifling any hope of anyone getting in or out of the Gift Shop.

Over the next half hour, most of the onlookers that had cameras, including me, took their respective turns rolling around on the warm concrete outside the Gift Shop doors, inhibiting commerce, but also photographing a unique scene that Larry Jones later said was a "first" for him. When I quizzed him for his expert opinion about which one of these venomous creatures he would rather be bitten by, he gave me the only scientifically valid response: "Neither." Then he added, "Well, it depends on where you're bitten. Coral snakes have a nasty venom, but then so do black widows." I thought about this as I stepped between several pairs of legs on my way to get another look, and decided that my envenomator of choice would probably be the coral snake. With its tiny mouth, there are a limited number of body parts that would present themselves on a fully clothed individual, whereas the black widow could more easily slip itself in or under, exposing a plethora of meaty targets.

BEMUSED BIOLOGISTS BARRICADE BOOKSTORE might have been the headline in the morning paper had the scene not diffused itself as quickly as it started. By early afternoon, life was back to normal for everyone but the coral snake. What had started as a five-alarm biological event --a rare clash of the titans --was now barely a side show. With no crowds to draw attention to it, most visitors came and went, buying tee shirts, or books, or Gatorade, without ever noticing the black widow hanging smugly from her fresh kill in a shadowy, nearby corner.

Falling for fall finery

2010-11-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

In the deciduous woods of the northeastern U.S. and Canada, the progression of fall color typically follows lines of latitude. To catch all of fall, itinerant color chasers with too much time on their hands often start somewhere in Quebec in late September and then put in some serious road miles and six weeks of bed and breakfasts until they see the last leaves fall in New York and Pennsylvania sometime in early November. For fall color enthusiasts in the low deserts of Arizona, we have it decidedly easier. What color we miss in our own back yards, we can find in hours - if not minutes - with some relatively painless trips to the higher elevations that surround us. Subtract the obvious high-country opportunities like the Mogollon Rim and the White Mountains, and we're still blessed with half a dozen "sky islands," mountain ranges that rise nearly a mile, sometimes more, above local population centers like Tucson, Safford, Sierra Vista, and Globe.

What we lack in quaint covered bridges and idyllic scenes of white-steepled churches, we make up for in precipitous, windy roads that often lack guard rails but are sometimes paved, like those in the Pinaleno Mountains near Safford or the Catalinas north of Tucson, and dusty, rutted tracks that snake up to stands of aspen, gambel oak, and maples like Forest Service Road 651 in the Pinal Mountains south of Globe. This kind of vertical accessibility means that you can roll out of bed at 8am in Tucson and be sipping coffee and crunching through fresh layers of fallen leaves at nearly 9200 feet on Mt. Lemmon in the time that it takes a visitor to New Hampshire to correctly pronounce Lake Winnipesaukee. And you can do it again and again throughout the fall autumn season without burning vacation time, crossing any international borders, or stumbling over multi-syllabic words.

Fall in the higher elevations was late by a week or two this year which gave those of us with poor planning skills more of a grace period to see what we would have missed in previous years had the nights cooled down earlier and closer to schedule. Though late, the colors have been consistent and homogeneous with aspens and maples coloring up evenly and en masse, creating surreal environments of yellow on brown and yellow on white, like a colorized sepia photograph. A full description of the mechanics of why leaves change color is the lead story in the October Member newsletter that you should have received in the mail about a week ago.

Back at the Arboretum... the most vibrant trees that exhibit the anthocyanin pigments (the glorious oranges and scarlets of our Chinese pistachios), usually reach their peak in late November or early December. It's a logical and predictable progression that begins with the now-changing leaves of honey locusts, jububes, and soapberries, all with their characteristic hues of yellow carotenoid pigments. In fact, all of the Arboretum's deciduous trees lose their leaves by November or December, and most take on some sort of yellow-ish coloration first that ranges from the cornbread yellow of canyon hackberry to the lemon-sorbet leaves of our native cottonwood, the last hold-out to finally drop its leaves.

The fall season is much like following wildflowers in the spring but in reverse: the leaves are dying rather than springing to life - and summer is seven months away rather than two. It's not a re-birth, it's a cool-down. It's the victory lap that celebrates the wrap-up of another desert summer and the out-pouring of sweat and air-conditioned tonnage that kept us cool enough to appreciate all of the color that we'll see for the next few weeks. Think of autumn as a seasonal attitude adjustment. Chill.

kws

Strange lights seen at Boyce Thompson Arboretum

2010-10-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

At one of the night time member events at Boyce Thompson Arboretum this summer, I discovered that Turkey Vultures are as sensitive to the light beam from a common, handheld laser pointer as are those touchy airline pilots and officials at the FAA. Just one stray millimeter-wide beam from a red or green laser (often carried legitimately by star gazers to point out distant skyward constellations) can cause a group of thirty buzzards to scatter from their nighttime roosts like each one had been goosed simultaneously by an invisible human finger. It’s a raucous explosion of 60 panicked, tangled wings that propels the vultures into the air, followed immediately by complete silence again as the outstretched wings carry each buzzard noiselessly into the darkness. It’s a clear case of overreaction to a harmless laser pointer that is, at worst, a really annoying part of most Powerpoint presentations, but try convincing them of that.

Another kind of light that is now as commonly available as a Bic Flick is a portable, battery-operated, fluorescent LED flashlight. “Black light” technology has come a long way since Spencer Gifts pioneered the overuse of it in every shopping mall from Los Angeles to Cherry Hill, New Jersey in the 60’s and 70’s. Now you can pick one up for about $10 in the decidedly less psychedelic confines of Walgreens and Home Depot. Not only do black lights make the Led Zeppelin posters glow on your dorm room wall, they also cause scorpions to involuntarily glow a subtle green color at night and have now become the method of choice for scorpion locating.

Scorpiontologist and Mesa Community College professor Andy Baldwin led a recent nighttime excursion at the Arboretum and picked up dozens of glowing scorpions by their tails with his quick, bare fingers, holding each stinger tightly like one might hold the untied end of an inflated balloon. He identified six or seven different species and showed us the all important sexual differences between males and females, both of which sting with equal enthusiasm. His personal record of being stung is 17 times in one night. Personally, I consider one sting to be a singular event, but after nine or ten, who’s counting?

Red lights generally convince advancing motorists to stop, or, in red light districts, invite them to stop “in”. At the Arboretum, they’re used to help people negotiate the night at our frequent Star Night events with the East Valley Astronomy Club. Our eyes use the retina’s rod cells for night vision and these cells are conveniently blind to red light, so astronomers carry red light flashlights, wear red, backlit wristwatches, and use red-on-black computer screens to function in the inky blackness. They even mount red lights on the legs of their telescope tripods to keep klutzes like me from tripping over them. With soft red lights reflecting off faces, clothing, and star-viewing equipment, all under a few billion stars and assorted galaxies, the scene can be other worldly -- not unlike Spencer Gifts, but without the sandalwood incense.

A few limericks of summer

2010-08-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

If eggs really fry on the street
When summer makes roads overheat,
How can ants pillage
And cleanup the spillage
With blisters all over their feet?

I’m proud of the sweat that I make,
But somehow my smell’s hard to take?
The same goes for you,
You stink like me too.
We both need to jump in Ayer Lake.

Where boats had once floated last Autumn,
There's a vastly reduced water column.
No waves and no wake
In Tempe Town Lake
Topside is now on the bottom.

There once was a man from Tacoma
Who pined for sweet desert aroma.
This fair-haired palooka
From Straight Juan de Fuca,
Was treated for skin car-ci-no-ma.

"You eat prickly pear fruit, Mr. Young?"
The knave, in his hand, it still clung.
"There are glochids," said he.
"Yes, I know, ninety-three.
They're embedded all over my tongue."

Morning-after ant-ics

2010-07-17T13:59:00.000-07:00

After 3/4" of bruising, hard rain last night, I was excited to get up early and see what the first major rainfall of the monsoon had done to wake and shake things up. I knew that ants can grow wings and take flight in the time it takes to roast a 12 pound turkey, but I wasn't prepared for the shear volumes that I found. In just a quarter mile walk along the Toll Road trail in the Pinal Mountains south of Globe, I plowed my way through dozens of individual cyclones of flying ants. Each little mini-tornado was about two feet across and twenty feet tall with thousands of furiously busy ants flying in a clockwise motion in tight formation, as if they were caught inside a clear glass tube. I had to cover my mouth and nose to breath ant-free air as I walked through the swarms.

There were many harmless collisions as they slammed against my arms and body, and the temporary stillness of the briefly stunned individuals allowed me to see the expected black ant head, thorax, and abdomen. What seemed totally out of place to me were the wings. They were perfect little translucent wings that were beautiful and clearly functional, but creepy, too. How do they manufacture them so quickly? Do they duck into an alley after a good rain and unzip a compartment on their exoskeleton to reveal the secret of flight that they've kept from everyone their whole lives? And if so, how do they learn to fly in these tightly wound swarms so quickly? It's just unnatural.

A small calf had recently died and I spooked a lone Turkey Vulture that was feeding on it in a small ravine just off the road. My dog was with me and though I kept her from stealing a bit of the meat herself, I have no doubt that she inhaled an ant or two or three as she ran in front of me up the road.

Kim Stone

The Flight of Fruitarians

2010-07-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

It takes a patient, thoughtful observer like Arboretum volunteer and birder Jack Bartley to point out the mid-summer bounty of fruit-eating opportunities for wildlife at Boyce Thompson Arboretum. It’s not only about the ripening of red, ripe saguaro fruits-which is huge-but also about the fruiting potential of hundreds of other plants, like desert hackberries and condalias, that are growing in the Arboretum’s plant collections and dare to fruit in the middle of the summer. Jack is keenly aware that knowing what birds eat is the best way to find them, so when he and I met at the bottom of the switchbacks on Sunday, he reminded me of a half dozen fruiting shrubs that he had seen earlier in the day.

Nothing short of a real bird-brain is needed to keep up with such things and I’m sure that Jack would admit to having one, because he quickly rattled off the six fruiting shrubs with the staccato beat of a woodpecker drilling a pine snag. All of them were plants that I considered to be old friends, but I hadn’t noticed that a single one had ripe fruit ready for a bird to pluck. Its human indifference, I guess, brought on by being spoiled and overly domesticated with the luxury to ignore easy food sources in favor of the ones we have to pay for. Sure, those desert hackberry fruits look yummy (and they are), but I have far too many other less healthy, store-bought options to satisfy my hunger than to spend the day picking enough of these tiny orange fruits for a meal. And just think of all those seeds.

I visited each one of the plants that he mentioned and they were indeed loaded with fruit. The funny thing was, there weren’t many birds particularly interested in the fruit salad that presented itself. There were copious amounts of the small, black fruits of elderberry, crucifixion thorn, and Condalia globosa, the orange desert hackberries and the pinkish-orange Berberis, and the leathery-colored, perfect globes of Geoffroea decorticans, but according to Jack, the birds that might be attracted to these plants, like Phainopeplas, Black-Headed Grosbeaks, Hooded Orioles, and others, were all but absent.

Perhaps it’s the heat, in which case the expected 115 degree high on Thursday will be an appetite buster for bird and man alike.

Kim Stone

A mid-summer bicycle ride

2010-07-11T12:28:00.000-07:00

Customarily, I ride the Arboretum’s mountain bike around the main trail every day between 3pm and 5pm. It’s not only because the Arboretum is closed for the day and I have the place to myself, but because if I didn’t, I would probably have nodded off at my desk. My mind considers the 3 o’clock hour to be a time of rest, and even though it’s the hottest part of the day, if I don’t get up and do something physical and aerobic, I will likely wake up 30 minutes later with a teaspoon of drool saturating my keyboard.

A much better time to ride is in the morning and I did that today about 8:30am. The trail was dimpled from a wisp of rain that we received the night before. Prominent golf cart tire tracks flattened the dimples on some of the trails and showed that the rain had come before 6am and the first cart traffic. When I called up to Lynnea in the Gift Shop to ask whether we received any measurable rainfall, she paused to check and then responded, “No, nothing in the rain gauge. Not even a trace. Sorry.” It seemed strange to hear her apologize for something she has no control over, but even though she is only the messenger, she can sense the plaintive tone of our voices when we pose the "r" question. What we are really asking this time of year is: “Please, oh please, tell me that we received more than a trace. Lie to us if you have to. Even a tenth. We’ll take a tenth.” It’s only July 11, though, and too early to become alarmed or overly disappointed by the lack of rain. We’ll reserve those sentiments for mid-August during which no rain will be a legitimate reason to panic.

Every saguaro is full of split open, red lipstick-colored fruits. They’ve been fruiting now for several weeks with succulent red flesh and dark black seeds exposed to the elements and to every living creature that can reach them up high or collect them from the ground. This morning, I found several small caliber piles of animal scat that were comprised of 100% saguaro seeds. This is a sure sign that the fruits are ripe for the picking. One pile across from Picket Post House looked like it was from a fox or skunk, and the other larger, more consolidated pile in Queen Creek was probably from a javelina. The seeds, when tightly packed and unmixed with other seeds, closely resemble blackberries as they glisten in the low morning sun. The rule of thumb is that there are about 2000 tiny seeds per fruit and by the looks of the “blackberries,” there were three to six whole fruits digested, depending on the size of the pile. Because the Arboretum provides so many varying food sources from trees and shrubs all over the arid world, it’s comforting to know that our own Sonoran Desert can hold its own as a life giving food source without any horticultural intervention.

Butterflies are everywhere, especially in areas where irrigation has run onto the trails and created little moist sumps for butterflies to alight and collect moisture. Half a dozen Harris’ ground squirrels were criss-crossing the trail above the lake, their three inch furry tales standing ramrod straight and vertical in the air as they run. Many lesser earless lizards were seen, too.

Kim Stone

49 bye byes, Part 2

2010-07-08T16:56:00.000-07:00

Years ago, maybe ten or so, the rodent population in the Smith Building and Visitor Center was of a similar density as it was before we launched our newest offensive on June 15th. Their numbers have ebbed and flowed over the years, and we have dealt with the population fluctuations on a “catch as catch can” kind of basis. To the mice, it’s been more of a “catch me if you can” scenario, with the mice inevitably holding the upper hand for a time, then losing ground to our lukewarm eradication efforts, then going into a high speed reproductive mode when they sensed that we were losing our resolve.

Wholesale rodent eradication requires a killer instinct. But because our staff is in the plant business, our murderous tendencies are usually reserved for those biological entities, typically insects, that chew and suck on our plants, rather than those that tear into salted peanuts and Snickers bars in the Visitor Center Gift Shop or set up nesting facilities in the endless piles of newspapers in Paul’s office in the Smith Building. The mice were aware that we were “plant people” and therefore knew that we were inherently pacifists. We could be counted on to fence-out rather than shoot skunks, rabbits and javelinas, and to favor live traps that would inevitably give every mouse, rat, or other animal a second chance. One of the staff might finally flip out—like me on several occasions—and attempt to kill as many mice in as many creative and cruel ways as possible. Baited snap traps, sling shots, torture, loud and unapologetic yelling were all fair game. Inevitably, though, blood, guts, decaying flesh, and the thought of little mouse families torn apart by the tragedy of my doing would take its toll and I would return to my pitiful “shoo mouse shoo” control methods. They had my number, all of our numbers, and so, about ten years ago, the professionals were called in.

Men arrived in their crisp uniforms, armed not with sophisticated traps, sonic deterrents, or small caliber side arms, but with little packets full of poison. Within each packet were a few tablespoons of toxic blue crystals, the same color as the nutrients delivered to a hospital patient in your garden variety feeding tube. To the rat or mouse, the crunchy contents of these packets were designed to be irresistible and eaten with relish. The pest control people knew best and in their wisdom they spread dozens of these packets throughout the Visitor Center and the Smith Building, particularly in the crawl spaces above the ceilings. The exact locations of the packets were unbeknownst to us and quickly forgotten by the applicators, but we were told that they were put just about everywhere. “Your mouse and rat problems will soon be over,” they told us as they packed up their sophisticated step ladders and powerful flashlights. “Guaranteed,” they said. Over time, the poisonous bait did its job, but it was a move that we would regret for many, many years to come.

Continued in Part 3…

Kim Stone

49 bye byes, Part 1

2010-07-02T10:32:00.001-07:00

It’s the first of July and the beginning of a new fiscal year with a new budget and a fresh cycle of money and time to help make the world a better place. This, in and of itself, would be reason to celebrate, but it is dwarfed by an accomplishment of near incalculable value: since June 15, nearly 50 mice have been removed from the confines of the Smith Building. There was no overt violence thrust upon them. We didn’t whip them with ocotillo branches or lunge at them with snapping pruning shears. In fact, every benefit of the doubt was given to them to leave willingly and peacefully at any time, the very same opportunities granted our staff at the close of each day. Our tolerance has been noble in its scope and for six months or more, we have coexisted in a laudable natural harmony, each of us, mouse and man, acting out our lives in our own separate ways. “I’m OK. You’re OK,” is what we have voicelessly said to each other.

Because I work the late shift, often working until 9pm or later, I have always been more privy to the secret lives of our resident rodents than the rest of the staff. At roughly 5pm, after most of the humans have left for the day, I generally spot the first mouse coming through the door of the hort office, its fat little grey body hugging the edge of the wall. Depending on the day and the mouse, it either climbs to the second shelf of the metal bookcase on the left and then leaps across twelve inches of open air to the nearby countertop where our seeds are stored, or it turns the other direction after entering through the door and disappears through the crack in the sliding door of the wooden bookshelf on the other side of the room. My desk is in a centralized location, bordered on one side by a felt-covered cubicle divider supported by hollow, square metal tubes, and I have a clear view of their comings and goings. Because of the “live and let live” philosophy, I generally ignore them once they’re in the room even though I’m conscious of their presence.

Over the past month, however, a certain brazenness has come over them. And even though I haven't changed, their attitude has assumed a palpable cockiness that has begun to wear on my utopian attitude. For one, they began to reproduce inside my office, actually using one of my desk drawers to suckle a budding little family unit of three mouselets. This, after shredding the tabs off of the manila folders H through K that were hanging in the drawer in order to provide the fodder for their cozy nest. When I opened the drawer, the mother ran off, dragging one of the baby mice still hanging onto a teat, leaving me no choice but to take the two remaining hairless pinkies and drown them outside in a bucket of water.

When they weren’t breast feeding, the female mice joined the males in uninhibited romps across my desk. They made playful runs up and down the hollow tubes of my cubicle, poking their heads out of the top and quickly retreating if I made aggressive moves towards them. And if I left the room for more than ten minutes, I could guarantee that a dime size hole would be eaten from the bottom of my bag of almonds, or one or two fresh, glistening black mouse turds would be deposited on top of my lunchtime soup spoon. They pealed the labels off of the stashed soup cans and ate through hard plastic jars of Planters peanuts in my other drawers. They chewed the cuffs off my canvas work gloves, and pooped or left dollops of pasty pee on everything else. I occasionally brought in my vacuum to suck up the droppings but within three or four days, the deposits would be back to their former glory, leaving no doubt as to their preferred routes of travel.

I started to sour when some of the really obnoxious mice would waddle out into the open and just stand there, barely holding up their distended, well-fed bellies, knowing that the most they could expect from me was the kind of backhanded swat usually reserved to shoo flies from a bowl of potato salad. I had clearly lost their respect. To them, I was a patsy. They had me pegged as either a card-carrying PETA member or a pacifist who’d rented The Green Mile too many times. They had built themselves a smug little dynasty in the Smith Building, courtesy of the benefits of the welfare state that we had created to meet the demands of their lifestyle. Like most living things, if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile, and until recently, both parties appeared to be content with this arrangement. But since June 15th, their cushy world of obesity, excess, and public defecation has been turned upside down with the passing of each fateful day.

Continued in Part 2...

Kim Stone

Diving for droplets

2010-06-30T20:49:00.000-07:00

More than once, I have offered to throw myself off of Apache Leap or Magma Ridge if this fatal and final act would have any positive outcome on the bringing of summer rain to the Arboretum. It would be a symbolic offering to be sure, but if it brought the rains, I felt that the sacrifice of one human being -- me in this case -- would be worth it. I considered doing a swan dive or perhaps a full gainer, something graceful yet profound. It would be worth watching and would leave no doubt as to the earnestness of my desire for the sky to deliver its stubborn and recalcitrant payload of moisture.

Generally speaking, my thoughts of making the ultimate sacrifice don’t start until we’re well into the monsoon flow, usually around early to mid August. By this time, all those that use evaporative coolers are experiencing true, human suffering, and there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the correct conditions for dramatic thunderstorms are upon us. The rock-bottom, single-digit humidities of June are a thing of the past and the sweat that was efficiently disappearing from our skin at just about the same rate as it was being created, now just piles up like oil on the morning tide.

This early in the year, though, my attitude is usually fairly positive. My thoughts are still focused on giving nature a fairly long leash and allowing it to produce rain without me trying to force the issue by performing some dramatic, acrobatic ritual. As I stand outside in back of the Smith Building and look towards the northeast, I can smell the rain and I can hear the rumblings, and I know that eventually, it will rain. If not today, definitely tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, it will surely rain next week. If half of our rain falls during the summer monsoon, then we should be expecting some fraction of eight inches to fall at any minute. And so, for now, I wait.

Kim Stone

First week January 2010

2010-01-03T15:22:00.001-07:00

I’d like to call this blog posting the New Year’s resolution that wasn’t.

Even though today is just three days into the new year, I’m writing this blog entry more from the guilt of six months of neglect than I am from the traditional opportunity of a fresh start based on an arbitrary date on the calendar. This blog never crossed my mind as I watched the ball drop and raised my glass in a champagne toast at the stroke of midnight three days ago.

The main reason for the shameful lack of attention since June of last year is that I have forgotten the true meaning of the manufactured word “blog.” A blog is a combination of the words “web” and “log” and by definition it’s not meant to be an overly polished or an interminably thought out essay; it’s supposed to be timely and spontaneous and dynamic. So, in the spirit of the new year-- and the new decade-- I’m going to let the fingers fly, and make every attempt to capture the moment (on a more regular basis) at Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

I usually ride around the Main Trail Loop everyday on my bicycle. It’s just about the only motive force besides walking that presents a thin enough profile to navigate the entire loop. It’s also the fastest and it allows me to do a quick daily reconnaissance of the constantly changing moods of the gardens and natural areas with some extra blood cell oxygenation in the process. The pinch point is the catwalk along Queen Creek, an area that we have always known as “the Narrows.” The water in the creek was unusually clear this morning with layers of recently fallen cottonwood and willow leaves perfectly layered on the bottom, all covered with a thin layer of fine mud, perfectly visible under a lens of 12 inches of water.

A man with a pronounced limp was emerging from the west side of the catwalk, moving slowly and leaning heavily on a cane. His wife was behind him carrying the basket and seat of an electric wheelchair. “I’ve been here many times,” the man told me. “But this is the first time that I’ve made it all the way around.” I helped the woman carry the remaining three pieces of the wheel chair through the catwalk and it struck me that despite this gentleman’s frequent visits to the Arboretum, he had never experienced this riparian area before. He had never been this close to Queen Creek in flood or heard the cicadas singing in the cottonwoods along the creek in June when the only sign that water had ever flowed was a dried, unbroken coating of thick green algae covering every rock and boulder.

Seeing any water in the creek at all is a comforting experience and at this time of year, it's probably the result of about 1.5 inches of total rain in December and the fact that many of the riparian trees have lost their leaves and are no longer transpiring much water. Though most of the intense fall color is behind us, this was one of the most beautiful autumn seasons that I can remember. There was a unique combination of deeply saturated colors—almost artificial looking--and a range of trees with concurrent color that were spread out over a longer-than-usual time period, barely ending at the turn of this new decade.

With temperatures today in the high 60’s, little wind, and clear blue skies, it feels like spring is in the air, though we historically still have the lowest temperatures of the winter to look forward to in January. There is evidence of germinating ephemerals throughout the Arboretum grounds and in the open desert, so it’s still possible that we might still salvage a decent spring wildflower season.

The electric wheel chair that I had helped carry was reassembled without struggle or fanfare, and the vistors were on their way, puttering along slowly but with a great deal of satisfaction, headed in the direction the Herb Garden. For me, I did my usual aerobic climb up to the Picket Post House at the top of the switchbacks, and then let gravity carry me back to my computer chair.

Kim Stone
Membership, Media, I.T.

Mid-June. Queen of the evening, Queen of the night

2009-06-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

6-21-09
I was digesting a Father's Day plate of freshly grated hash browns on my way to work when I realized that not only was today Father's Day, it was also the first official day of summer. Plus, it was likely to be the first official 100 degree day that we've had this June. More often than not, we would have been laboring under the burden of three digits for a month or more by now, but this year, June has been unreal with temperatures staying in the hard-to-complain-about 90's. When you add all three of these coincident dates together, it's really kind of bizarre: how often does a celestial, a terrestrial, and a familial event happen on the same day?

As I drove, it occurred to me that maybe this was a sign that there was order to the universe after all; that I wasn't just an insignificant speck on the windshield; that I was part of billions of other specks on millions of other windshields; and that we would be all be cleansed by the great wiper of life, only to begin a new cycle in balance and harmony. In almost the same instant, a wasp hit my windshield at 60 mph and disintegrated, leaving a quarter-size dollop of translucent body fluid that quickly flattened against the glass. The wasp's useless carcass then rolled over a few times and was snatched away by the wind. It was at this moment that I realized that today was shaping up to be something special.

My newfound optimism was shattered later that morning when groundskeeper Jeff Payne asked me matter-of-factly, "Did you know that you missed the Peniocereus blooming?"

"Actually, no," I answered. No one had called, or twittered, or texted, or emailed, and even if they had, I was camping and out of cell phone and internet range. The flowering of Peniocereus greggii is a dramatic, once a year, not-to-be-missed event, and I had blown my chance with an ill-timed weekend getaway.

Peniocereus greggii, also known as "queen of the night" or more generically, "night blooming cereus," is an elongated, spindly cactus with a number of representatives in the Arboretum's collections, particularly in the Cactus and Succulent Garden and the Demonstration Garden. It is also a common native plant in the surrounding desert, usually growing under foothill paloverdes, ironwoods, and mesquites, but can also be found growing through dense shrubs like creosote and jojoba. Its overall appearance is unbalanced with gangly, angular stems that are barely the thickness of a breakfast sausage. The stems have a muted, dull green color that serves as excellent camouflage, making them easy to miss, especially in low light. The stem diameter at the very base of the plant is nearly the same as the diameter of the stems two or three above the ground, giving the plant the look that the slightest wind could bring the poor thing crashing down at any moment.
When it blooms, the plant's unstable look is magnified several fold by huge, white flowers that are 7 or 8 times the diameter of the stems. The color of the flowers is the purest of white, unblemished, unstained, perfect. It's as if the flowers were carefully painted in a heavenly clean room, hovered over by angels with wings shrink wrapped in cellophane lest an untimely molt might despoil their creation. Each individual petal is tipped with a thread-like point that curves upward, surrounding a cluster of stamens that share the same ethereal whiteness.

If you want to be a true blue "bloom gazer," you can pull an all nighter and watch the flowers bloom continuously from roughly 7:30 in the evening to about 9am in the morning. For those of you that insist on 8 hours of sleep, that still leaves a potential 5 and a half hours of face time. The rest of us have to settle for seeing the photographs taken by people with better planning skills --like Jeff Payne-- who captured most of the images that are included here.

Jessie Byrd is another queen of the night fancier and each year she holds a bloom gazing party at her house in Tucson. She serves mugs of beer, explains to her guests that the meaning of the word "penio"in Peniocereus is actually Latin for "tail" (definitely not what most of them had been thinking), and then enlists her well-lubed guests to help hand pollinate the flowers with paint brushes. The hand pollination helps out the sphinx moth which is the plant's natural pollinator, and assures better seed production.

This is a good time to plant Peniocereus greggii. Jeff and Arboretum groundskeeper Becky Noth laid out four one gallon plants today in pre-dug holes. All locations were under several different species of "nurse" trees and were new additions to the other night blooming plants that have been planted as part of the Arboretum's new Night Blooming garden.

I think that it's fair to add "botanical" to the celestial, terrestrial, and familial celebrations for the 21st of June, but don't dismay that you missed your last chance to see Peniocereus bloom. I have notes from 2000 that showed several of our plants at the Arboretum blooming on June 26 and Jessie Byrd's bloomed at the beginning of June this year in Tucson. This means that there is some wiggle room on the calendar, and if you're lucky, you still might get the chance this year to see one bloom.

So grab your sleeping bag and a six pack, and take in one of the great spectacles of life in June in the Sonoran desert.

Kim Stone
Horticulturist

Early June 2009 Saguaros

2009-06-09T18:26:00.000-07:00

I’ve always had a lousy memory. To prevent myself from becoming a candidate for a more structured environment, I keep track of timely events with a thin, spiral bound notebook that I carry in my hip pocket and a #2 pencil tucked behind my ear. Of late, that pencil has been replaced by a G2 gel pen, but you get the idea.

Much of what I write down has to do with seasonal events that happen in the desert and I’ve learned to anticipate these events by associating them with events that I dare not forget in my daily life. As my wedding anniversary nears in mid March, I know that I’m likely to have to sidestep the first diamondback rattlesnake of the season. Tax time in April is the beginning of the spring cactus blooming season, beginning with our native hedgehog.

The event that I look forward to the most is the appearance of the flowers and fruit of Arizona’s most famous cactus, the Saguaro. In May, saguaros become cactus volcanoes with flowers bubbling out of the top of each arm and the main stem, solidifying one by one as they travel downward. To forget this timely event, I would also have to face the consequences of forgetting Mother’s Day.

By Father’s Day in June, the summer heat is bearing down, cicadas are singing, and the first saguaro fruits are just starting to open. It’s also when semi trucks begin their yearly ritual of shearing off great slabs of tire retreads. Many of these cast-offs come to rest safely on the side of the road but occasionally they stand on end, slowly rocking back and forth in front of oncoming traffic. I start looking for ripe saguaro fruits when I see the first cars take evasive action.

Like my dad, the saguaro is the ultimate strong, silent type. Narrow at the hip and broad shouldered, it doesn’t give up its moisture easily. The entire outer surface of the plant is covered by a thick, waxy skin with plenty of spines. Even though its main stem can contain as much as 9 gallons of water per every foot of height, there is no way for another creature to get any of that water out, until the fruits open to the outside world.

Within minutes after they split open, every desert creature that can fly, jump, climb, or vault to the top will be queued up to scarf up the sweet, red pulp.

Few people know much about saguaro fruits. Just as it’s too difficult to appreciate the muscularity of an ant because it’s too small, or a movie from the front row because it’s too big, the fruits are just too high to easily reach. The Tohono O’odham people of Arizona construct a “harvest pole” made from two long, stout saguaro ribs lashed together with a cross piece at the end. They place this cross piece behind a target fruit that may be as high as 25 feet up in a saguaro, and then, with a push-pull motion, they dislodge it. They carry buckets of ripe fruit back to a shaded temporary camp they call their “cactus camp” where they process them to make syrup, jam, and wine.

As the beginning of the summer monsoon nears after the fourth of July, the last few fruits that haven’t already fallen to the ground look a lot like giant red flowers as we whiz past them in our cars. But don’t look too closely. You might hit one of those tires.

Kim Stone
Horticulturist

Late May 2009

2009-05-28T17:27:00.000-07:00

"Attention everyone. It's May and the spring wildflower season is over. Everyone please return to your air conditioned houses. There is nothing to see here."

I have heard variations of this seasonal death sentence countless times over the years, and my reaction to it is still the same as it has always been: it ain't over yet.

In the minds of many, the Sonoran desert spring is the season of goldpoppies, lupines, and owl's clover with warming days, cool nights, and the supressed memories of rock salt and studded snow tires. It's that short window of time when the desert wakes up and explodes in color, splattering itself onto Arizona Highways magazine covers and making the now lush, drive-by scenery through "the desert" look as disarmingly safe and enticing as a mountain meadow, as if Julie Andrews could appear at any moment. It's the season to take the kids for a hike with a reasonable chance of survival wearing only baseball caps and a few pints of water tucked into a fanny pack. This is what I call "Part One" of spring and it usually lasts from mid-February to mid-April. It's the first part of the Sonoran desert spring that is generally inviting and accessible, yet notoriously fickle with its flower show and highly dependent on well-timed fall and early winter rains.

Part 2 of the Sonoran Desert spring is far more dependable but it's not for the faint of heart, which is why so many people roll up their awnings and point their motorhomes towards Wisconsin and Michigan in April. The homing instinct to arrive in Grand Rapids in time to watch the snow melt has cheated many poor souls from ever experiencing the spectacular, albeit hotter half of our spring. While the first half is dominated by ephemerals and relatively small perennial plants, the second half is dominated by the flowering of the deserts larger elements, like yuccas, agaves, cacti, mesquites, both of our native species of palo verdes, and ironwoods. In other words, just about everything that didn't bloom in February, March, and mid April is now hard at it in late April and May, including saguaros.

Here is a short list, in ascending chronological order, of what common native plants to expect to flower exclusively (or nearly so) during Part Deux of spring in the environs of Boyce Thompson Arboretum.

April

Boyce Thompson hedgehog- Echinocereus boyce-thompsonii
Pincushion Mammillaria- Mammillaria grahamii
Buckhorn cholla- Cylindropuntia acanthocarpa
Engelmann prickly pear- Opuntia engelmannii
Blue palo verde- Parkinsonia florida
Soap tree yucca- Yucca elata
Banana yucca- Yucca baccata
Jojoba- Simmondsia chinensis

May

Native mesquite- Prosopis velutina
Catclaw- Acacia greggii
Foothill palo verde- Parkinsonia microphlla
Ironwood- Olneya tesota
Saguaro- Carnegiea gigantea
Chain fruit cholla- Cylindropuntia fulgida

In addition to these are several carryovers from the first half, including:

Fairy duster- Calliandra eriophylla
Flat top buckwheat- Eriogonum fasciculatum
Creosote- Larrea tridentata
Ocotillo- Fouquieria splendens

This was the best year for foothill palo verdes that I've seen since 2005; every hillside was covered in an unbroken sea of yellow in all directions, like being emersed in a low hanging sulfer fog. Foothill palo verdes have a light, chiffon-like yellow compared to the more saturated yellow of the earlier flowering blue palo verdes and they are the dominant tree on the hillsides surrounding the Arboretum. 2005 was also a great year for the prolific brittlebush which grows amongst the foothill palo verdes but flowers a month ealier, making that year even more spectacular than this year with an unbroken yellow colorfest for two solid months from April through May. Still, 2009 has been no slouch with ironwoods flowering as densely as I have ever seen them.

In the end, all superlatives used in the descriptions of wildflower displays are inherently subjective. What might be "mind-boggling" to me could be merely "spine-tingling" to someone else. The important thing is not to give up too early. Though summer is definitely knocking at our door, the desert still has a lot to give to those of us that are willing to put on a wide brim hat, carry quarts of water rather than pints, and, at the very least, give the desert a second chance.

Kim Stone
Horticulturist