Desert Botanical Garden – A Phoenix Gem
Most people automatically associate the word ‘desert’ with two things – aridity and searing heat. The first is correct and any place with less than 10 inches (250 mm.) of rain annually is technically a desert. However, the second is not. Of fourteen named deserts in North America, only three are considered ‘hot’ – the Chihuahuan, the Sonoran and the Mojave. I have previously written about the Chihuahuan in this post from White Sands NP in New Mexico and this one on the El Chepe train ride from the city of Chihuahua to Copper Canyon, Mexico. Alison and I visited the Mojave desert a few years back and I wrote about it in this post from Death Valley and another from Joshua Tree NP. However, although I’ve been in it many times, I have never written anything about the Sonoran Desert. That is about to be rectified as Alison and I visit a number of national parks and monuments in the Arizona portion of this huge desert that stretches all the way from central Arizona almost to the tip to Baja California. It is the only North American desert that has substantial sea frontage which has created a variety of plants that are unique to the Sonoran Desert, most notably the saguaro and organ pipe cacti. In this post I am going to embark on a crash course on the Sonoran Desert cacti by visiting the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. Come along and learn more about this amazing biosphere.
History of Desert Botanical Garden
In the 1930’s Phoenix was a growing, but still small southwestern city of less than 50,000 inhabitants. The most important thing for developers was getting access to water for the golf courses, parks and lawns that were growing up everywhere around the Arizona canal system that was essential to the creation of Scottsdale, Glendale and other Valley of the Sun communities. Water was on everybody’s mind and almost nobody thought about the native flora that thrived in the near absence of that supposed vital aspect of life. That is except for Swedish botanist Gustaf Starck and a small group of individuals who shared his belief that the natural landscape of the Phoenix area was not something to be stripped away and replaced by water sucking grasses and other foreign invaders. In 1939 the Desert Botanical Garden was founded by that group as a non-profit organization to preserve and showcase the natural flora of the Sonoran Desert. Eighty-five years later the garden now comprises 140 acres with five different looped trails that feature over 50,000 specimens including the largest collection of Sonoran Desert cacti in the world.
This map of the Desert Botanical Garden shows the Desert Discovery Loop trail from which three other loop trails branch out. The fifth trail, the Desert Wildflower Loop, is on its own and I recommend doing it last after completing the other four. The reason for that is that after paying your admission fee, which you can do in advance online here, you should take one of the guided tours that are included in the admission price. These last an hour and will take you around the Desert Discovery Loop after which you can explore the other four loops on your own. The tours are limited to 15 people and go at 10 and 11 AM and 1PM. You don’t need to book these in advance. If there are more than fifteen people at any given time they will simply add another guide which happened during our visit. One tour went in one direction and ours in another.
The tour guides or docents are all volunteers and very conscious of making sure their guests stay hydrated during the tour. It wasn’t really an issue on the day we visited, but apparently the day before, some little guy passed out after not drinking enough water on a very hot afternoon. The plants might not need it, but we do.
The main thing I got out of my visit was the chance to see a great number of species, cacti and others, that you probably wouldn’t encounter on your own in the Sonoran Desert. I say this based on our later visits to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Saguaro National Park. Yes, we saw lots of saguaros, organ pipes, prickly pears, barrels and chollas, but nothing like the variety of cacti we saw in the Desert Botanical Garden. But just in case your not getting out into the Sonoran Desert on your own here are a few photos of what I would call typical Sonoran Desert flora – saguaro, barrel and several varieties of cholla along with mesquite and creosote bush.
And here is an Organ Pipe cactus of which we will see a lot more in the next post.
Ok, now let’s take a look at some of the less likely to be seen specimens starting with the largest cactus in the world, the giant Mexican cardon. These can grow as tall as 60 feet (18 metres) and weigh as much as 25 tons. A specimen like this one is well over 100 years old and the largest have life spans measured in centuries.
Readers of this website may recall that we encountered another species of cardon in the Atacama Desert in Chile where the wood (yes some cacti have wooden interiors) was used in place of the trees that are too wimpy to grow there.
Our next plant is not a cactus, but a tree although you might be fooled into thinking otherwise. This is a boojum tree, named after a mythical creature from Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark which is never described, and has driven scholars mad trying to make sense of what is meant to be nonsense. Described as an upside down carrot with spines, this native of Baja California must surely rival the baobab as the weirdest tree in the world.
Did you know that not all cacti have spines? Neither did I until read the description of this totem pole cactus, which is also a native of Mexico and not to be found in the wild in Arizona. Apparently the name comes from the unusual shapes that can form on its branches which reminded some people of the figures on a totem pole.
Another large cactus which decidedly has spines, is the toothpick cactus which is not a native of the Sonoran Desert, but rather Argentina.
Not all of the cacti at Desert Botanical garden are tall, in fact, many are ground dwellers such as this crested mammillaria which has been in this same spot since Desert Botanical Garden opened in 1939.
Another ground dweller is the aptly named Mother-of-Hundreds. Both this species and the one above are commonly sold as house plants, but they have a completely different look as a wild plant.
Perhaps the most aptly named of all the cacti at Desert Botanical Garden is the octopus cactus. I don’t need to explain why.
There are over 200 species of prickly pear cactus in the world. With the exception of one species, cacti are only native to the western hemisphere, but the prickly pear is now found in Africa, Australia and around the Mediterranean. It is my favourite cactus because of delicious nopales the Mexicans make from their pads. Here I am with Victor Romagnoli in Cacaxtla a few years ago enjoying one fresh off the grill of a local vendor.
Prickly pears are well represented at the Desert Botanical Garden. This is the pretty purple variety, a Sonoran Desert native which is now showing up more and more in landscaping projects in the Phoenix area and elsewhere. I don’t recall seeing these on multiple previous visits to the city, but in 2024 they seem to be everywhere.
Another striking prickly pear is the so called ‘cowboy whiskers’ which refers to the tiny whisker-like glochids that replace true spines in many prickly pear species. Lest you think they are cute and want to rub them like real whiskers, you’ll spend weeks trying to get them off your hands. Here the adage ‘look, but don’t touch’ is very accurate.
Now if you want real spines look no further than the black-spined prickly pear. Can you imagine accidentally falling into that? Just thinking about it creeps me out.
A much smaller family of cacti are the cholla, which has an undeserved reputation as an aggressive plant that will ‘jump’ at any person or animal passing close by and attach a piece of itself to that unfortunate creature. I can attest from being an eye witness on an Arizona golf course years ago that the spines will go right through the bottom of a golf shoe to the great dismay of a member of our foursome who stepped on what he thought was just a piece of bark.
This is the deceptively named red teddy bear cholla with which you would never want to cuddle up to. What the chollas really do, rather than jump, is to have parts of them that detach very easily. Even a light wind or a nearby footstep can cause this to happen and then they hope to hitchhike their way to a new location and start a new family of teddy bears. It’s not unusual to see coyotes with bits of cholla stuck to their tails.
If you were to visit the Desert Botanical Garden between February and June you would see a completely different sight than what Alison and I were seeing in November. Late winter and spring is the blooming season for most cacti species in the garden along with a host of other desert flowers and shrubs. Still there were a few indications of blooms to come such as on these barrel cacti.
The last cactus I’m going to feature is a saguaro, but as the docent explained, a 1 in 20,000 variety. This saguaro is a cristate mutation, meaning it has developed a ‘crest’ and as this National Park Service bulletin states, nobody knows why. In the days succeeding our visit to the Desert Botanical Garden we saw literally thousands more wild saguaros and never saw another one with a crest.
Aside from admiring and learning about the flora at the Desert Botanical Garden, there are other reasons to visit. On the Plants and People of the Sonoran Desert Trail there are a number of places where you can learn the ways the Indigenous people who once inhabited the area interacted with what at first glance would appear to be a very inhospitable habitat.
One of those groups were the Akimel O’odham, mistakenly called the Pima people by the Spanish when they first encountered them in the 16th century. This is a recreation of a traditional dwelling which would have been one of a number in an Akimel O’odham village. Akimel translates as ‘of the river’ and this branch of the O’odham people were building canals and waterways long before the Europeans arrived. You will find a watery oasis on the Plants and People Trail that simulates an environment very similar to what these early Arizona people would have created in what is now the city of Phoenix.
This is a communal cucina where the women would prepare the meals for the villagers which, aside from the beans, corn and squash that they cultivated might include a variety of cacti and agave and even be accompanied by a wine made from saguaro fruit.
Another name the Spanish gave to the O’odham people who also include the Tohono O’odham or people of the desert, was the Papago, which is the name given to the small mesa that overlooks the Desert Botanical Gardens.
There is much more I could write about the Desert Botanical Gardens, but I think I have hit the highlights which for me were the cacti of the Sonoran Desert.
In the next post Alison and I will traverse the Tohono O’odham lands on the way to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Hope you’ll join us.