Ran across this article on the New York Times web-site about the Mission Garden's here in Tucson. This is just half of the first page of the on-line article (the article takes up 4 pages).
Seeds of an Era Long Gone
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
THE lost pueblito of Tucson is a Spanish outpost of Pima Indians, soldiers and ranchers on the banks of the Santa Cruz River. On a clear, sunny fall day (which could be just about any day in the desert), Jesús Manuel García Yánez will sometimes look for the missing settlement from the top of a black volcanic heap that the locals call A Mountain, after the gigantic concrete letter on the side.
In a straightforward sense, Mr. García, 44, is a Mexican ecologist. More broadly, though, he is a self-appointed emissary from the land once known as Pimería Alta, an interpreter of its culture, plants and people.
He pointed to the west. Picture the Presidio of San Agustín de Tucson right there, a 12-foot-high adobe bulwark against Apache marauders. Across the acequias, or old irrigation ditches, would be the mission and convent, which rose after the Jesuit padre Eusebio Francisco Kino visited in the 1690s.
What obscured the vista on this day, as it has for the last 50 years, was the sprawl of modern Tucson and its half million residents. The presidio had yielded to the glass office towers of downtown. The mission and convent had crumbled and become a municipal dump.
“It’s a search for what Tucson used to be,” Mr. García said. “Along the Santa Cruz River, there was a belt of cottonwoods and a mesquite forest. But that’s gone. The water table dropped. For newer generations to try to see that is almost impossible.”
Except for one thing. Mr. García waved down to the flood plain and a new adobe wall that formed a tidy square. Inside was a huerta, a small orchard of the same fruit trees that Padre Kino and his fellow missionaries brought with them from the Mediterranean.
These trees were no mirage: apricots, peaches, quinces, figs, pears, limas (or sweet limes) and pomegranates. Along with a civic group called Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace, Mr. García helped to plant the Mission Garden in March with specimens he scouted himself.
He had found the trees growing next to leaky troughs at border ranches and in the tiny Tucson backyards of elderly Hispanic ladies. How long has that quince been there, he would ask, and what is its story?
“When I became involved about 8 to 10 years ago,” he said, “it dawned on me that Tucson was a sleepy Mexican town like the Mexican towns in Sonora. If you don’t travel to Mexico, you can’t picture what that was.”
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