(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, thousands of plants in 135 years, the story of the University of Arizona Herbarium.

(Shelley) So natural history collections are incredibly vital for documenting and understanding biodiversity.

(Tom) Arizona wines exist on the edge of what's possible.

(James) We like to showcase what the beauty is of this state.

It's interesting to figure out a new terroir.

(Tom) We'll meet the gallery owners of the South Tucson gem.

(Mel) This is where you talk about Tucson, and it being a magical space.

(Tom) And an in-depth look into the Desert Ironwood.

(Jack) So using an Ironwood as a centerpiece, you can plant other shrubs, cacti succulents in the vicinity, and it will create microclimates that will benefit those species as well.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

And today we're joining you from Herring Hall on the University of Arizona campus.

This one built originally as a gym in 1903.

It's the second oldest building on campus.

And over the years it's served many, many purposes.

It was actually home to Arizona Public Media when we first hit the airwaves of southern Arizona in 1959.

We moved to the Modern Languages building in the 60s, and the Herbarium moved in here in 2004.

Now, a herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens, some hundreds of years old, that are used for scientific research.

And in 2025, the University of Arizona Herbarium is celebrating its 135th anniversary.

(Shelley) A herbarium is a natural history museum.

We have collections of preserved plant specimens.

My name is Shelley McMahon, I am the Faculty Director of the University of Arizona Herbarium.

This herbarium was started before the university opened.

They hired a botanist, not a faculty member arrived, and he didn't have any material to use to teach the students.

So he basically drove around the area, getting to know the flora and making specimens, and preserving them.

It's the second oldest building on campus.

It was built in 1903.

It was originally built as the gym.

[ BIRDS CHIRPING ] So people have been documenting the diversity around them for millennia, really.

People wanted to understand what plants were edible, what plants were medicinal.

In Europe, you can go to some of the really old, famous herbaria and see specimens that are hundreds of years old.

The idea of documenting diversity through preserving actual specimens has been around for a long time.

[ STORAGE LOCKER OPENING ] Okay, so this is what a fully prepared herbarium specimen looks like.

We have a label which gives us information on what the species is.

It has a date when it was collected.

This is a museum piece and so each museum piece gets an accession number.

This number 439,329, so we have a lot of specimens in here.

We also have a little packet on each sheet and that allows us to store any bits and pieces that might fall off.

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist in the 1700s who looked at the way people were naming things.

In his time, there wasn't a system, so he developed the system that's just two words, a genus and a species.

The first one is the genus so that tells you what people think it's closely related to.

Cause members of a genus are all cousins, if you will.

And then the species is that one biological entity that's separate from the others.

Brittlebush is Encelia farinosa so it's in the Encelia genus.

And it actually, if you travel around and you see other Encelias you'll know that, oh yeah, that's related to our brittlebush.

Whereas if you just call the brittlebush, you wouldn't know anything about what it's related to.

(George) Hi, I am George Ferguson.

I'm the Collections Manager here at the University of Arizona Herbarium.

We're gonna demonstrate how the first steps in melting the plant after it's been collected.

(Shelley) The glue's a special glue, it's an archival glue.

We actually get it from bookbinders.

It will preserve the specimen for, how we anticipate, hundreds of years.

We also have special paper, It's non-acidic archival paper.

Also, a label has been printed with all of the really important information there.

And so one mounter will make a pile of alternating absorbent paper specimen and coated wax paper, taped up wax paper, and put the bricks on top when they're done for the day, and then the next day we can come out and unpack it all.

So natural history collections of which the herbarium is one are incredibly vital for documenting and understanding biodiversity.

Each object, it represents information that can be useful for so many different questions, and that's exciting to me, but each one of those has a story.

Just the fact that it's here, somebody had to be traveling on horseback through the mountains of the Sierra Madre in order to find that particular thing, preserve it in a way that was gonna make sure it didn't rot, and it got all the way back to some museum.

A-A-And the huge amount of effort it took, and still takes, to generate that kind of primary biological information is, it's inspiring to me.

So I think these objects that are in here are really precious.

When you're thinking about wine grape growing regions around the world, Arizona rarely comes to mind.

After all, we have heat waves and winter frost and most extreme of all monsoons during the harvest season that can literally transform the chemistry of a wine grape overnight.

Yet, Arizona winemakers are resilient, and the industry is booming.

♪ GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC We're about two miles west of the town of Elgin.

Started in 1990 with my folks.

I think there were only about five wineries in the state when we started back in '90.

At that time, the Elgin Road was effectively all dirt, and we named our vineyard "Buenas Suerte" because that's what the guys who helped us plant the vineyard said when he left on those last days.

Because he thought we were insane.

♪ GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC We planted 17 acres in '90, three of which were experimental, quote unquote.

By the mid 2000s, the industry really took off.

Sonoita itself has seen a real spurt of growth just in the last five or six years.

I think we've added six or seven new wineries, almost a winery a year.

The fact that we survived, yeah, maybe.

Gave them a little hope, I don't know.

But we are basically honing down not only what does well in Arizona, but what does well on this particular property.

We're getting there.

We're slowly but surely getting there.

Still, yeah.

We're at Buhl Memorial Vineyard in the Kansas settlement region just south of Willcox, generally due east of Tucson.

So you're coming down I-10 and you're going through Benson and then you end up coming to the crest of the Sulfur Springs Valley and it opens up in front of you.

You see the Playa, you see Dos Cabezas Mountain.

Depending on the season, you know, you've got the ocotillos blooming off the side of the highway and the wildflowers.

It can be colorful in the desert.

♪ ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC ♪ MEXICAN CORRIDOS MUSIC (Jesse) Marc and Vineyards took ownership of Buhl Memorial Vineyard in 2014 and brought me in to manage it.

I manage a crew of anywhere from 10 to 26 people at this point and we'll either have one or two picking crews going at one time.

So our target to harvest wine grapes here is generally the third, fourth week of July through the month of August, maybe into September a little bit, which is the monsoon season.

So that creates challenges because you're trying to get the fruit at the right chemistry.

The sugars are increasing every day, the acid's falling, so you want to hit that balance.

The climatic extremes here in Arizona, is-it puts us farming on the edge of what's possible.

It gets warm pretty quick after bud break and we don't have a terribly early bud break either, so you have a compressed season.

So everything that you might have eight weeks to do in France, somewhere you might have four weeks or five at the most here.

It is very hot and at times we get heat waves, but it's not necessarily the dryness that we have to battle here.

We can irrigate and we don't use much water to keep these vines happy, but we get too much rain and sometimes during the monsoon, it makes a lot of challenges.

We do a lot of work in the vineyards to keep each cluster in a nice little well-ventilated microclimate behind the leaves and avoiding sunburn as well as a concern, so it's again striking that balance.

You want varietal correctness to shine through and then show some of the terroir, so that's the soil, the uniqueness of the place.

That includes the people farming it, that includes the climate, everything that you can't replicate anywhere else in the world, but this one spot.

When bins are full, we get them back to the shop, get them weighed, documented and loaded into the refrigerated truck to cool them down and hold them safe until they can be transported to the winery.

♪ ACOUSTIC GUITAR MUSIC (James) Right now at the winery, it's our busiest time of year.

We are taking the grapes we're picking and right now we're turning those grapes into wine.

We have done about 50 tons worth of grapes so far.

There's pressing, there's de-stemming, there's inoculations with yeast.

And ultimately it's just this two-month period of just where we transform this entire year's worth of work into a product that we can share with people.

(Server) Start you with the Calibre Grenache.

This is a fruit-forward wine.

We have two vintages that are in different stages, so we age our wines for two years, our red wines.

We put it in a barrel, it needs to age, it needs to get some time to refine the tans, but also just to give more character and complexity to the wines as well.

We make our wines right on the boundary of failure and greatness.

There's a safe route you can take and make really marketable wines that are good, but as a winemaker we want to build stuff that's super complex and to do that takes lots of risk.

That's kind of where we're at right now, is just kind of figuring out where we are, where we stand, how we can make the best wine we can possibly.

The idea is to kind of transform people to a different vision of what wine tasting is.

You know, in my opinion, this is Arizona.

We are outside most of the time.

It's beautiful weather most of the time.

Even when it's not beautiful weather, when it's raining, that's beautiful weather for an Arizonan.

We like to kind of showcase what the beauty is of this state.

It's interesting to figure out a new terroir for a region that hasn't really established it yet.

I guess that's my job as a winemaker to help do that.

♪ GUITAR MUSIC (Kent) There's no question that you can see the difference in vintage, you know, comparisons based on the weather that we've gotten and which obviously involves monsoon moisture.

So yeah, the more intense the monsoon, generally speaking, the less fruit-driven our wines are.

This place is not about high-end, uppity stuff.

We're trying to be very welcoming and hope people enjoy the scenery and the wine in a very relaxed and comfortable setting.

Yeah, and pretty too.

So yeah.

(James) Wine is so complex if it's done well.

And you can sit there and you can ponder it, you can think about it.

As you sit there and sip it and you're like, "Wow, this wine's from Arizona," and you like it, you've never had before, well, you can glean that, you know, maybe there's something out there besides the status quo, right?

There's something that's beyond your knowledge that makes it interesting.

And ultimately, that's what wine is about.

It's all about exploring and trying different things.

(Kent) You can taste the struggle.

Yeah, you can taste the struggle.

♪ GENTLE GUITAR MUSIC Mel and Melissa Dominguez opened Galeria Mitotera back in 2018 as a place to celebrate an uplift ChicanX culture and artist of color.

Next, see how the passion they have for local art is building community.

(Mel) We're in the city of South Tucson, and we're at Galeria Mitotera, right across the street from Mi Nidito [ TRAFFIC SOUNDS ] (Melissa) The city of South Tucson is a pueblo within the city, as they call it.

We're a one square mile city.

We have our own city council, our own mayor, and our own city manager Public works, all of that.

♪ LO-FI MUSIC (Melissa) The mission of Galeria Mitotera is really to inspire, uplift and support artists of color within our community And we want it to be a safe space for artists of color, for queer artists, to to be able to talk to and grow with artists that they can identify with.

(Melissa) Indian born American Made Three is a curated show by our friend and artist David Moreno from Pascua Yaqui and David came to us pre-pandemic and asked us if we could host the show here.

(David) I just wanted a venue to host Native American artists just to show and let other Native Americans have a place to to exhibit their artwork and hopefully get some recognition.

(Melissa) We are in an Indigenous community, there's so much rich history in the city of South Tucson And to have a show like this of all Indigenous artists and makers is really important for this space.

(Mel) I was thinking, what if we did a big design like on the floor, like to create like a in Spanish, they call them alfombristas and they use like pedals and like sawdust that tinted different colors to make the design.

I've worked with a lot of communities and a lot of schools, and a lot of times I would be called back to the city of South Tucson, and what I was realizing in those callbacks was that a lot of the students and the youth around this area, sometimes they don't get to experience a lot of the performing arts or like visual arts or just a lot of times get to know some of the artists that live in their neighborhood.

So I come from East L.A. and that was pretty much our foundation was to seek the artists from within the community and lift them up.

And so I came to the city of Tucson with that.

That one that says, you are beautiful in Yoeme So it's, I love what he did and he is so shy He's a very shy artist And he called me and he's like, Melissa I'm not going to get the piece ready for the show And I said, I don't accept that.

Melissa would always tell me about how fantastic Tucson was, and I was like, when I went there, all I heard was crickets or something, you know?

And I didn't.

I didn't get it in 1997 I didn't get it because downtown Tucson isn't what it is today.

I told Mel, I said "I'm done I really want to go back to Tucson."

And and Mel was like, "Okay, let's do it."

I can't live without her.

Is that why?

Yeah, I'm like, "I better go with you."

♪ LO-FI MUSIC (Melissa) Mel had been painting out of our home, and as Mel's art grew, art career kept growing here.

Folks would ask to come and see Mel's work in the studio, but it was kind of uncomfortable having strangers in our house.

That kind of made us fast track the idea into finding a space.

♪ LO-FI MUSIC (David) Well, when I graduated from art school and came and tried to approach galleries, it was very, very difficult.

I mean, there was hardly any any galleries on this side of town.

That would even take you serious and even less on the on the east side.

(Melissa) When we moved here from Los Angeles.

Mel struggled making that connection with galleries here.

And Mel's work didn't really identify sometimes with what the gallery owners were wanting to show.

We still, in the background saw that need for artists of color to be able to break through or to feel like they could show their work because it should have been a space that already existed.

♪ ALTERNATIVE MUSIC (Mel) But this is where you talk about Tucson and it being a magical space.

This is where when you say things like that, like, where can we have a space to to uplift other artists and where can we do this where we identify with those folks?

And then you put that on a universe in the city of South Tucson.

Magic happens like it's so wild.

♪ ALTERNATIVE MUSIC ♪ (Tom) To see a Spanish language translation of that last story and many others from our archives, as well as Spanish language news articles from our news team, check out our new webpage, azpm.org/espanol As part of our recurring series on recommended plants for this region, we hear about the Ironwood, like the one in the passageway behind me, or the one in my yard that I've been trimming, and I still have thorns and many fingers from doing that.

As I found out, the Ironwood is a tough but essential tree for the Sonoran Desert.

As you'll see, it provides shade, habitat, and nutrition for plants and animals.

[birds chirping] (Jack) This is the Ironwood Tree and it's scientific name is Olneya Tesota.

It's really one of the most important species in the Sonoran Desert.

It's what we'd call a keystone species.

The range of ironwood matches up almost perfectly with the extent of the Sonoran Desert so it's a real indicator that you are in the Sonoran Desert.

It's a tree that is in the Bean family similar to Mesquite or Palo Verde.

The nice thing about trees in the bean family is they actually have a bacteria that lives in their roots, that takes atmospheric nitrogen and turns it into plant-available fertilizer.

So not only does this tree, sort of, create its own fertilizer, every time it drops leaves, shed roots, drops flowers or beans, that nitrogen is seeping into the soil around it and so other plants are going to thrive.

Additionally, trees like ironwood, mesquite have these deep roots that pull moisture up from a deeper strata of the soil and bring it up closer to the surface which makes it available for other species.

And then you know perhaps most importantly in the Sonoran Desert it's evergreen so it provides some year-round shade during the hot part of the summer and that canopy is going to mitigate extremes of cold or heat so plants are able to thrive around it that might not be able to thrive in open spaces.

So a tree like an ironwood creates what I like to call an island of fertility where you're going to have a little bit of higher biodiversity right in immediate proximity to the species.

This massive ironwood is possibly hundreds of years old.

In fact it was here before this entire plaza was built and the designers built this whole structure around it and one of the great things about a large lightly pruned ironwood like this is that it creates such an oasis for other species, insects and animals to thrive.

If you want to envision the flowers they look a little bit like your standard garden pea or bean plant that you might have in a veggie garden.

It's going to have that same shape.

The flowers are kind of lavender and white.

They're actually incredibly delicate and incredibly lovely and that's one of the great things about so many of these desert species.

They can seem so intimidating and tough at first but when they put on that floral display they're absolutely stunning, and this is a tree that's going to bloom kind of in the late spring early summer so it blooms during that period of time where everything's so hot so dry and these flowers really kind of alleviate that early summer heat.

These beans are an important food source for wildlife in this area and they've also been eaten by humans for thousands of years.

They're really good if you boil them to remove the tannins and then you can roast them and their flavor is quite a bit like peanuts.

(Jack) This is a fantastic tree for urban environments for a number of reasons.

One, it's incredibly drought and heat tolerant.

Our urban spaces tend to have a lot of reflected heat from concrete, pavement, metal, etc.

This tree is going to have no problem with that.

It's not going to tax your water bill substantially because it It's possible they can reach anywhere between 20 to 30 feet high and wide.

So the first thing to do is really envision the long-term growth of this tree and try and plant it in an appropriate location.

That will necessitate significantly less pruning.

Over pruning can be problematic because it can make trees heavier at the top and more prone to blowing over during monsoon storms.

Additionaly you're going to lose a lot of that shade and wildlife value that makes it such a great tree in the first place.

[ BIRDS CHIRPING ] There are a number of trees worldwide that have the common name ironwood and one of the things they all share in common is that their wood is incredibly dense.

So I've read that you know essentially a foot section of mature ironwood trunk can weigh in the neighborhood of 80 pounds.

The wood is actually so heavy that it will sink in water It's not buoyant at all.

So the name is really apt to describe the incredible density of this wood.

It's another reason not to prune.

You're going to dull a saw on this thing very quickly.

[ BIRDS CHIRPING ] I like the calming effect that natural ecosystems have on every human nervous system.

I think one of my favorite things is actually taking other people out into the desert or into our Sky Island mountain ranges and really just watching sort of the weight of the world kind of wash off of them.

It's obviously been you know heavily documented and scientifically proven at this point that we as human beings really do benefit mentally and I think many people would say spiritually from access to and presence in nature.

(Tom) If you have questions for Jack Dash about what to plant in your yard, be sure to mark your calendar.

On April 19th, we'll be hosting Arizona Illustrated Thriving in the Desert, Sustainable Landscaping for Southern Arizona at the Environmental and Natural Resources Building on the University of Arizona campus from 1 to 2.30.

For more information and to reserve your spot, go to azpm.org/plants Thanks for joining us for Arizona Illustrated.

From here at Herring Hall, AZPM's first home on the University of Arizona campus, I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you again next week.

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