(Mary) Coming up on State of the Arts, Earth Week and nature reflected in art.

Organic materials bridge life and death, and a study of water.

All next on State of the Arts.

It's Earth Week, and we're bringing you a collection of stories inspired by nature and the arts.

I'm your host Mary Paul.

We begin here in Tucson at a beloved garden that brings together a beautiful collection of living things.

Plants and butterflies may be the main attraction, but Tucson Botanical Gardens offers even more.

Having just celebrated its 50th anniversary, it's a place where nature, art, science and culture intertwine.

We take a look at this oasis in the heart of Tucson.

♪ SOFT PIANO (Adam) This is one of the few places in town with this much shade, this verdant canopy.

The easiest way to describe my job is I'm in charge of the plants and keeping them happy and healthy.

One of the things that sets us apart from a lot of our sister gardens is that we are an organic based botanical garden.

So we do not use any petrochemicals.

We do our best to not use pesticides.

We try to keep as much of a balanced ecosystem as we can.

(Michelle) The mission of the gardens is to connect people with plants and nature through art, science, history and culture.

I started at the gardens back in 2002 when the gardens only had about 700 members and a staff of about 15.

Today we're at about 6,200 households.

In fact, I remember back in the old days, their horticultural budget was about $700 a year.

We're happy to celebrate this year, our 50th anniversary.

What we're celebrating is the day that the city of Tucson turned over the deed of the property to the organization, the Tucson Botanical Gardens.

But the story of the founding of the garden started many years before that with Harrison Yocum who started the club, the Tucson Botanical Garden Club, and then the Porter family whose property we're sitting on.

In 1939, Bernice and Rutger Porter built this little house on this property.

Mr.

Porter was one of Tucson's first nursery owners.

And so many of the trees that you see in Tucson were planted by Rutger Porter.

Bernice was a naturalist.

She studied biology.

So it was a marriage kind of made in heaven.

Mr.

Porter had passed away and Mrs.

Porter had always dreamed of the garden being a botanical garden for the public.

Half of this garden is really historical, and we keep it that way.

But there's also a beautiful herb garden.

Of course, we have our Cox Butterfly and Orchid Pavilion, the Cactus and Succulent Garden.

The most beloved garden is our Barrio Garden.

It's a typical Mexican backyard garden.

We also have a Zen Garden.

In May of 2024, the gardens opened the Great Garden Express Railroad.

And then we have a little sensory romanas that really give you little pockets.

It just gives you a real sense of immersion into that space.

We also house four galleries with rotating exhibits.

We have a cafe on site.

(Adam) This is our new Frida's Garden.

At the time she was creating her famous garden in Casa Azul, formal plantings were usually plants from Europe and not from Mexico particularly, or even the Americas in general.

So she collected some plants from South America and Mexico for her space, and so that's what we've done in that space as well.

(Michelle) The first traveling exhibit called Nature Connects, it was a Lego exhibit.

That was totally transformed, the gardens with a thousand new members, bringing in people who had typically never thought about entering a botanical garden.

And I've always said that that's a bit of our job.

It's very easy to attract naturalists and gardeners to a garden, but how do we get those people that are not naturalists and are not horticulturalists or are not gardeners to become passionate about gardens and about nature specifically?

(Michael) We're in the Butterfly Magic exhibit.

This is the only and first tropical butterfly exhibit in southern Arizona.

We've been here since 2004, so this is our 21st year.

We house over our season about 300 to 400 butterflies at any given time.

They're all from the tropics, so Costa Rica, Malaysia, different parts of southern Africa.

The other thing that we do is try and educate people about conservation and get people interested in essentially how these species should be protected in their native habitats.

The people that we purchase from are essentially putting that money back into communities and also into conservation efforts.

(John) Well, we're in an old janitor's closet that's been converted to our train repair room.

The weather here has been very harsh on our trains.

We've burned out a number of engines over the summer.

I was always good with my hands, so I was a trauma surgeon, very unrelated.

(Katie) If you're here exploring the Botanical Gardens and you see a butterfly or a bird or a lizard that fascinates you and you want to learn more, we will likely have the programming that can help you discover more about anything that your eyes can see here at the gardens.

(Laura) One of the programs that we do here is Garden Story Time.

It's geared for preschool kids, but all ages are welcome.

We have a volunteer who is a professional puppeteer, so we have puppets to help us tell the stories.

(Philippa) I work with a range of different populations.

The one common theme amongst those populations is that they have some type of therapeutic need, whether that is recovering from an illness or coping with a new life circumstance or dealing with a lifelong disability.

I work with those populations to accomplish goals that improve their quality of life and overall level of independence in a garden setting.

So we're planting, we're harvesting, we're cooking the food.

They're growing plants from seed all the way to maturity, and in the process of doing all those activities, they're working on enhancing their fine and gross motor skills, boosting their ability to communicate, increasing their self-confidence.

This has been going on since the 80s, and it's been passed along to various horticultural therapists over the years, and so I luckily got this position (Adam) We're five and a half acres, but we feel so much bigger than that because you come into 20-plus different spaces while you're in this garden.

(Michelle) You can always tell the story of plants in a broader, deeper sense by connecting it to other things in the world.

(Mary) American designer and sculptor Maya Lin is renowned for her design of the Vietnam War Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Perhaps lesser known are her large-scale projects inspired by the natural environment, particularly water.

This next story features an exhibit that showcases Lin's work on the Chesapeake Bay.

♪ MAJESTIC MUSIC I'm Melissa Messina, and I am the guest curator of Maya Lin, A Study of Water.

This was a perfect combination, right?

I mean, Maya Lin, you don't get a much bigger name than that, and the work is so incredibly important, and I think it's important to have that conversation here.

As a guest curator, I'm constantly asking questions.

Who is your audience?

What do people want to see?

My role was really to bring all sides together and have a conversation about what is possible.

Maya Lin's representations of water, it's something that she's been interested in and focused on for much of her career, so it seemed like a really natural fit to start from there and create an exhibition that really looked at all of her representations of water.

♪ MAGESTIC MUSIC [ APPLAUSE ] (Maya) I have been preoccupied with and obsessed with water for at least 30 years, and I don't quite know why.

Maybe there's something that just drew me to water.

I'm very committed and caring.

Environmentalist in water is the lifeblood of our planet and of us.

The Chesapeake Bay has played a very large part in many of minds, in studio sculptures, and people have asked, "Well, why the Chesapeake?"

From an ecological point of view, it is one of the most critically important waterways in this country.

It is so beautiful as a form.

I love the Chesapeake.

It's called "Folding the Chesapeake," and it's made out of industrial glass marbles.

♪ FAST PIANO I do like to ground you with what is right outside your front door in the natural world, and I'm trying to capture in the mediums sort of a reflectivity, which is so much a part of water.

And so when the sun hits it at certain times of day, it almost, it's like a light switch went on.

♪ PIANO We just went out to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and looked at oyster restoration.

Oysters play a big part.

Those oyster reefs could have significant protection for our coastal lands.

These are huge boons for both climate change mitigation, storm surge, as well as cleaning the bay and bringing back biodiversity.

Blue carbon habitats may stand alone as the most efficient biological reservoirs of stored carbon, so you are here and the Chesapeake Bay becomes a huge solution to climate change.

If we rethink our farming, rethink the soils, rethink protection of the wetlands, because wetlands sequester three times as much carbon as a tropical forest.

♪ GRANDEOUS MUSIC How does a wave begin and end?

So the piece that you'll see here is called "Flow," and it became two-by-four landscape, and it actually can't make up its mind if it's a hill or a cresting wave, but that's sort of the genesis, and I love the ambiguity.

From the front, it looks like a cresting wave.

From the back, it felt like a hill.

Artists need to create on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy, and I have been finding a lot of my time being focused much more on climate change, obsessed with how quickly we are losing the ice in the glaciers.

Scientists are saying the thickness is disappearing, so it's going to melt a lot quicker now because it's so much thinner than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and it's led to a series of works.

So the uppermost level is where we're at today, and then the thinness, of course, expresses the vulnerability due to the fact that we're eating away, the water's eating away at these ice areas from beneath.

I realized I needed to deal with what we're losing, especially stuff you don't even realize is disappearing.

The species we will lose if we do not take action.

So it's just a wake-up call and a call to action.

♪ INTENSE CELLO How can I get you to connect to nature in a different way?

Go to the website, explore a history of the world.

There's thousands of ecological histories, personal memories, and there are in-depth timelines.

There's over 100 entries, charts, and ecological history of your bay.

What our ecological histories try to do is get you to understand massive abundance, what's missing, not to depress you, but almost weave you in awe of what nature can hold.

Nature's resilient, and if you give it a chance, it comes back.

And so there's a whole echo throughout the timelines of that arc.

Nature is incredibly strong.

We're just not giving it any chance to come back.

For me, it was always about, can we just think differently about this?

Can we just put it in a perspective that kind of says, this is fixable.

This is doable.

We could all do something.

We could make a difference here.

♪ INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC (Mary) For many, a creative practice can promote healing.

After a life-altering surgery, Rob Hoffman was able to find peace in the art of bonsai.

Today, more than a decade later, he continues to bring this art form into his daily life.

♪ WISTFUL MUSIC (Rob) Bonsai is a really great hobby to get into.

it's helped me with patience.

It's helped me find my artistic eye.

It's really done quite a lot for me, and anymore, it's not even like a hobby to me.

It's more like a lifestyle.

I discovered bonsai through my wife.

I had my leg amputated, obviously, about 12 years ago.

It was more of a rough process than I thought it would be.

I kind of got down the dumps a little bit, and she wanted to get me something that would kind of keep my mind off of it.

She bought me a little juniper from Home Depot or Costco or something like that.

I just kind of fell in love with it.

It actually got me up, because I was bedridden for about a year and a half.

It got me up and wanted me to learn about it.

I didn't want it to die.

I started to get on the computer and look how to take care of it.

From that one little tree, now I got all this.

♪ SOOTHING MUSIC Bonsai is not a very specific thing.

There's very many different characteristics and aspects of it.

This is a black pine.

I probably have 75% of my trees are probably black pines.

They're by far my favorite.

You can do so much with them in a short amount of time.

In tricks and tips and stuff, things that I do differently, not really, but black pines are pretty much my favorite tree to work on.

I like working on a lot of different stuff.

I wouldn't say there's actually a certain type of trademark that I have.

For me, it's more about just showing what you've done, what you can do to a tree, how nice you can make it.

It's not so much about...and don't get me wrong, I'm a very competitive person, but when it comes to this, to me it doesn't seem like it should be so competitive.

It should be more thought-provoking.

When you see a tree, it should make you feel something.

That's kind of where I'm at.

I'd rather do that than try to win an award.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's fun to win an award, but I'm not so much into the competitive aspect of it.

I never really taught that much.

I guess I do it work a little bit, but when I started my business and I started teaching, I found out that I really, really enjoyed doing it.

It's fun to go over things with people and get the confidence to do it, because with Bonsai, a lot of it is about confidence.

You know, you buy a tree and then you've got to cut half of it off.

It's kind of daunting to the first-time user, you know.

It's hard to do, but once you start working on trees and putting your hands on them, it makes it so much easier to work with people, go to clubs, do workshops.

It builds your confidence to be able to work on your trees, because just starting off, it's often pretty hard to work on your own tree, you know.

Most of the time, and I'll say this kind of easily, but most of the time, people are going to kill their first tree.

It's just going to happen.

You learn from your mistakes, so it's kind of the process.

I don't know hardly anyone that's been in Bonsai for a long time that still has their first tree.

I mean, there might be a few out there, but it's pretty rare.

It's pretty amazing.

It gets me to travel across the country and meet wonderful people.

It's really like-minded people, people that are artistic and people that, you know, enjoy nature.

It's a great hobby to get into.

(Mary) Interdisciplinary creator, Abbey Bell Bell, has a deep appreciation for nature and a love for all creatures living or dead.

Abbey sees the natural beauty all around us.

Nature calls to her and she listens.

Her artistic practice casts a wide net, but her main focus is organic arrangements with simple taxidermy animals.

[ CLIPPERS SNAP ] (Abbey) I use organic materials in my art because I think that there's a lot of beauty and interesting elements in nature, and building something that looks organic but isn't, but like putting it together in a way that looks natural, I think is really interesting and beautiful.

So I do a couple different things with the organic materials that I collect.

I make these intricate arrangements, and then I also do like jewelry.

When I'm making the arrangements in the jewelry, it's actually really cathartic.

I don't really think about anything, and that's probably why I like it so much.

It's very meticulous.

I don't have to focus on anything but what I'm working on, and I actually love that my brain's blank during that time.

It's very relaxing.

I love every kind of art, and I will dabble in pretty much anything.

I really try to have a nice dichotomy in my work.

I'm pushing myself a lot further, and I think that my confidence in my art does show through.

It's like a relationship that never stops giving, you know?

The more I pour into it, the more it gives me.

Turn around, buddy.

Maybe I'll give him a nut.

'Scuse me.

Thank you.

This is Porky.

He is my 10-year-old Amazon parrot.

He turns 11 May 27th.

He's a little ham.

He loves the camera, apparently.

He's not bothered.

So yeah, we have Porky.

I have a bearded dragon.

He's 14 years old.

His name is Viserion.

I have a ball python.

His name is Slithers.

He's six.

So as a child, my grandma did buy me a lot of different exotic animals.

And then as a teenager, I worked at a pet store for the better part of like two years, and I was a fish and reptile person.

But there was also birds, and you know, I would work closely with these animals every day, and I just saw that there was more to them than people thought.

You know, there's an intelligence there that's like very interesting.

The focus of my art is like simple taxidermy.

I collect things from hiking or just from my family farm or even in my own garden.

I have bees from my garden.

They're quite small.

They're green iridescent bees.

Those are like a rare one.

I have turtle feet, a jar of Porky's feathers, which I put into some stuff, a tiny little whole duck.

And he's from the South Shore Yacht Club.

And I've been collecting like dead bugs and wasp nests.

And you know, even before I knew that people appreciated them, I think that it's just something I've always loved.

I've always loved animals.

And it's just been something I've always been curious about.

And knowing that other people appreciate it too is really special to me.

I think about honoring each animal the whole time that I'm taking care of them or processing them.

It's preserving them in a way that I think suits them the best so that they can be admired for long after they've existed.

Anything that makes you think about it a little bit, like it looks normal to your eye when you're first looking at it, but then when you look a little deeper, it conveys thought.

In today's world, everything's about instant gratification and art's a really slow burn.

It can give people an outlet to really enjoy and think about things differently than they might have before.

Perfect.

[ MUSIC FADES ] I get mixed reactions.

I get just flat out disgust.

But then I get a lot of like interest.

It's like one or the other.

Either you're really into it or you're not.

People really appreciate certain elements of my taxidermy work.

They really like that.

It looks natural, you know?

I've worked really hard to have a nice variety of elements to put in the domes and in the shadow boxes to make them look cohesive, but also like, yeah, you just pull them out of nature.

They look like they could move.

I think that the best comment I ever got was a mom who did not like it, but she said that it looked like I was bringing them back to life.

When I am open to my inner creativity, like the things that I create, they like make people think, you know?

I always try to think of people's reactions to them.

They get excited, but they also like are confused and I enjoy that mixed reaction because I'm evoking feelings in people and I think that's beautiful.

(Mary) Thank you for spending time with us.

I hope you've enjoyed these stories inspired by the beauty of the natural world this Earth Week.

I'm Mary Paul and we'll see you next time.

♪ OUTRO MUSIC