About
I have lived in the desert city of Tucson since 1972 and worked for the University of Arizona Extension Service as an Extension Agent (Urban Horticulture). The work was varied, helping nursery owners, landscapers, garden clubs, and homeowners (many of whom were recent arrivals unfamiliar with caring for plants in a desert environment) to develop and enjoy their surroundings. Experienced local gardeners who wanted to assist the educational effort were trained to become volunteer Master Gardeners. They helped start a Community Garden program after a local homeowner donated her land and the use of her well water. From that beginning in 1992 several gardens have been started, and advice given to others who wanted to have a community garden in their own neighborhood. In working with the Tucson Parks and Recreation Department an annual Flower and Garden Fair was begun, and it lasted for twenty years until I retired in 1995. Fifty local gardening and landscaping enthusiasts spent a day in Reid Park enthusiastically demonstrating their knowledge and skills to large crowds.
Before coming to Tucson, I taught horticultural classes for nine years at Arizona Western College in Yuma.
And before that I spent eleven years in Tanganyika, East Africa, promoting agricultural development while providing on-the-job training to young African field staff to work with the cultivators in outlying villages. The country is made up largely of areas with poor soils and inadequate rainfall - in other words, a desert. I was a member of the Colonial Agricultural Service and left the country when it acquired independence from Britain.
Now I spend my time and energies as a volunteer with a group of some sixty enthusiastic gardeners, loosely gathered around four gardens that are cultivated on “borrowed” spare land at peoples’ houses. They kindly call me their Education Director.
If those years are added up I have spent about fifty years in trying to understand desert gardening. And they have been, and are, fun years.
