Mission Garden

Mission Garden is a living agricultural museum near Sentinel Peak in Tucson, Arizona. Its adobe walls enclose four acres of heritage crops and heirloom trees that represent people who have lived in the Sonoran Desert for more than 4,000 years.

Introduction

The agricultural practices featured in Mission Garden include those of Hohokam, Tohono O’odham, Spanish colonials and other Europeans, Mexicans, Chinese, and people of African descent. As a result, Mission Garden grows crops that originated in many areas of the world. A few are listed in the Ark of Taste’s catalog of heritage foods. White Sonora wheat and O'odham pink bean exemplify local foods in this catalog. Mission Garden's constantly changing garden areas show cultivars and farming methods that have succeeded in the Sonoran Desert. Throughout the year, Mission Garden also hosts regular and special events featuring these food plants. The gardens and events combine traditional and modern knowledge related to agriculture in a hot and arid region. This focus is relevant in the context of food insecurity and climate change. Collaborations with other organizations also advance Mission Garden’s mission:

Mission Garden inspires people to connect to this land by reclaiming agricultural traditions for our community in a changing world.

This historical and cultural resource figured in Tucson’s application to UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network. In 2015, Tucson became the first City of Gastronomy in the United States. It is noted especially for its culture and development of Sonoran Mexican cuisine. Media attention has included pieces in Bon Appétit, the Boston Globe, the Denver Post, Forbes, and the New York Times.

History of the site

The site is in the watershed of the 210-mile Santa Cruz River. This area has been continuously farmed for over 4000 years. Archeological research establishes that early inhabitants grew maize, beans, squash, and agave. These crops supplemented other food sources, such as foraged mesquite beans and acorns. Mission Garden represents this early agriculture in the agave-covered hillside along the entrance path, an agave roasting pit, a reconstructed pithouse, and plots growing Hohokam crops such as corn.
Plots also represent the Tohono O’odham, who were called Papago by Spanish colonials who came to the area in the 1690s. When the Jesuit priest Eusebio Kino arrived in 1697, he found people raising crops such as corn and cotton with the summer monsoons. Also, they used small canals to distribute the river's water. After the Spanish arrived, the O’odham people living near the mission added winter crops such as winter wheat to their diet.
File:Historic American Buildings Survey Copied from view of Tucson in 1880. Courtesy Harry Drachman.. - HABS ARIZ,10-TUCSO,3-1.tif|alt=Mission San Cosme y Damián del Tucsón seen from Sentinel Peak, 1880|left|thumb|Mission San Cosme y Damián del Tucsón seen from Sentinel Peak, 1880
A few years after his first contact with these O’odham people, Father Kino established near the Santa Cruz River a chapel visited by priests from Mission San Xavier del Bac. The older mission and the so-called visita chapel were about 10 miles apart. The visita would become the San Agustin Mission del Tucsón. It eventually had a church, a two-story residence for priests, a granary, tanning vats, a soap factory, a blacksmith shop and smelter, as well as cemetery areas – all surrounded by a compound wall. This mission was later called the Mission San Cosme y Damián. Mission Garden is located where the original mission’s gardens and orchards were. Its Spanish Colonial area features fruits such as grapes, quince, pomegranate, Valencia oranges, peaches, plums, and apricots. Vegetables such as carrots, beets, and cardoon also represent the Spanish colonial influence, as do medicinal and culinary herbs such as caraway, chicory, garlic, and marjoram. Mission Garden's model acequia shows another way that the Spanish colonials influenced agriculture in the area.
Another event that informs Mission Garden is Mexico’s 1821 independence from Spain, when the mission system began to fail and Mexico claimed the area. In 1848, Mexico ceded the area to the United States; and in 1854, the Gadsden Purchase added the Arizona Territory to the United States. Mission Garden’s Mexican and Territorial gardens represent this period. Tucson's growing population included indigenous and Hispanic peoples who had lived in the area for many generations before the Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón was established in 1775. The railroad arrived in 1880, which brought Chinese workers to the area as well. By the 1930s, the farms that these Chinese people raised food on had disappeared. Mission Garden’s Chinese garden represents these influences.
Another influence on the area was the 1887 Sonora earthquake, which lowered Tucson’s water table. Human factors such as overgrazing and pumping groundwater for agriculture and industry also contributed to the Santa Cruz River’s decline. For example, Tucson Pressed Brick began operation in 1894, mining clay and firing bricks just west of the river. The company was an important employer for the region, and it supplied material for local buildings through 1963. But, its digging was detrimental to the buildings of the abandoned San Agustin Mission. Further, the farms near the river had become Tucson neighborhoods.
The land that Mission Garden occupies was part of a landfill that Tucson used in the 1950s and 1960s. This landfill included the bulldozed remains of the San Agustin Mission. In the 1980s, neighborhood protests stopped a four-lane road from going through the site. In 1999, Tucson voters authorized a new tax district to support cultural and recreational amenities and historic re-creations. A living agricultural museum was among several projects whose design and initial construction were funded by those taxes. The 5013 non-profit Friends of Tucson's Birthplace shepherded the Mission Garden project over several years and continues to help fund and manage the place. Archeological research between 2001 and 2008 informed continued work on the Mission Garden site. But the construction that had been started in 2008 was stalled by an economic downturn. In 2011, Friends of Tucson's Birthplace and Pima County entered an agreement to develop, operate, and maintain Mission Garden. Volunteers cleaned the area, improved the soil, and put in water lines. The first 120 trees were planted in 2012; the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project grew them from 17th and 18th century cultivars. Every year since then has seen additional work on various garden plots and special events.

Grounds

Trained docents meet most visitors who come through the main gate. They review with the visitors a map of the grounds, pointing out historical timelines and thematic areas, as well as noting current and future events. Visitors can explore the grounds on their own or have docent-guided tours. Thematic areas are described immediately below.

Entry garden

A number of native plants grace the path from Mission Garden’s visitor parking area to the mesquite plank gates of the main entrance. These plants include trees that will eventually shade the path. Among them are desert hackberry, canyon hackberry, Arizona ash, and mesquites. Other plants growing along the entrance path include ocotillo, brittlebush, bamboo muhly, and Fremont wolfberry.
East of the path are hillside terraces showing a technique used by ancient Hohokam farmers to grow agave for food and fiber. Each plant is set above a pile of rocks that slows down run-off when it rains. These small retaining walls are called trincheras. Video by Justin Risley shows such planting during one of Mission Garden's educational events in 2021. Bat Conservation International and the Borderlands Restoration Network collaborated in this agave-planting event to support migrating nectar feeders such as bats. Archaeologists have found entire hilltops marked by trincheras, as well as stone tools for processing agave and pits for roasting agave. Such findings indicate the importance of this crop to these ancient peoples.
Because Mission Garden is next to a former landfill, trash was exposed when the soil cap began to erode. Mission Garden considered stopping the erosion by planting trees or shrubs, but that was not an option because of the trash. So, rocks were piled where rivulets were forming by the main entrance, and extra soil was brought in for planting agaves. These trincheras outside the east wall of Mission Garden thus represent a restoration of degraded land that avoided potentially hazardous contact with the old landfill, countered erosion along the entrance path, and improved the path with plantings that show this ancient technique for harvesting water in a place where rain is rare.

Spanish Colonial garden and orchard

Mission Garden's main entrance opens onto an orchard whose first trees were planted in 2012. Ethnobotanist Jesús Manuel García-Yánez collected these trees in collaboration with the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project. They represent those that fed the San Agustin Mission, the mission for which this living agricultural museum is named. As of 2023, the orchard grew close to 200 heirloom figs, grapefruit, limes, oranges, quince, pomegranates, olives, and stone fruit such as peaches and apricots. Many of these trees were propagated from older trees found in southern Arizona and northern Mexico. For example, the Sosa Carrillo cultivar of the Black Mission Fig came from a centenarian tree at the house where Leopoldo Carrillo and his family lived in downtown Tucson. Photographs from the 1930s show that tree, and the family's descendants believe that it grew from a cutting from the San Agustin Mission’s orchard. The Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project establishes the legacy of trees like that cultivar through such interviews, as well as by reference to accounts written 150–300 years ago, such as records for missions and mining towns. Originally funded by the National Park Service, this project finds and re-establishes cultivars or stocks of these historically important fruit trees. Mission Garden is one of several partners in this enterprise.
Mission Garden also has close to 40 heirloom grapevines of two historically notable varieties. Franciscan missionaries brought to the west coast of North America what is generally called the Mission grape, which they made wines with for their missions. Scholars determined in 2007 that the Mission grape is related to a Spanish variety called Listan Prieto. Mission Garden grows several cultivars of the Mission grape that come from arid regions. For example, the original stock for Mission Garden's Niagara grape came from Capitol Reef National Park’s Fruita Rural Historic District. The other notable variety here is the Canyon grape, which is edible even though it is small and seedy. Grapes are planted to show three forms of vine training: arbors, espaliered, and goblet.
The Spanish Colonial garden also features vegetables and medicinal or culinary herbs. They are planted as they would have been inside older Spanish orchards so that they benefit from the foliage and soil of surrounding trees. Mission Garden’s choices here are influenced by letters that Jesuit missionary Phillip Segesser wrote home in the 1750s. His letters asked for seeds of plants like flax, turnip, carrot, beet, cauliflower, fennel, caraway, anise, sage, mint, chicory, garlic, celery, chives, and marjoram. Based also on gardening in modern Spain, the Spanish Colonial garden might also grow food like spinach, cabbage, artichoke and cardoon, fava beans, potatoes, leeks, peas, radishes, and carrots; and herbs like chamomile, calendula, basil, borage, dill, and parsley. Ornamental flowers also abound in and around this garden, adding beauty and attracting pollinators.