Wallace Desert Garden
Wallace Desert Garden Getting Ready for the Wallace Garden Opening
Text by Jeff Payne, ACLP, Certified Arborist WE - 9449A | Director of Horticulture Artwork by Keegan Rider & Photos by Dara Heward and Joseph Pacheco
T
he long-awaited opening of the Wallace Desert Garden will take place in March 2020. The project began in August 2015, when the first boxed specimen cacti arrived at Boyce Thompson from north Scottsdale. Since that time, we moved a total of 5,870 plants, finally finishing the transfer in 2017. Three key employees are now bringing this massive project to completion: myself, lead foreman, Miguel Hernandez, and gardener Derek Lopez. Some of the original players who were very instrumental in getting this project off the ground have either retired or moved on. Cathy Babcock, longtime Director of Horticulture, retired in early 2019. Clayton Newberry, Eddie Valenzuela, and Lisa Galford have new employment elsewhere.
8 | Boyce Thompson Arboretum | Winter 2020
New staff members working on the Wallace Garden include our plant recorder, Becky Stephenson, and a new full-time groundskeeper, Angela Velducea, as well as a temporary fulltime groundskeeper, Christine Gomez. We will be adding another full-time groundskeeper very soon. The final plantings— what we are calling the understory plants— will be in the ground by the time you read this, as will all the plant labels. These understory plants are the smaller plants that BTA staff salvaged from the Wallace Desert Gardens, driving every week on Wednesdays in 2016 and 2017 with two or three trucks and trailers. Every week we would load up the vehicles with bare root specimens or vegetative cuttings for propagation. After doing this for well over a year and a half, we amassed more than 3,300 + plants that we housed in six temporary shade structures at
