A 30-Year Seed Bank Community The Desert Legume Program grows desert legumes in Tucson - and even a bigger global community. TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY DARA HEWARD
I
f legumes weren’t around, we wouldn’t have many of the benefits that they provide. After all, they are the second most important plant family agriculturally. These benefits are wide ranging: nitrogen fixation; providing nutritional benefits for humans and livestock; improving soil quality; helping provide nitrogen availability for crops; countless medicinal benefits; and in usage as low-water landscape plants. Plus, the scientific name is outright fun to pronounce, similar to a Harry Potter spell: Leguminosae (alternatively Fabaceae).
With the Desert Legume Program (DELEP), we have many species of legumes from the arid landscape regions of the world saved and put aside for research and conservation. As a joint venture of the Boyce Thompson Arboretum and The University of Arizona College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, DELEP is a very unique project. To learn a little more about DELEP, the seed bank, and the field sites (where a lot of these seeds come from), I took a trip down to Tucson, Arizona where they are housed. DELEP is located at the University of Arizona Campus Agricultural Center (CAC) and housed in the Arizona Crop Improvement Association building. They are neighbors to the USDA Bee Research Lab. How cool, I thought, to have field sites of legume flowers so close to the bee lab, where bees could help pollinate DELEP’s plants and DELEP could help feed the bees. In Tucson, under the gray gloom of an Arizona monsoon, I walked into the DELEP offices. I 18 | Boyce Thompson Arboretum | Summer 2018
greeted Ken Coppola, DELEP’s horticultural specialist. His office was covered in pictures of plants, naturally. Ken is a charismatic guy with a vibrant personality. Soon after, Matt Johnson walked in and greeted me. Matt is the Program Manager and Curator of DELEP, a tall man with a contagious smile. It’s a rarity and a delight when I see these two colleagues, since I work in Superior at the Arboretum and they are housed in Tucson. I’m not sure if I have more fun when they talk “plant talk”, saying the various names of surrounding plants, or when they fight over what plants need to be moved out of the shade house and field sites. It’s as if they speak their own language, in this case, we could call it “Legumish”. Ken took me on a tour of the field sites next. He took me to Field Site 1 and Field Site 3. Since his first day at DELEP, 30 years ago, Coppola has helped provide the support of age-old trees. I began to grasp the importance of these two colleagues and the role they had on the long-standing legume program. He not only knew every plant by its name and the year it was planted, but he kept data on each plant – how much each one flowered, how many seeds it produced, environmental factors of that year, how much water they received, how much wind they got, and so on and so forth.
Ken Coppola (right) shows me one of the many legumes at one of the DELEP field sites housed at the University of Arizona Campus Agricultural Center (CAC).
