Tohono Chul Gardens & Galleries Tucson

Tohono Chul Celebrates the Nature of the Sonoran Desert
A visit to the gardens of Tohono Chul can last half an hour or become an all day experience. Our gardens demonstrate our goal of creating spaces of beauty that attract wildlife, utilizing native and adapted plants. The garden’s plantings have been designed especially to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, which will be seen throughout our gardens.
The gardens also reflect the wide range of habitats in the Sonoran Desert, including riparian areas and the elusive desert palm canyons. The Sonoran Desert is much more than saguaros and prickly pears.

DESERT PALM
Just six hours south of Tucson, along the east coast of the Gulf of California, pockets of native fan palms nestle in isolated mountain canyons. The fact that palm trees grow in the Sonoran Desert is evidence of the region's tropical origins long ago.

Poetic Earth: The Memory of Land - Catherine Nash, M.F.A.
Almost all naturally occurring iron oxides have a clay base (an eroded product of silicate rocks) which also influences the ultimate color.
Iron oxides were used by prehistoric cave dwellers symbolically for cultural and spiritual rituals. There is evidence that prehistoric man traveled many miles to mine iron oxides, perhaps sought for their qualities of durability and richness of color. Some of the world's oldest prehistoric cave paintings have been found in the south of France. The paintings at Lascaux, perhaps the most famous of these, were created more than 16,000 years ago.
Durability, permanence, and light fastness still make these pigments important for today's artist. A wonderful green earth that I dug just north of Moab in Utah is from the Brushy Basin member of the Morrison Formation and is dated to the Jurassic era, about 135,230 million years ago. A sedimentary rock, it contains quite a bit of clay. The green is iron that was not oxidized, which means it was laid down in a low oxidized environment (i.e., into water). Geologists have determined that a huge lake measuring 500 miles long and 300 miles wide covered a great deal of the Four Corners area (where the states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona all meet). Volcanoes all along the western shore of this lake spewed alkaline ash into the water, where it settled. Different levels of salinity resulted in varied shades of green: bluish green can be found near Durango, Colorado, for instance.2
In contrast, the red earth of Sedona is a fine grained sedimentary sandstone. The magnificent rock formations in this area are similar to those of Utah's Monument Valley. A second, a purple grey, gathered from a highway road cut near the Painted Desert, is from Jurassic and Triassic sedimentary layers. The site is specifically known as the Owl Rock member of the Chinle Formation, along the road just west of Tuba City. It is an incredible area of petrified trees, fossils, and dinosaur tracks.
Like the different colors found in iron oxides, colorful horizontal banding of sandstone and mudstone layers of the Chinle Formation resulted from a varying mineral content in the sediments and also from how quickly they were laid down. Concentrations of slowly deposited oxides of iron and aluminum create red, orange, and pink hues. A rapid sediment buildup

HOHOKAM PETROGLYPH NEWSPAPER ROCKS
RE CREATED BY ARTIST J0HN PALACIO
Petroglyphs are designs chipped into the dark surface of desert boulders by pecking. scraping or grinding. The thin, hard coating that accumulates on rock surfaces after long exposure to the elements is called rock or desert varnish. Designs are chipped through the varnish, revealing the lighter colored rock beneath.
The desert Southwest has uncounted thousands of petroglyph examples. About 120 sites have been located in Pima County alone Hohokam designs are often of stick figures shown with artifacts like bows and arrows, or engaged in an activity such as dancing. Animals such as coyotes, deer, lizards or mountain liors: or geoetrics like circles, spirals, and "pipettes" (a distinctly Hohokam creation) are also found We will never understand the exact thinking behind the pictures, but these forms of ancient expression deal not with language but with symbols - designs that can speak to us of the people who once lived here and allow us a glimpse into the ceremonial, aesthetic and social lives of early man.

The mule deer is an iconic American ungulate with a black forehead, gray face, brownish-gray body, white rump patch, and small tail with a black tip. The species is named for its large mule-like ears. NoLæs mere