Symphony in Tree Major the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum at Superior

The Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum

U. S. Highway 60 and 70 flow by the very gates of the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum near Superior. On establishing this Arboretum, Colonel William Boyce Thompson said: "I have in mind more than mere botanical propagation. I hope to benefit the state and the Southwest by the addition of new products . . . We will bring together and study plants of the desert countries, find out their uses, and make them available to the people."

SYMPHONY in tree MAJOR

WHAT is an arboretum? Many persons traveling through Arizona, over U.S. Highway 60-70 between Florence Junction and Superior, come suddenly upon the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, and both the word and place are new to them. If they are in a tremendous rush, they zoom on by and their frustration begins. For right away Junior, or Mother, or somebody who has retained a fragment of Latin, observes, "Arboretum means trees." Then Aunt Lulu, or Sister Sue, or somebody with a poetic strain, says, "Only God can make a tree." Then Father or Uncle, or somebody practical, begins to wonder audibly about what tree He does make out here on the desert, and whether Man is helping His trees along back in that Thompson Arboretum, and if so, why, how and what not. And in the end, the whole family is saying in selfdisgust, "Doggone it, why didn't we stop and visit the Arboretum?"

All these possible complications are avoided annually by at least twelve thousand families who did not rush past, but turned their cars into the stone gate entrance of the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, open from sunrise to sunset three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.

There, on a small placard, they find arboretum defined exactly as "a place where trees and shrubs are cultivated for scientific and educational purposes." They learn that this particular arboretum contains not only the plants native to the semi-arid Southwest but almost every plant in the world capable of growing in a desert climate. And when they leave, they know that Colonel William Boyce Thompson meant

The story of the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum, "most useful garden of its kind in the world."

it when he said, on establishing the Southwestern Arboretum: "I have in mind far more than mere botanical propagation. I hope to benefit the State and the Southwest by the addition of new products. A plant collection will be assembled which will be of interest not only to the nature lover and the plant student, but which will stress the practical side as well to see if we cannot make these mesas, hillsides, and canyons far more productive and of more benefit to mankind. We will bring together and study the plants of the desert countries, find out their uses, and make them available to the people. It is a big job, but we will build here the most beautiful, and at the same time the most useful garden of its kind in the world."

Old Noah Webster has failed us Englishspeaking peoples when it comes to a variety of words capable of describing the universal reaction to a trip through the Arboretum. You have to see plants and trees for yourself and pick your own adjectives in person. But it does no harm to have a general idea of the Arboretum before you visit it, so here, in advance, is a description of some of the things you will see.

When you reach the gates of the Arboretum, you are already conscious of its strikingly-beautiful natural setting - rolling foothills covered with vari-colored desert flora and leading up into the imposing and spectacular Pinal mountains. On the northwest are the ominous gray-black Superstitions, with the Weaver's Needle-legendary landmark to the fabulously rich lost Dutchman gold mine-sticking up like a finger. To the east, the white smelter smoke marks the location of the copper mining town,

Picket Post House

On a high bluff overlooking Queen Creek and surveying the Arboretum like a mighty castle is Picket Post House, the home of Colonel Thompson on his visits to the Magma mine before his death. Towering above it to the south is Picket Post Mountain, famed landmark of early-day Arizona.

Superior. Beyond that can be seen the purple-red cliffs of Apache Leap, where once, it is said, a band of Apaches was surprised by a cavalry patrol. Refusing to surrender and knowing that they would be annihilated, they shouted their war songs and forced their horses over the steep precipice in a mass suicidal pact.

Behind the Arboretum, rising like a menacing barrier, is Picket Post Mountain, where Arizona history was written with campfire smoke and mirrors. All through the 1800's, and no doubt earlier, the Apaches smothered their fires with blankets and sent puffs of smoke into the clear blue sky to be seen and decoded by distant tribes one of man's earliest forms of telegraphy. Late in the century, these same Apaches were betrayed by Picket Post, for the Signal Corps of the U. S. Army used its highest pinnacles as a heliograph station and from there flashed messages across the barren wastes to patrolling cavalry units. This telegraphy by reflecting mirrors added so much to the effectiveness of the army's Indian cam-paigns that the Apaches were finally crushed.

Under the shadow of Picket Post, the road to the Arboretum dips leisurely into a can-yon and leads to the ivy-covered administra-tion building where you park your car. When you get out, you are standing in the ap-proximate geographical center of the sub-arid inland portions of Southwestern United States--an area embracing some 500,000 square miles and including Arizona, New Mexico Utah, Nevada and parts of Texas and California and before you stretches one of the most idyllic sections of this semi-arid country. The Arboretum itself is about 1,760 acres of deep, wide canyons, rugged crags and rolling foothills, all of it alive with an abundance of plant life both native and introduced.

By Allan Lehman

Clipped to a small post are three colored arrows: a green one, a yellow one, and a red one. Each arrow points down the roadway into the shaded green vistas of the Southwestern Arboretum, and each indi-cates a walking tour through a part of this desert garden, with the time the walk should take given on each. Naturally these tours do not march you over the whole thousand(Turn to Page 37) The Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum is a mighty garden place wherein grow plants and vegetation from all over the world. In the spring this garden place is ablaze with beauty and blooms, one of the most delightful places in the west to visit.