Desert Garden

to be planted individually in the freshly-irrigated soil. By September the plants were mature and ready for picking.. Mexican labor was best for the job, being both financially expedient and best experienced.

At picking time, each bush presents an interesting picture: it has three tiers of pepper pods-low, ripe red; middle, fairly ripe, and top, greenest. In this way, actually, each bush has three crops going. The greenest are usually the most susceptible to frost. But frost is not entirely detrimental: it is one thing that rids the chili grower of the chili-weevil, the curse of California growers. The only serious menace is the big green tomato worm, and this customer has to be picked off bushes individually, by watching for perforated leaves, which give away its presence.

Having experimented with drying chilis on his six acre test patch, Brockman came to the conclusion that the age-hallowed Mexican method of sun-drying was too wasteful. Too many peppers were lost through mildew or general spoilage. He installed a/dehydrating plant.

Peppers to be dehydrated are gathered by Mexican pickers into large fifty pound gunnysacks. Workers predry them in the sun, in the big yard behind the plant. In several days' time, this process eliminates much of the moisture. After short sun-drying, the peppers are raked into long rows, loaded into a truck and taken into the plant for actual dehydration. In the plant, the chilis are washed to eliminate all dust. After washing, the pods are placed in trays, which are wheeled into the dehydrating tunnels. These tunnels are heated up to 165 F. and run day and night. The tunnels are 82 feet long and will easily accommodate 50,000 lbs. of wet chilis. After 13 hours in the tunnels, these will come out completely dehydrated, only one-fifth of their original weight. Top production of the plant is ten thousand pounds daily, dry weight.

From dehydrating tunnels the peppers go into trays on a slowly moving belt over which Mexican workers watch, picking out, sorting, and culling. Twisted or broken pods which sometimes comprise half of the crop are rushed to the grinding room where they are turned into powder. Since different sections of the country like differently colored chili powder, great fuss goes into blending different colors of chili pods to make the powder exactly in accordance with the customer specifications.

Perfect chilis, which are pushed by sorters to the middle of the moving belt, are eventually packed into 180 pound bales, or forty pound cartons. To insure their arrival in perfect condition-whole -they are steamed at 270 F. before packaging. Whole chilis go to customers who choose to do their own grinding. For customers who like redder powder or redder pods, chilis may be additionally heat-treated or sun-dried. For cheaper chili whole pods are ground.

Through experimenting with the first small patch, Brockman learned that 20 miles is the closest one should plant sweet from hot chilis, otherwise pollinating insects will turn the sweet crop hot.

Just as it was in the Middle Ages, the pepper is valued for its flavoring and preserving qualities: meats steeped in chili powder keep a long time, and flies are not anxious to light on drying meat covered with hot stuff. Besides uses in preserving and flavoring, chili peppers found their way into a barnyard: producers of egglaying mashes discovered that chili flavor sends an egg production curve toward the top of the chart, and through the roof. However, chickens or animals should not be allowed to overindulge in chili, Brockman says. A calf he allowed to sneak into the plant yard and gorge himself on husked peppers, became so hot, his meat could not be eaten. Too much chili in the egg-laying mash may send both the hen and the businessman who orders scrambled eggs into a temperamental tailspin. However, used wisely, chili is a delightful flavoring. As a commercial investment, the redhot is sound. Brockman claims that chili pepper growing is one type of investment, from which uncertainties plaguing an ordinary rancher have been completely eliminated. "This is one case where you can count your chickens before they hatch," he says.

Facts and figures support Brockman's statement. Inured to frost and not susceptible to insect pests, a chili crop is stable. Knowing that each plant, or 35 chili pods will usually give one pound of chili powder, a farmer can pretty well tell what the yield will be, if he knows his acreage. He can count on about $400 gross per acre.

Gradually, farmers in different parts of the country are waking up to the possibilities of "Hot Stuff." Though it is not generally known, the chili industry grosses something like twelve million dollars annually. The chances of expansion are best exemplified by Brockman's business which jumped in five years from 6 to 300 acres, from 10 to 100 employees and a dehydrating plant. Brock-man also has contracts with many small growers and ships the peppers in wholesale quantities to leading packagers around the country. Among these are C. B. Gentry in Los Angeles; R. T. French in Rochester, N. Y.; C. L. Pratt is the only other big sale chili pepper grower in Arizona. Brockman predicts that Elfrida, because of its ideal climate and even temperature, is bound to become the chili-growing center of the country. As for the popularity of the little redhots, Brockman feels that it will sweep the States. "Why, every boy who ever trained at one of our Southwestern bases, acquired a taste for chili and took it home with him!" is his argument. Each Fall Elfrida's crop is valued at $250,000. "And," Brockman says with a knowing wink, "from then on, the sky is the limit!" Chili is becoming more and more recognized as a very important source of valuable vitamins.

You can walk across its length or breadth in five minutes, but if you pause to inspect its flower surprises any warm spring day, you'll be in the Desert Botanical Garden of Arizona for hours.

For spaciousness, this desert garden would seem to the uninitiated little more than a cacti patch, for it spreads over only 306 acres of picturesque Papago Park, a mile off a busy transcontinental highway, and a fifteen-minute drive from the teeming Arizona metropolis of Phoenix.

But into its 306 acres are packed more than 10,000 specimens of flora of the deserts around the world, something from every continent, and each springtime it presents one of Mother Nature's most alluring flower shows.

This is the only botanical garden in the world devoted exclusively to desert plants grown in the open the year 'round, and in the next few years it bids fair to become one of the world's chief centers for desert plant research.

The same World War II which caused for five years suspension of activities at this "laboratory" among the towering Saguaro, also wrought destruction of great desert botanical gardens at Dahlam and Frankfurt in Germany, and the Kew gardens at London, England, where research had been under way for 300 years.

Students and scientists already are beginning to arrive at the Papago Park garden for study and research while European gardens are being restored, reports W. Taylor Marshall, an authority with a quarter-century of experience in the cataloguing of desert plant life.

Says Mr. Marshall, who came last December 1 to become director of the Arizona garden: "Despite the fact that many of the desert species of plant life, and most of the cacti, are exclusively American plants, the research for centuries has been carried on in Europe.

"But with those great research laboratories the victims of war's destructive forces, I believe this scenic area of the Arizona desert is destined to become the leading botanical garden for study of desert plants. We have the climate, the soil and the natural habitat."

Perhaps the name "desert" implies rolling sand dunes, sepulchral barrens and wastelands devoid of color or vegetation. Then "desert" is a misnomer for this sun-drenched, intriguing area where grounds blaze in the spring with thousands of flower hues, attracting birds, highly-colored insects and butterflies in profusion.

Founded in 1938 by the Arizona Cactus and Native Flora Society, of which Mrs. Gertrude D. Webster of Vermont, an Arizona winter visitor, has been the moving spirit, this Desert Botanical Garden of Arizona didn't "just grow" like Topsy.

When it formally was dedicated February 22, 1939, its plant There are many rare cactus plants in the Arizona Botanical Garden. One of the most interesting is the Caterpillar Cactus which actually crawls forward as it grows. It nonchalantly disregards obstacles. The garden is dedicated to the dissemination of desert knowledge.

Explorers already were in Mexico obtaining species of desert plant life.

From those and thousands of others obtained in a series of such expeditions in the pre-war years, a multitude of flora from the world's deserts was collected, planted carefully in Papago Park, and catalogued.

Then an attractive, Indian pueblo style headquarters building was completed and dedicated January 21, 1940, when plants were just beginning to dot the desert floor, and the display was almost insignificant beside the orderly profusion through which a visitor strolls today.

Now, also, the Cactus and Succulent Society of America has become a co-sponsor of this Arizona garden, providing not only moral but financial support.

Twelve acres are devoted to Arizona natives; all of the plants from any desert portion of the state, and there are hundreds. For Arizona in variety of its flora is one of the nation's richest states. It has almost as many types of ferns as the New England states; more kinds of valuable grasses than even the Midwestern prairie states. Arizona counts 3,000 handily-identifiable plants, with probably several thousand yet unclassified.

There's a walk through the garden known as "The Rainbow Trail" because it is bordered by rainbow cacti from Southern Arizona; a section for desert lilies, including the Yucca and native Arizona spoon plant. Another section contains the desert amaryllis, including the century plant so often confused with cactus. African species occupy another section.

There's the "Old Man of the Desert," a nine-foot-tall cactus shaft completely clothed with what appears to be gray hairs. And nearby is "The Old Lady," another native of Mexico, also swathed in gray hairs, yet in maturity hardly nine inches in height.

You can find there the Caterpillar cactus, which snakes along the ground and roots from its underside, actually moving forward as it grows. There is the Aloe Vera, a South African native, only known cure for X-ray burns. Of this the garden has a large supply, and stands ready to furnish the plant to hospitals without charge.

The stately Saguaro towers twenty to thirty feet above its desert carpet and it takes fifteen to twenty years for a Saguaro to reach a height of one foot. Age of very large ones in Arizona has been placed at 150 to 175 years.

Dr. Forrest Shreve of the Carnegie Institute's Desert Laboratory at Tucson says the Saguaro grows very slowly at first, then "speeds up" to a growth of three or four inches per year, depending upon the quantity of water it gets.

Here in Papago Park's garden is the squat little Ferocactus acanthodes, more commonly known as the barrel cactus, which wears in spring a "crown" of golden or blood-red flowers; the Opuntia Lindheimeri blooms in red or orange; the Opuntia macrocentra is a wax-like creation with deep red center and orange or yellow petals, while the Opuntia acanthocarpa, or staghorn cactus, may produce deep orange or deep red flowers.

There's the wand-like Ocotillo, which scientists have discovered may bear a fresh set of leaves after every heavy rain, but develops its bright scarlet racemes-flowers appearing on the tips of its branches only in the early spring.

Most of the cacti bloom in April and May, though the South African Aloes are mid-winter bloomers and the Bryophyllum from Madagascar, one of the most attractive of winter flowers, could be placed in any garden as a source of winter table decorations.

In the garden headquarters building's patio the famous nightblooming Cereus-which produce only in darkness their exotic flowers from an unimpressive wand-like stalk-start blooming about May 1 and continue until late September. Director Marshall plans to floodlight the patio at night so visitors can watch the night-bloomers open.

Snowy white flowers of the Saguaro appear in May, forming a crown at the top of its trunk and at the tip of each branch. Its juicy red fruit comes to maturity in June, driest time of the year, and the pulp and seeds are eagerly sought by birds.

Though literally hundreds of varieties of cacti sprinkle the grounds of the Desert Botanical Garden of Arizona, ranging from the towering Saguaro to tiny growths that hardly do more than spot the desert floor, this garden is not confined solely to cacti, which are indigenous only to the Western Hemisphere and adjacent islands.

There also are desert trees, shrubs, lilies and all plant life growing under desert conditions. The South African succulents, the Euphorbias from Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the Canary Islands all are included in the planting plan.

Plant explorers now are scouring the Gulf of Lower California and South African deserts to bring back several thousand additional specimens.

Director Marshall, who has personally visited most of the desert sections of the American continent in his study of plant life, is an author of several outstanding texts on desert growths.

President emeritus of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, he also is honorary vice-president of the American Horticultural Society, a member of the American Society of Plant Tanonomists, and assistant editor of the National Horticultural Magazine.

One of Director Marshall's first projects at the Papago Park garden is a large lath house to care for the rain forest species-desert plants which live in the tops of trees like mistletoe, and seem to thrive with an abundance of water and shade.

The garden's headquarters building contains quarters for visiting scientists, and there generally is someone on hand to study the galaxy of plants. Mr. Marshall hopes soon to increase facilities with another building for housing of an herbarium which would preserve dried plant specimens for future generations, as well as dormitories which could accommodate botany students from distant schools and colleges.

The garden is opened to the public without charge daily except Monday, with conducted tours twice each afternoon. Each Thursday and Sunday afternoons visitors have an opportunity to hear a lecture, usually illustrated with pictures of a wide variety of desert plants. Special talks are arranged for garden clubs and schools, and distinguished speakers frequently address groups gathered in the garden's administration building, which is furnished and decorated artistically.

And, stretching away from the building's broad terrace is a magnificent view of the Saguaro-studded desert land, then a patchwork of irrigated farms, and finally a backdrop of cardboard-like mountains that shimmer in the sunshine. In all the world there could not be a finer place for such a desert garden.