(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, as our show is celebrating its 45th anniversary, we'll check out other local institutions that celebrated milestone anniversaries in 2025, like the Tucson Botanical Gardens that just turn 50.

(Michelle) You can always tell the story of plants in a broader, deeper sense by connecting it to other things in the world.

(Tom) While a cat shelter and an Iris society both celebrated 60 years in Southern Arizona.

(Tiffany) It's just full of passion and love here.

(Tom) And Romero House Ceramics has been a place of refuge and creativity for five decades.

(DC) People come for playing a play, but they stay for the community.

You know, they really find a heart here.

Hello, and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

You know, our show turns 45 this year, and 2025 is a year where a lot of local institutions are hitting these major milestone anniversaries.

So we'll look at those in this program, and we'll begin with Tucson Botanical Gardens, which just turned 50.

♪ SOFT PIANO (Adam) This is one of the few places in town with this much shade, this verdant canopy.

The easiest way to describe my job is I'm in charge of the plants and keeping them happy and healthy.

One of the things that sets us apart from a lot of our sister gardens is that we are an organic based botanical garden.

So we do not use any petrochemicals.

We do our best to not use pesticides.

We try to keep as much of a balanced ecosystem as we can.

(Michelle) The mission of the gardens is to connect people with plants and nature through art, science, history, and culture.

I started at the gardens back in 2002, when the gardens only had about 700 members and a staff of about 15.

Today we're at about 6,200 households.

In fact, I remember back in the old days, their horticultural budget was about $700 a year.

We're happy to celebrate this year, our 50th anniversary.

What we're celebrating is the day that the city of Tucson turned over the deed of the property to the organization, the Tucson Botanical Gardens.

But the story of the founding of the Garden started many years before that with Harrison Yocum who started the club, the Tucson Botanical Garden Club, and then the Porter family whose property we're sitting on.

In 1939, Bernice and Rutger Porter built this little house on this property.

Mr.

Porter was one of Tucson's first nursery owners.

And so many of the trees that you see in Tucson were planted by Rutger Porter.

Bernice was a naturalist.

She studied biology.

So it was a marriage kind of made in heaven.

♪ AIRY AMBIENCE Mr.

Porter had passed away and Mrs.

Porter had always dreamed of the garden being a botanical garden for the public.

Half of this garden is really historical and we keep it that way.

But there's also a beautiful herb garden.

Of course, we have our Cox Butterfly and Orchid Pavilion; the cactus and succulent garden; the most beloved garden is our barrio garden.

It's a typical Mexican backyard garden.

We also have a zen garden.

In May of 2024, the gardens open the Great Garden Express Railroad.

And then we have a little sensory ramadas that really give you little pockets.

It just gives you a real sense of immersion into that space.

We also house four galleries with rotating exhibits.

We have a cafe on site.

(Adam) This is our new Frida's garden.

At the time she was creating her famous garden in Casa Azul, formal plantings were usually plants from Europe and not from Mexico particularly, or even the Americas, in general.

So, she collected some plants from South America and Mexico for her space, and so that's what we've— that's what we've done in that space as well.

The first traveling exhibit called "Nature Connects," it was a Lego exhibit.

That was totally transformed— the gardens with a thousand new members, bringing in people who had typically never thought about entering a botanical garden.

And I've always said that that's a bit of our job, you know, It's very easy to attract naturalists and gardeners to a garden.

But how do we get those people that are not naturalists and are not horticulturalists or are not gardeners to become passionate about gardens and about nature, specifically?

(Michael) We're in the Butterfly Magic exhibit.

This is the only and first tropical butterfly exhibit in Southern Arizona.

We've been here since 2004, so this is our 21st year.

We house over our season about 300 to 400 butterflies at any given time; they're all from the tropics, So Costa Rica, Malaysia, different parts of Southern Africa.

The other thing that we do is try and educate people about conservation and get people interested in essentially how these species should be protected in their native habitats.

The people that we purchase from are essentially putting that money back into communities and also into conservation efforts.

♪ UPLIFTING GUITAR (John) Well, we're in an old janitor's closet that's been converted to our train repair room.

The weather here has been very harsh on our trains.

We've burned out a number of engines over the summer.

I was always good with my hands, so I was a trauma surgeon, very unrelated.

(Katie) If you're here exploring the Botanical Gardens, and you see a butterfly or a bird, or a lizard, that fascinates you, and you want to learn more, we will likely have the programming that can help you discover more about anything that your eyes can see here at the gardens.

♪ MELLOW PIANO (Laura) One of the programs that we do here is Garden Story Time.

It's geared for preschool kids, but all ages are welcome.

We have a volunteer who is a professional puppeteer.

So we have puppets to help us tell the stories.

(Phillipa) I work with a range of different populations.

The one common theme amongst those populations is that they have some type of therapeutic need, whether that is recovering from an illness, or coping with a new life circumstance, or dealing with a lifelong disability.

I work with those populations to accomplish goals that improve their quality of life and overall level of independence in a garden setting.

So, we're planting; we're harvesting; we're cooking the food.

They're growing plants from seed all the way to maturity.

And in the process of doing all those activities, they're working on enhancing their fine and gross motor skills, boosting their ability to communicate, increasing their self-confidence.

This has been going on since the 80s, and it's been passed along to various horticultural therapists over the years.

And so, I, luckily, got this position.

(Adam) We're five and a half acres, but we feel so much bigger than that because you come into 20 plus different spaces while you're in this garden.

(Michelle) You can always tell the story of plants in a broader, deeper sense by connecting it to other things in the world.

In the 1960s, a Russian Orthodox nun from England moved to Arizona and turned her home into a cage-free shelter for countless cats.

Well, Hermitage Cat Shelter is still assisting hundreds of felines every year and providing them a safe space to live out their lives or wait to be adopted.

(upbeat music) The message here is that sheltering can be done differently.

Cats do not need to be in cages, animals do not need to be in cages.

They can free roam and get along well.

With the proper medical care, kitties with special needs can live a very long and healthy life and are very much adoptable.

We wanna make sure that people know about feline leukemia too, that's a big thing.

We house FELV kitties here.

FELV is not a death sentence.

My name is Tiffany Johnson.

I am a certified veterinary technician and the medical supervisor here at the Hermitage.

I was an instructor teaching vet assistant students prior to coming here and so I would bring students here to practice their hands-on skills.

So in doing so, I learned about this place and then the job became available and I jumped on it because this place is magical.

Just to be here and to be able to treat these cats as individuals is what makes it magical.

Every one of these cats is an individual and we are free to learn their personalities, their likes, their dislikes, their friends, how they prefer everything in life because this is their home.

Back in the medical suite, we can do a lot of things that you can see in any other vet practice.

We are the starting line for every cat that comes to the shelter and through our intake doors and we take care of all the medical needs of the cats.

And so whether it's intake, where we are screening them for diseases, checking their blood work, making sure that they're healthy enough to join the population out where they're free-roaming and not spreading things to them, we monitor them back here.

We also do all of our spay and neutering here on site.

We do dentals, we can do amputations, we can do ultrasounds, we have an x-ray suite.

We can do most things that you'll find in any regular vet clinic.

We are non-profit so 100% of what we do is because of our donors and our supporters and we thank them dearly for that.

Volunteers as well, we're able to save so much money on labor hours because we have our volunteers who do about 250,000 hours of work, which equates to hundreds and thousands of dollars of savings at $15 an hour.

We're very, very lucky and fortunate that we have volunteers who are as passionate as the rest of us to come in here and help these kitties.

(gentle music) I volunteer a couple hours on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday and then three hours on Sunday.

My first day of volunteering was December 23rd of 2017 and I started cleaning the senior cat room and then in April I got my first bubble kittens.

Thunder and Lightning were found in a dumpster in Phoenix.

It was scary as all get out to have such teeny tiny little kittens depending on you.

I got them when they were two days old and they just fit into the palm of my hand and of course you fall in love with them.

The first two kittens I got were Thunder and Lightning.

I was a foster failure.

That's when you don't give your kittens back but adopt them instead.

I have two adult sons who are my human boys.

and these two cats are my cat boys.

We call them the cat boys all the time.

They're like furry sons.

I bet Thunder went into the bottom of the closet.

(gentle music) I need to hold on with one hand so... The Hermitage is a wonderful place.

The Hermitage is my happy place.

There is no cat that won't find a welcome at Hermitage.

They provide cages for TNR, trap, neuter, and return.

They're just a full-service place with wonderful people to make it happen.

(gentle music) Long ago, very long ago when I was in college I spoke with a sister who was just forming this organization called the Hermitage.

The bottom line is she was tough.

She didn't suffer fools.

If you asked her a question about a cat, she would scold you that you didn't know this information already and just lecture you and so on.

So she was very tough but you could see underneath all of it.

Extremely loving and caring about the cat community which was something brand new because back then nobody cared about stray cats--but she did.

If she were alive today I'm sure she'd be thrilled to see this.

If you come to the Hermitage today it's insane how organized, how professional, it's astonishing.

I'm Sara Vanstraalen and I'm here to visit the cats and we're thinking of possibly adopting one.

I'm a teacher at St.

Michael's School and we are big believers in community service and outreaching in the community and this is one of our organizations that we visit with our students.

We come for a day to volunteer and help out in the shelter in any way we can.

I believe that there are so many animals that need good homes already versus going to a breeder to buy one because we have lots of love to give.

How did you hear about the shelter?

It's just full of passion and love here.

To get to work with animals has always been a passion of mine which is why I became a veterinary technician.

I did 20 years in the military and then decided I'd take orders from animals instead of people for my next life.

(soft music) We, absolutely everybody here, is an animal lover.

They say that there's dog people, there's cat people, everybody here is an animal person.

(laughs) (soft music) Next we'll show you an organization that's been encouraging residents to plant, grow and show a relatively drought resistant plant.

It's beautiful.

It's the Tucson Iris Society and they are celebrating 60 years.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR My name is Joyce Knill, and I'm a member of the Tucson Area Iris Society.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR I discovered the Iris Society about 25 years ago and they were having a show, and I joined the club, but I was working all the time, so I really couldn't participate until about five years ago, and try to grow irises here in the desert, which is totally different than trying to grow them in Minnesota or Illinois.

So it was a challenge, but I have to say, the members of the club were instrumental in giving me advice, helping me solve my problems, never making fun of my failures, and guiding us.

♪ UPBEAT GUITAR I am Kevin Kartchner.

I am president of the Iris Society in Tucson.

Today, we're at an iris show.

This is a combined show with the Rose Society.

If you look at the flowers that we have here, they are something that you can actually grow in Tucson.

A lot of people do not think you can grow flowers as delicate and impressive as they are.

I like to call them desert orchids, not that they have any relationship, but they're something that's spectacular that can be grown here in the desert.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC Iris are fairly drought tolerant.

You don't have to water them a whole lot, so that makes them a nice, low-water addition to your garden.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC They don't get any pests to speak of.

They aren't bothered by, say, javelinas or other animals, like rabbits that might eat your other things you're trying to grow.

The biggest challenge we have is probably in monsoon season, because they're rhizomes, rhizomes if they get too wet, can rot.

And so when it's humid and soaking rains, some of them can rot and die.

It just became my favorite flower over many years, just because of the huge diversity of colors and shapes of the flower.

All of us in the Iris and Rose Society are gardeners in general.

We just tend to specialize in something.

Being an engineer, I keep track of everything, so I have probably about 400 Iris varieties growing out here in the garden.

And you can see from the tags, they're all named with a little bit of information about each one of them.

♪ UPBEAT MUSIC As far as total plants, you can take the number of varieties and multiply that by a dozen or so, and then you just quickly come up with, there's thousands of plants out here, and each one of those with multiple flowers.

So you're looking at thousands of flowers today.

I don't want to calculate how much time goes into this, because I don't want to know.

This time of year in the spring, it's not work at all.

I just kind of wander around the plants and take inventory of things and do a little bit of hybridizing or breeding.

The most work would probably be in the fall.

When they get too crowded, they need to be divided, and then they have to actually be dug up, and the digging and dividing and replanting, that's the work.

My granddaughter says I'm assessed, and just her word for obsessed, but that's just kind of where I'm at with the flowers, and right now I have the space and time to take care of too many of them.

(Joyce) I live on the east side, which is a little bit chilly, very little rain for the last ten years.

I have over a hundred irises in my backyard.

I grow some in ground, I grow some in raised beds, and then also I grow some in very large pots.

I grow the full gamut, I grow historic irises, which are over 30 years old, and that is something I'm just interested in.

I love the form of some of the very old irises, but then I also, every year when I get the new catalogs, I have to order even more.

I'm addicted.

I can forget about buying new clothes, but I have to have new irises.

I grew up on a farm in southwestern Minnesota.

My mom enjoyed flowers.

My father raised corn and soybeans and alfalfa, so we were surrounded by plants always.

There was an iris hybridizer that lived outside of the small town.

My mother, every single spring when those irises were blooming, my sister and I would tag along with mom and go admire all the irises, and mom would choose one iris to bring home to the farm.

So my sister and I both share those memories, and we still share that love of iris, and we have had iris in our lives pretty much since then.

This is our front yard.

I love to have the neighbors stop by and admire the plants.

It doesn't matter their age or their sex.

I have little boys who are around 10 years old who come and stand at the sidewalk and point out different flowers.

And when I catch them, they always tell me how much they enjoy being here.

There's a little girl who's just learning how to talk, but she has the word flower figured out.

And she comes by with her mom and dad in a stroller, and she points out flowers, and so she's saying, "Flowers, flowers, flowers."

All the way past here.

And then every now and then during the summer, we find little surprises tucked in next to plants.

I've received painted rocks, and one time I found a little plastic dinosaur tucked in with one of my plants, which I just think it's great.

Maybe this means there's some hope that future generations will become gardeners as well.

(Tom) Romero House Ceramics has been nestled just outside of the Tucson Museum of Art for five decades and anyone, even me, can check it out and make pottery.

So here is an excerpt from our trip there earlier this season.

Well, truth be known I have been in Tucson almost 30 years and I have never been to Romero House Ceramics and this is a cool place and joining me is a cool person behind it.

David Campbell, otherwise known to his friends, acquaintances and TV host as DC.

Hey, thanks for having us.

Good to meet you.

Thanks for being here.

It's a special place.

You are packed with history, you are packed with clay and ovens and just a great vibe down here.

Right here in the Tucson Museum of Art Historic Block and we have been here 50 years this year.

Started outside of the Tucson Museum of Art school.

2012 we became a non-profit and we have been going strong ever since.

DC, this special place you have is part history, part therapy I am sure, part art and a magnet for this community.

Absolutely, it is.

People come for the work for playing with clay but they stay for the community.

They really find a heart here.

Again, right in the heart of downtown Tucson and like you said a real magnet for people.

(Tom) You know, as the world gets edgier and more intense, this is a release I think.

(DC) We take pride in maintaining a studio and a community where people are... We leave the cares of the world behind.

You come in here and you create.

When we work with clay you can do pottery on the wheel, you can do hand built free form works.

But again for a lot of us it is just coming here being a part of a community and doing something other.

(Tom) It is a well kept secret.

It is a very well kept secret.

Like I said, we have been around 50 years.

We want to keep this going for another 50.

So we are actually going to be starting a year of celebration.

Starting November 1st we are going to have our first art auction here in the Mudroom Gallery and ramping our way up to in about a year from now a larger block party where we really celebrate.

(Tom) So what if you are not an artist?

What if you can't even draw a stick figure and I won't mention any names?

(DC) All of our classes are geared towards beginners.

But we then will work with you and build with you.

Our classes don't have a general curriculum like most classes do.

We follow what the artist or what the student wants.

We mentor as instructors.

But it is all about creating that space where people can let that inner creativity out.

(Tom) This is extra special because you are part art, you are part of the Presidio, you are on the campus of the Tucson Museum of Art.

What a great spot.

(DC) Oh, we love it here.

You want to be around another 50 years?

It sounds like you'll be around another 50 years.

Oh, I certainly will be.

Thank you.

DC, thank you.

This is great.

It's been eye opening.

Thanks.

Thanks.

Thanks for being here.

Appreciate it.

(Tom) Like what you're seeing on Arizona Illustrated?

Then connect with us on social media for even more Arizona Illustrated.

Like, follow and subscribe to Arizona Illustrated on Facebook, Instagram and X. Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara, and we'll see you again in 2026 as our 45th season continues.