John Burcham for The New York Times
The Mission Garden in Tucson, organized by Friends of Tucson's Birthplace, where heritage fruit trees are planted. More Photos »
THE lost pueblito of Tucson is a Spanish outpost of Pima Indians, soldiers and ranchers on the banks of the Santa Cruz River. On a clear, sunny fall day (which could be just about any day in the desert), Jesús Manuel García Yánez will sometimes look for the missing settlement from the top of a black volcanic heap that the locals call A Mountain, after the gigantic concrete letter on the side.
In a straightforward sense, Mr. García, 44, is a Mexican ecologist. More broadly, though, he is a self-appointed emissary from the land once known as Pimería Alta, an interpreter of its culture, plants and people.
He pointed to the west. Picture the Presidio of San Agustín de Tucson right there, a 12-foot-high adobe bulwark against Apache marauders. Across the acequias, or old irrigation ditches, would be the mission and convent, which rose after the Jesuit padre Eusebio Francisco Kino visited in the 1690s.
What obscured the vista on this day, as it has for the last 50 years, was the sprawl of modern Tucson and its half million residents. The presidio had yielded to the glass office towers of downtown. The mission and convent had crumbled and become a municipal dump.
"It's a search for what Tucson used to be," Mr. García said. "Along the Santa Cruz River, there was a belt of cottonwoods and a mesquite forest. But that's gone. The water table dropped. For newer generations to try to see that is almost impossible."
Except for one thing. Mr. García waved down to the flood plain and a new adobe wall that formed a tidy square. Inside was a huerta, a small orchard of the same fruit trees that Padre Kino and his fellow missionaries brought with them from the Mediterranean.
These trees were no mirage: apricots, peaches, quinces, figs, pears, limas (or sweet limes) and pomegranates. Along with a civic group called Friends of Tucson's Birthplace, Mr. García helped to plant the Mission Garden in March with specimens he scouted himself.
He had found the trees growing next to leaky troughs at border ranches and in the tiny Tucson backyards of elderly Hispanic ladies. How long has that quince been there, he would ask, and what is its story?
"When I became involved about 8 to 10 years ago," he said, "it dawned on me that Tucson was a sleepy Mexican town like the Mexican towns in Sonora. If you don't travel to Mexico, you can't picture what that was."
Over the weekend, Mr. García would be driving back to his family seat in the mission town of Magdalena de Kino, Mexico. In a way, his personal mission is to recreate the orchards he knew there. He has started with dozens of seedlings in the backyard of the small ranch house that he shares with his girlfriend, Dena Cowan, a Spanish-language interpreter and videographer. (The couple recently produced a documentary, in Spanish and English, about the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project called "Tasting History.")
Yet he remembered the orchards with something other than simple nostalgia.
As a child, he packed boxes of fruit to load onto his uncle's truck. "My father had this farm that he was renting, probably two acres," Mr. García recalled. By necessity, "the only things we bought from the store were salt, sugar, coffee and kerosene," he said. "Everything else we produced."
"Our mother, she made our underwear out of the wheat sacks," he continued. "My father used to make these homemade shoes for my brothers: leather, with used tires on the sole. They would hide them in the river on the way to school and then go to school barefooted." Better that, he recalled, than let classmates see their privation.
By the time Mr. García reached junior high, his older sister has become a teacher and the family's lot had improved. They installed indoor plumbing, for a start. There was nothing trendy about what he ironically calls their "sustainable" years. "I got the tail end," Mr. García said. "But I got enough to realize how hard work it is. I learned enough to realize I wanted to get an education and get out of that life."
THE first priority this morning was to visit the huerta at the bottom of the hill in Tucson and get a taste of history. At first glance, the 119 trees and 24 grapevines didn't resemble any kind of orchard. Rather than climbing a trellis, for instance, the grapevines were sprawling across the ground.
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