Benedictine Monastery Plant Sale

Saturday October 9, 4pm-6pm, FREE with $5 suggested donation at the Gate.

---

Post Event Resources:

---

We have a very limited selection of trees reproduced from those at Tucson's Benedictine Monastery. We will also have local authors reading from their work, wine poured by Sand-Reckoner Winery, and live music by the duo of Laura and Sarah Roland. Come enjoy Mission Garden on a wonderful afternoon that will include wine, good books, and music!

Plant Sale

A few years ago Tucsonans were saddened when the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration  left Tucson  and sold their building. A deal was made to save the building, but many wonderful fruit trees on the grounds were lost as apartment buildings went up on either side of the monastery.

Mission Garden has been working with partners to make sure that new trees could be grown from cuttings or seed taken from the historic trees there. The garden was aided by a grant from the Kaimas Foundation, for which we are very grateful. This effort is now coming to fruition, with the availability of avocado, pomegranate, apricot and fig trees grown from those that were at the Monastery.

Stock of these special trees is limited so arrive on time for this event.

Music

Laura and Sarah Roland, violinist and cellist respectively, are impressive young Tucson musicians. Laura, age 16, is homeschooled and in the 10th grade. She has been taking violin lessons since she was 5 years old. She competed in a high school festival in South Carolina in 2019 and won 1st place in the Strings Division. Her hobbies include drawing, reading, and eating ice cream. Sarah, age 14, has been playing cello for 8 years. She has placed in several competitions including first place at the 2020 Tucson Cello Congress Competition. Besides her love of music and cello, she loves to spend time with her dog Dixie and ride her horse Brody. She is homeschooled and in the 8th grade. Laura and Sarah make a great sister duo! They also currently play together in the Tucson Philharmonia Youth Orchestra.

Local Tucson writers

Mission Garden will present four local Tucson writers whose works cover aspects of Tucson history ranging over 4,000 years. Carolyn Niethammer will moderate the panel and discuss her latest book “A Desert Feast, Celebrating Tucson’s Culinary History.” She will focus on the part of food history that took place right on the grounds of Mission Garden. Historian David Devine will answer questions about his latest book “Historic Tales of Territorial Tucson” and the interesting characters that populated early Tucson. Alva Torres worked for years to preserve Tucson’s barrios and wrote a column for the Tucson Citizen for nine years between 1984 and 1993. In collaboration with Lydia Otero, many of her columns are collected in her book “Notitas.” For a look at the modern desert city of Tucson, Marty Eberhardt uses her experience as the former director of Tucson Botanical Gardens to construct her first murder mystery “Death in a Desert Garden,” where everyone from the board of directors to the staff is a suspect when the wealthy widow of the garden founder is killed on the grounds of the garden.

Fine Wine

Fine wine service will be provided by southern Arizona's Sand-Reckoner Vineyard. It didn’t take Sarah and Rob Hammelman long to recognize that the aromas and textures of Arizona wines had a magical way of representing the high desert vineyard where they were grown. In 2010, they purchased a 12-acre farm situated between the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains in Southeastern Arizona outside of Willcox. The small vineyard was planted in 1997. They also have a tasting room in Tucson.

Wines available for this event are:

2017 Malvasia Bianca $8/glass, $35/bottle

2014 Syrah, $8/glass, $35/bottle

---

Want to learn more about the Fig Tree identification, harvesting and preparation?

This accessible pre-recorded video class is a great way to learn about the figs that can be grown here in Tucson and the greater Sonoran Desert. Recorded at Mission Garden during figs' active bloom and fruiting times with ethnobotanist Martha Burgess this recorded video class is available for $25, click the button below for more information.

Fig Workshop w/ Martha Burgess