Desert Botanical Garden

Author's Comments

The garden is curated, and you can feel it. This is not the wild desert. The trails loop with intention, the species are labeled, the saguaros stand where someone decided they should stand. I say that as a compliment. There are compositions here you cannot easily make in the open Sonoran because the plants are arranged for looking, and the looking rewards a careful eye. March is the month I keep returning to. The wildflowers come in at the bases of the cholla and the prickly pear, and the contrast of soft yellow brittlebush against the architecture of a thirty-foot saguaro is the photograph this place was built to give you. Get there at opening. The east-facing trails catch first light cleanly, and the spines along the cholla go translucent for about twenty minutes before the sun climbs high enough to flatten everything out. I shoot mostly detail here. The wide shots are available and they are fine, but the garden gives up its real images at closer range - the geometry of an agave from above, the fur on a teddy bear cholla glowing against shadow, the particular way a saguaro flower opens for one night and then closes by mid-morning the next day. Bring a macro if you have one. Bring patience for the families who arrive around ten. The night exhibitions are their own category. Luminarias in December turns the trails into something closer to a stage set, and Electric Desert washes the saguaros in color that has nothing to do with how they actually look. Both are worth photographing once. Neither is what I come for. I come for the hour after the gates open in early spring, when the light is still low and the desert is still quiet.

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