Monthly Meetings

Mission Garden is a living museum that tells the story of over 4,000 years of multicultural agriculture in the Tucson Basin. Mission Gardens is now planning a new garden that is to be called Tomorrow’s Garden. Its purpose is to explore how to grow food in the local area in the future, with higher average temperatures, more extreme weather events, and less water. A garden committee has gathered input from diverse stakeholders and is now in the process of making initial decisions about the garden design. This presentation will describe the status of this effort, some of the broader scale design parameters, and some of the possibilities we are exploring. Mission Gardens will also be welcoming input from Tucson Organic Gardeners’ about this new effort with an interactive portion as part of the discussion.

Dena Cowan is Curator of Collections at Mission Garden, Tucson’s Agricultural Heritage Museum, where she has also served as Garden Supervisor and Community Outreach Coordinator. For the past two years she has also created a farm plan and consulted for Arizona’s first certified organic regenerative farm, Oatman Flats Ranch.

Kendall grew up in Southern California and earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. After college he worked for four years on archaeological and conservation projects and became a bird watcher. Later Kendall received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego after twenty months of field work in central Mexico. Kendall held post-doctoral research positions at UCLA and at the Tucson VA Medical Center. In February 2002, in a departure from social science, Kendall joined the staff of the Tucson Audubon Society. There he was involved in communications, rural habitat restoration and creation of an urban bird habitat program. Kendall has served on a variety of community advisory committees including the Tucson Parks and Recreation Commission. He now works as Community Outreach Coordinator at the Mission Garden. He enjoys gardening, birding and walking dogs with his wife Mary Beth Tyndall.