Tucson - A Contrast

Tucson is a lot like Santa Fe in look and feel and culture. Low slung adobe houses nestle into hills and arroyos, there is no end of great food, it has a big art culture, and stark mountains ring the city. Visually, gastronomically and artistically Tucson feels like home.

But it's a much bigger city, five times greater population at about half a million compared to our less than 100,000. Tucson is a real city, but has the same feel as Santa Fe.

The big difference, to my eye, is the flora🌵.

A lot of this everywhere

First and foremost, saguaro cactus dominates the scene in Tucson. In city lots and home gardens it looks like giant installed sculptures. At the Saguaro National Park it looked natural and wild and spookily like sentient beings. 

Despite widely held misconceptions, saguaros DO NOT grow in New Mexico. So seeing them standing sentinel everywhere in Tucson was so different. 

Agaves, all spiky and blue, do grow in Santa Fe and we saw lots of agaves everywhere in Tucson, and huge prickly pear cactus and other succulents. Lots. 

A garden in Tucson

It's as dry as Santa Fe but way hotter (way hotter) in summer, so all the hellscape-adapted plants really look like desert survivors. 

No one gardens as I would define it. They have rocks, gravel and succulents. That's it, the garden is done. No one has perennials or the kinds of flowering shrubs I'd plant or trees with real leaves. Or irrigation. When more than 10 days a year are over 110° irrigation in your yard isn't the answer.

The Katherine Hepburn  / Spencer Tracy getaway casita in Tucson -- love the look

The adobe constructions and homes were familiar. Walls, gates, casitas and fences looked like what we'd see at home.

This could be Santa Fe but it's our hotel entrance in Tucson

And the mountains surrounding the city were familiar but not -- in Tucson they were big barren rocky formations, a lot like Albuquerque's Sandia mountains. In Santa Fe we're at much higher elevation, up against pine covered, green forested mountains.

And yet the view of the mountains from the city below was stunning.

A view of Tucson's mountains

We went to the Tucson botanical garden and it was a treat. Small, but well done. Of course there was a large section of succulents, cactus and desert oddities, but also an herb garden and butterfly garden and hummingbird attracting plants nicely arranged.

The section on desert crops that sustained the indigenous people was interesting. People lived and thrived in this harsh hot world for ages.

We're home now. Feels the same, looks similar, but isn't. It was nice to get away to see a warmer, harsher, more botanically odd version of our own place in the southwest. 

And we ate well the whole time. 

🍴