Interview with Maria Thomas, curator of plants at the ABQ BioPark Botanic Gardens, as told to Sue Brown
When I think about being a person of place, I think about my commitment to making my place a better space in which to live. I grew up in northern New Mexico, and my roots are here in the Rio Grande valley and the surrounding mountains and mesas. When I left for six years, living in Oregon with its earthy-crunchy vibe, rocky beaches, tidepools, and (seemingly) endless tracts of old growth forests, there was a strong pull to stay there and make Oregon my long-term home. However, it remained important to me to eventually come back here where I felt a deeper connection, a deeper sense of place.
From growing up gardening with my grandparents, hiking in Northern New Mexico, cultivating medicinal plants in Oregon, and working as an archaeologist in the four corners area of the southwest, plants have always been a strong part of who I am. Working as the curator of plants at the Botanic Garden allows me to do many different things, but what I like most about my position is that I’m employed by the community. With everything I do there, I strive to create a better place for our community to visit and to live.
The work I do strengthening the native plant community and the conservation of our native endangered plants is also related to this purpose. I want kids growing up today and tomorrow to have the same opportunity I had to experience our wild local landscapes and discover the natural beauty of the state they live in. We have eight different biomes here in New Mexico which makes our state incredibly unique as far as plant diversity goes. It is something to take pride in and to protect as best we can. At the Botanic Garden, we work with botanists, watershed ecologists, and conservationists from local, state, and federal agencies who are dedicating their lives to protect our native environment, scouring the state for endangered native plants, and collecting seed that we are saving in seed banks. Unfortunately, statewide there are not enough resources allocated to this effort. What work is done is often dependent on grant-funding and other non-constant programs that require an incredible amount of volunteer time to make any sort of progress. In an ideal world, there would be greater recognition of the important work of these people and state-wide action plans would be implemented to give them the long-term support they need to accomplish this incredibly important work.
Sustainability is also a major issue that we emphasize through many program themes at the BioPark. Drought impacts everything we do and care about. We all want to reduce our water use since it is a limited precious resource, but it is important to understand that you can have a beautiful yard using native and desert-adapted plants that promote pollinator and wildlife habitat and still use very little water. Many local landscapes use massive amounts of crushed gravel with very few plants. This gets heated up by the sun and then continues to heat up the city, which then increases evaporation of the little rainfall we manage to get each summer. Hotter landscapes equal stressed out plants, stressed out wildlife, and stressed out people as well! We need a different story to engage new stakeholders, otherwise we just continue preaching to the choir and still end up with vast subdivisions of sterile, inhospitable “zero-scape.” With this in mind, we know we have to generate interest at the grassroots level, which is something we are now implementing at Tingley Beach.
Tingley Beach is a native landscape designed to complement the Rio Grande Bosque and, since it is free to visitors, a wonderful place for public education. Recently, we hosted a Party for the Planet at Tingley Beach, sponsored by the Zoological Association of America. People volunteered in three hour shifts to beautify the grounds and plant native plants on site. At the end, participants received herb and vegetable starter plants to take home to plant their own gardens.
We are now working with the New Mexico Department of Agriculture to develop interpretive xeric gardens at Tingley Beach using native plants. These gardens will be an opportunity for visitors to learn about native plants and pollinators and how they can build and maintain similar gardens in their own yards. Some exhibits at the BioPark–like the Japanese garden–are great to visit, but they wouldn’t be a good choice for homeowners to have in their own yards. We are striving for Tingley to be a place where visitors can both enjoy the gardens and learn some valuable information on plant selection and water and pollinator/wildlife habitat conservation.
Additionally, we are trying to create more interactive experiences for the community at Tingley. We have partnered with the University of New Mexico on a citizen science project that uses flexible tree bands to measure growth of the tree trunks. Citizens can monitor and report their observations through an online format. Anyone from a casual jogger to a public school science class can participate. It gets the public involved in conservation and also gives us concrete information as to what is happening to our trees across the Albuquerque area. The BioPark also sponsors the annual backyard bird count, which monitors changes in species and numbers over time through a similar citizen science program as the tree banding project.
Sustainability also plays a large role in the way we manage insect pests and nuisance wildlife at the Botanic Garden. Situated along the Bosque, we co-exist with many animals, from bobcats and coyotes to beavers, porcupines, ground squirrels, racoons, and skunks to name a few. We love watching the joy and wonder visitors experience when sighting a porcupine sleeping in the rafters of the ceremonial garden or catching a glimpse of a coyote trotting down the walkway before quickly disappearing in the adjacent landscape.
However, at times wildlife can have a negative impact on our plant collections or pose a public health risk when they make their homes in public areas. Trapping them and relocating them leads to aggressive behavior as they stake out new territories and can also spread dangerous diseases like rabies and distemper to new locations. At the Botanic Garden, we prefer to take an integrated pest management approach to nuisance wildlife and employ natural deterrents whenever possible. For decreasing tree damage by beavers, we wrap the lower parts of certain trees with mesh. We use lime sulfur or apple cider vinegar, made from our own Heritage Farm apples, to deter porcupines from eating the soft growing tips of our roses and the bark off many of our ornamental trees. We use a spray made of garlic, cayenne pepper, and wax to prevent ground squirrels and other small critters from treating our annual container plants such as violas, pansies, and calendula like an all-you-can-eat buffet. They can nibble a taste, but are not likely to stick around for seconds. Skunks are a viable part of our ecosystem, but they also tear up the lush events lawn searching for grubs that are both harmful to the lawn and a natural food source for the skunks. When we begin to see too much damage occurring in the lawn, we use garlic spray to deter the skunks.
Garlic spray also works as a natural mosquito and aphid repellent in the main lawn area and in other areas with dense vegetation such as the High Desert rose garden and the Sasebo Japanese garden. Many night-blooming plants such as datura, agave, and primrose depend on night-active pollinators such as bats. We want to do what we can to respect and support the role bats play in our local ecology by being careful with how we control mosquitoes, one of their important food sources. With the garlic spray, we can keep both visitors and bats happy by keeping the mosquito population out of high traffic areas but still available as a valuable protein source for foraging bats.
Educating the public on sustainable choices when it comes to medicinal plants is also an important part of what we do. Plants can be the least aggressive way to treat an illness and can often be more compatible with our internal systems than conventional medicine. It is a choice to go “natural” when treating illness and chronic pain, but for how long, and with what plant, is always something that should be closely discussed with a licensed medical practitioner. So while we can’t make specific plant recommendations or give medical advice, we can encourage visitors to learn about the plants and make informed choices.
An example of a strong medicine that many people use in the Southwest is Osha. The uses vary, including treating sore throats, as a mouth wash, and for coughs. Osha grows naturally in high, cool, moist elevations and is incredibly difficult to cultivate. With climate change, there is a lot of environmental pressure on the plant when harvesting it in the wild. People are literally loving it to death. We have to find and use alternatives to Osha when possible, particularly alternatives that are more easily cultivated but with the same medical action we know and love Osha for. Then we can live a sustainable, alternative lifestyle but in an informed way that is mindful of our place in the ecosystem.
We have an herbalist that trains our docent team for our medicinal plant garden; she explains her relationships with plants as feeling the energy of the plant and actually having an exchange of information with another sentient being. I agree with this description, and I see this as taking time to slow down, absorb, and comprehend what knowledge the plant is trying to impart. Taking this a step further, plants are just a small part of the big picture we are striving to understand and coexist with. Perhaps the most important thing is recognizing what part we play, and both the big and small choices we can make to support the well-being of our community and surrounding environment.
