'Cactus are fighting for their lives': Outgoing Desert Botanical Garden leader on its challenges

Desert Botanical Garden has welcomed visitors — both from the Valley and beyond — who wanted to see Sonoran Desert plants for more than 80 years.

For the last 24 of them, Ken Schutz has served as executive director. Schutz will step down from that role later this fall.

He joined The Show to talk about his time running the garden, what he sees as the biggest challenges for the next person in the job, and the biggest challenges the next executive director will face in terms of continuing to care for the garden and keep it healthy and even expand it.

Rick White-Pickett

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: You've been here almost a quarter of a century. I'm curious, when you took this job, what did you know about desert landscaping?

KEN SCHUTZ: Nothing. It was the hardest sell in the interview process. I had worked at a zoo before. I'd run a science museum. I was good at fundraising and audience development and my pitch was those skills would translate well to the desert and a garden. And I was a hobbyist gardener but not of cactus nor agave, so I didn't know much when I started.

BRODIE: How did you go about trying to learn?

SCHUTZ: Well, it was easy. We have, right now it's on hiatus, but that time we had a program called the Desert Landscape School. I enrolled in that right away. And every Saturday morning for three hours I would, well, for every Friday night I would cram for the test on Saturday morning, and then spend time either in class or in the field learning first about desert natural history, then desert horticulture, and then our third semester was actually designing and installing a home landscape for a new Habitat for Humanity homeowner.

BRODIE: So now that you have been doing this for as long as you have, when you look at the garden, what comes to mind?

SCHUTZ: Our garden is amazing, and it was formed in 1939 to save desert plants locally, and I see that, but when I look at it now, what I see is that it's a sanctuary for desert plants of the world, so we're still doing exactly the same thing that we were created to do. It's just the scope is so much bigger and the threats so much greater.

BRODIE: And as you and others have said in the past, when Desert Botanical Garden was started, cactus wasn't that popular of a plant, right?

SCHUTZ: Cactus were not cool. It's an, it's an urban legend, but I like it. And someday maybe somebody will uncover it, but, that there were gardens in the 1930s who had a slogan, “no more desert and not one more cactus or no cactus left” was their, their slogan.

So there was this sentiment that I think is was deeply embedded. So I think what we were doing as a territory and then a state was trying to create this image of this green utopia. And cactus and desert references even didn't fit in with that public image. So the folks who came first, and in 1939 when we started, there were only 50,000 people here, I think came for the vergency and not the desert habitat.

So downtown where I live with my husband now, in a house that was built in 1930, when I walk my dog, I go past streets that were named back then that make no reference to desert plants. I go by cypress and holly and oak and palm. No reference whatsoever.

And if I look at the landscapes, including my own, which still has, shame on me, a green lawn, people are ripping out left and right native desert plants and putting in things from back home.

So there was this real sense that cactus, well, they are, they are tough to work with that, may have been part of it, but they weren't attractive or they weren't serious landscape plants. And there was this, there was this concerted effort to get rid of them so it was knowing that, their founder said, “well at least somewhere here, there needs to be a sanctuary where we celebrate desert plants.”

BRODIE: It seems like the cactus has come a long way. I mean, if you look on social media, they're pretty trendy, pretty popular these days.

SCHUTZ: So cactus are cool, and talking about what streets are named in the neighborhood where I live and what was popular in the 1930s, if you go to the most prestigious new communities today, they're full of desert references to ocotillo and to palo verde and ironwood. So cactus are cool and the most prestigious landscapes I think in Phoenix are those that are either Mediterranean or even more so Sonoran Desert.

So I think of it as we won that battle, right? But we're still fighting the war and maybe losing. So we now are fighting, really cactus are fighting for their lives, we're fighting for their lives. They're one of the five most endangered life forms on the planet.

So we are working now to first in captivity at the garden, the fancy word is ex situ, to have a breeding population of every known taxa of cactus and agave. So at the very least what remains are seeds and tissue samples, and someday, hopefully we will get things right, we as a community and a society and start preserving what habitats remain and then start restoring those that have been taken away.

And when that happens, the raw material to do that from the plant side will be at the garden. And our friends at the zoo can toss in some of the, the four-legged creatures that will be necessary also for and two-legged, I'm thinking of birds, for habitat restoration.

BRODIE: Yeah, your next door neighbors there in Papago Park. So I'm curious, like when you think about the mission of the garden as you see it now, sort of getting ready to be on your way out, how much of it is education about this ecosystem and the plants that habitate here and how much of it do you see as maybe getting ready to potentially, you know, put more desert landscaping into the world?

SCHUTZ: Well, we in that respect, we still keep our focus local. We're, we're about the Sonoran Desert, and there's a lot of it to preserve. And as I think about that, I worry, I worry about development, I worry about climate change, in particular the intense heat that we've had in the past couple of years, and drought.

So actually hanging on to a verdant desert habitat, is something we're all gonna have to work on really hard and I think make changes in the way we live and the way we prioritize the things we do in order to, to save, preserve, and then restore Sonoran Desert habitats.

BRODIE: I want to ask you about art at Desert Botanical Garden because I know that you've had various exhibitions and installations over the years there, and I'm curious like what to you is the advantage of doing that? 

Like why put Chihuly’s throughout Desert Botanical Gardener? Why have other artists and their sculptures or pieces in the garden amongst the plants?

SCHUTZ: So to me when I first came, when I came for the first interview at the garden and rounded a corner near Webster Auditorium where the giant cardons grow, they're 35, maybe 40 feet tall.

I felt like I had stepped onto the set of a Star Trek episode. It's just things like this couldn't really exist. Nature couldn't have created that or they couldn't survive. So there's a certain wow factor to desert plants, especially when they're, when they're curated and, you know, don't have to suffer the extremes as they would in the wild, that is really appealing and intriguing, but are also artful in its own way. So I think that's part of it.

There also is the practical reality that if you like saguaros, and come to the garden every year to see your favorite saguaro, maybe it will have grown 6 inches from the last time you were there, and maybe you'll come when it's in bloom.

Maybe an owl will have made a nest in it, but in general, because desert plants are so slow growing, it can seem the same every time you come. And art, human made art rather than art made by nature to me, if we select it correctly, provides a really nice counterpoint to that.

BRODIE: Can you reference the heat just a couple of minutes ago and how the desert ecosystem is struggling to some degree with it.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for the person who will be taking your job next? You have this huge garden, which is obviously outside and subject to the elements. What do you think are the biggest challenges the next executive director will face in terms of continuing to care for the garden and keep it healthy and maybe even expand it?

SCHUTZ: Well, in my opinion, from my perspective, one of the biggest challenges is that as a society we're still talking about if climate change is real. We need to stop talking about if it's here and it's having a profound impact on us.

We also need to recognize that not only is it here, not only does it exist, but it's already having an immediate and profound impact on our plants. Most concerning to me is that desert plants have evolved so that in order to save water, they don't undergo photosynthesis during the day.

They close up their stomata, little cells that open and close so they can exchange gasses. They don't do any of that business during the day because they, there would be more evaporation. So very efficiently they do at night, and what triggers that is when temperatures fall below 90 degrees.

And we've had in the past couple of summers, prolonged is too strong of a word, but back-to-back days when the temperature never fell below 90 degrees during the nighttime and we've had significant damage, die off actually in our shoal population because of that, the stress that's caused by that.

Now, we still have a very healthy saguaro population. It's more than 1,000 plants strong. Pre this extreme weather, we would lose maybe three or four a year either to storm damage or old age, but just this last year we lost 40, so the trend line is really, really concerning.

And I think one of the things the next director will have to figure out along with the board and the team is how to cool the garden at night to get those ambient temperatures below 90 degrees. And probably that will involve the use of water and then that leads to yet another threat that we all face and need to be aware of and proactively responding to. And that's drought and then just also the finite amount of water that's available for all of us as a community to live and farm by.

BRODIE: I would think that the heat also causes maybe some consternation for an institution like yours in terms of visitors, right?

Like if it's really hot during the day, it's not that pleasant to be outside and as beautiful as the garden is, when it's 118 degrees, you don't really want to be in it and as you referenced when at night it's still 90 degrees plus, still not all that pleasant to be in it. So like what do you do about that?

SCHUTZ: Well, When it's going to be 115 degrees in the afternoon or more, we close the garden at 11 and reopen at 5, and that's for the sake of any guest who would come, and more particularly for our staff.

We have taken what I think is a very important step to protect our own staff, our horticulturists who by the nature of their job, have to be outside with the plants. They come in very early and they leave before temperatures get high.

And we decided just last year that the stress, the bodily stress of working during intense heat takes a toll, and we have reduced the work hour, although not the salary, for our horticulturalists who need to be outside in the summer from a 40-hour work week to a 32-hour work week during the summer.

BRODIE: You mentioned at the beginning of this conversation that you really didn't know anything about desert landscaping when you got here.

I'm curious after, you know, 24 years of doing this, when you look at not just not DBG but like, you know, when you drive around and you see desert landscaping, like what do you see now?

SCHUTZ: So I see often, more often than not, really beautiful landscapes, and as a new gardener, what I learned is what those people that have those beautiful landscapes know, which is do not water as much as an Easterner you think plants need.

You learn that through attrition. You get a plant you water it's doing well and you give it twice as much water. You think it'll do twice as well and it falls over one day.

So first of all, what I've learned and what I see is that for people who understand desert horticulture and practice good horticulture, amazingly beautiful landscapes can be created.

There are some landscapers, and homeowners who don't know how to prune native plants and, there's a particular, aesthetic thing we call poodling, which is creating sort of a skinny branch with a puff of, foliage on the end, kind of like a poodle's tail. We see some really, terribly, in my opinion, abused trees that are bushes mostly that have been poodled into a state of shocking disrepair to me, so I see that.

I see the effect of drought in the past two years and the intense heat. I see more die off than I ever did, particularly in mature landscapes that didn't once need water and now in order to survive do need supplemental water.

I see an absence of shade or an absence of all the shade that we need first to cool and, to cool the air and you know, mitigate the heat island effect. But also a lack of shade provided for desert plants, especially those that may not live naturally in the low deserts, which is essential now to allow plants to get through the summer without being in the blazing sun all day long.

So, compared to 1939, we've made a lot of progress, but there's still much that needs to be done in terms of teaching and modifying horticultural practices throughout the Valley.