Lecture Series

Each year Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries provides the SaddleBrooke community with several informative and entertaining lectures. All are offered free-of-charge to FSL members. Non-members are charged a nominal $5 fee to attend some of the lectures.

October 12th at 4:00 pm

 in the DesertView Theater

Topic: Tucson Mission Garden

Speaker: Kendall Kroesen, PhD, Outreach Coordinator

Tucson Mission Garden is a living agricultural museum of Sonoran Desert-adapted heritage fruit trees, traditional local heirloom crops and edible native plants. The Garden is located at the foot of Sentinel Peak, at the site of the Native American village of S-cuk Son (pronounced Chuk Shon), a place sacred to the Tohono O’odham. Current garden plots include: Native Plants, Early Agriculture, Hohokam, O’odham Before European Contact, O’odham After European Contact, Spanish, Mexican, Chinese, Yoeme, Africa in the Americas, Medicinal, and Youth. The Garden is open to visitors and offers special exhibits/events.

Kroesen 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 Kroesen received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego after twenty months of field work in central Mexico. Kroesen held post-doctoral research positions at UCLA and at the Tucson VA Medical Center. In February 2002, in a departure from social science, Kroesen 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. Kroesen 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.

This lecture is free for FSL members and $5 for non-members.