Lecture in Camp Verde

"Pre-Columbian Agaves in Southwestern United States: A New Way of Looking at Species and Their Cultural Landscapes"
Tues., November 19, 7pm
Camp Verde Community Center Rooms 206/207 (behind the Historical Society) by Wendy Hodgson, Research Botanist, Herbarium Curator, and Botanical Illustrator, Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix

Wendy has been with the Desert Botanical Garden for nearly 40 years and has lived in the desert for 44 years.  Her areas of interest include southwest United States and northern Mexico floristics, rare and endemic plants, and taxonomy and systematics of Agave and Yucca, including the study of pre-Columbian agave cultivars. Other current projects include the study and documentation of the flora of the Grand Canyon region, including the evolution and distribution of certain plant groups as affected by the unique factors characteristic of this area. Ms. Hodgson is studying and documenting southwest United States cacti and is a co-coordinator for the Cactus Family of Arizona project by Desert Botanical Garden research staff and research associates. She was also the coordinator for the Cactus family treatment for the Intermountain Flora project, the preeminent botanical initiative documenting plant diversity between the Sierra Nevada and the Rocky Mountains, published in 2012 by the New York Botanical Garden Press. She is the author of numerous scientific papers and the illustrated book, Food Plants of the Sonoran Desert, published by the University of Arizona Press and winner of the 2002 Klinger Book Award by the Society for Economic Botany. She is an avid plant collector, particularly those pesky, difficult to press plants of the Agave and Cactus families.

From Linda Guarino