Post-Conference Tour 2022: Arizona

Tour Fee

$1,050 (single occupancy), $780 (double occupancy). Fee includes lodging for three nights, breakfast and lunch for four days and transportation via rental vans. Please note that dinners are on your own. Number of participants: 20. To book a place on this and other Conference Tours, see the Conference website for registration details.

Tour Description

We will travel west from Las Cruces into Arizona and spend four days exploring the state’s oak diversity hotspots, tracking down Q. toumeyi, Q. palmeri, Q. havardii, Q. turbinella, Q. chrysolepis, Q. gambelii, Q. arizonica, Q. grisea, plus a number of hybrids to spice things up. Stops include Chiricahua National Monument and Mount Lemmon on the way to Tucson, several oak-rich sites around Sedona as we move north towards Flagstaff, Arizona, Hualapai Mountain Park on the way down to Prescott, and Boyce Thompson Arboretum before ending the tour in Phoenix, Arizona.

Itinerary Notes

Participants will be picked up at their Las Cruces hotels on the morning of September 3rd, following the Conference, and will be dropped off at Sky Harbor airport in Phoenix on the evening of September 6th. If your flight does not leave till the following day, you will need to make your own arrangements for accommodation for that night.

Accessibility Note

This Tour will encounter rugged, off-trail terrain; stops will in general involve short walks to view sites of interest. 

Tour Leaders

Sean Hogan

Design consultant, author and nursery owner, Sean was born in Portland and spent his later childhood years in Sacramento. He pursued his education in horticulture and botany at American River College and Sacramento State. Early work included mapping rare and endangered plants for the State of California as well as landscape and design work, often revolving around his love of western natives.
From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, Sean worked as the curator of South African, New Zealand, Australian, New World Desert and California Native Cultivar Gardens at the UC Berkeley Botanic Garden. In 1995, he and his partner, UC Davis Arboretum Botanist Parker Sanderson, returned to Portland to start a design and consultation firm specializing in regionally appropriate plants for the Pacific Northwest. This eventually evolved into their opening Cistus Nursery, located on Sauvie Island in the Columbia River west of Portland. Cistus Nursery is highly regarded as one of the best west coast retail/micronurseries and is known worldwide for its collection of rare plants and advocacy of unusual and underused plants.
Hogan has lectured extensively in North America and Europe, and has conducted explorations in South America, South Africa and the western regions of the United States and northern Mexico. His writing and photos can be found in an extremely wide range of horticultural and botanical literature. He was the consulting editor of the 20,000-plus entry FLORA: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia, published in 2003, and he published Trees for all Seasons in 2008, both by Timber Press.

Darin Jenke

A botanist and teacher in Arizona with a Masters of Science in Plant Biology from Arizona State University, Darin has worked as a botanist in spring annual plant surveys since 2008. He works with native plant nurseries and wholesale nurseries to grow new plant species by finding seeds and breeding new types of oaks for Arizona. He has been teaching biology since 2011 at local community colleges in Arizona and is continuously exploring the oak habitats there and in the adjacent states.