STORY BEHIND THE ART OF JOAN MCGANN

Abundant Future: Cultivating Diversity in Garden, Farm, and Field

San Rafael Quince

Cydonia oblonga cv. 'San Rafael'

Quince is a beautiful small tree, growing to 10 or 12 feet tall. It has pinkish blooms and large fuzzy yellow fruits. It is known for its sweet candy-like scent. The fruit is high in vitamin C and pectin and is often used in jams and jellies. In Spain and Mexico, it is typically used to make cajeta, a type of fruit bar.

The specimen depicted herein was found in Tucson’s Mission Garden. It is a living ethnobotanical museum that interprets 4,000 years of Tucson’s agricultural history through heritage fruit trees, traditional local heirloom crops, and edible native plants. The garden is located on the site of the Spanish Colonial walled garden that was part of Tucson’s historic San Agustin Mission. This particular quince tree was propagated from a cutting from a fruit tree in the San Rafael Valley in the southeastern border area of Arizona. These varieties of fruit trees arrived in this region in the late 1600s with the Jesuit missionaries, among them Father Eusebio Francisco Kino. At that time the area was still northwest New Spain. It later became Northwest Mexico, and now we call it the Southwest! The name of the cultivar, ‘San Rafael’, is an acknowledgement of the family homestead, the San Rafael Ranch, where the cuttings for these trees were collected by Jesús García.

I spoke with Jesús García, an ethnobotanist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and founder of the Kino Heritage Fruit Trees Project, hundreds of whose trees grow at Mission Garden. He originally helped trace the legacy of the fruit trees introduced into the region during the Spanish Mission era. He explained that the quince is still a very important fruit in many Hispanic communities in the Southwest U.S. and Northwest Mexico. This variety of quince, called Octubreño because it fruits in October, is an eat-off-the-tree fruit, and it is sweeter, juicier and rounder than quince varieties found in the eastern U.S. It is a long-lived tree (80-100 years), so old trees that can be traced back to stocks introduced 150-300 years ago were the varieties sought out in the Sonoran Desert to rescue the heirloom varieties from the Spanish colonial era.

I am most fortunate to have easy access to Tucson’s Mission Garden and, to have found there the wonderful quince trees in the heritage fruit tree orchard. I was attracted to this branch which was heavy with fruit, hanging away from other branches and already a nice composition that was altered only a bit to read well on paper. I love working in pen and ink and chose to use the medium in this piece. The colors were very similar in value throughout the branch so I chose to capture the volumes, shadows and movement in ink.

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Read more about this artist’s work: America's Flora