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On a recent morning, Elizabeth Davison, director of the University of Arizona arboretum, tromped across campus to show off one of the biggest Chinese pistache trees in Arizona.

Davison — always a steward of the horticultural recourses on campus — was stopped by grounds crew employees near the Arizona State Museum. They informed her that an alumni bonfire would be built adjacent to the Joseph Wood Krutch cactus garden. Wisely, Davison suggested that the crew hose down the garden to avoid a succulent inferno.

At the shady edge of the Chinese pistache's wide canopy, Davison took a deep breath and seemed to have briefly forgotten about the bonfire. "This is a gorgeous, huge tree," she said of the pistache, which can grow 40 feet high and wide. "People need to come and see just how big these trees can get. When you're buying a tree for your courtyard in a nursery, it's hard to imagine the tree's mature size. Here we have the full-size plant on display."

Davison, whose persistence and passion for plants helped make the arboretum a reality, is excited to have the public appreciate the hidden botanical treasures of the campus.

"The plantings on the campus are a series of experiments to find out what would grow in the desert," she said. "Only about half of the plants originally planted survived. The campus was a proving ground. Food-producing crops like olives were planted to test their viability in the desert. In the '20 to '30s, plant explorers brought Sonoran Desert plants into the campus gardens."

In the '70s and '80s, Davison explains, landscape architecture professor Warren Jones continued searching for desert-adapted plants. Jones alone is responsible for nearly half of the 400 types of plants found on campus, most of which were started from seed-lings that he collected from arid regions around the world and grew in coffee cans. When you're on the campus looking at plants, Jones' legacy is everywhere.

Although the campus maintains an air of clipped neatness, it still has mysterious corners. When asked about her favorite part of the campus arboretum, Davison replied, "The historical olive walk. These are massive old trees, and we don't know who planted them."

On the south side of the Engineering Building, she stopped to look at a haze of pink and cream-colored flowers produced by two silk floss trees. The flowers are large and lily-shaped and are so striking that she just stopped and stared up into the canopy of the largest South American silk floss in Arizona. "I love this tree," Davison said, putting her hand on the knobby trunk. There's no reason to doubt her.