Once it grew in the desert wild, but now an ironwood at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum is all but boxed in by walls. To accommodate construction, the tree even underwent some chopping of its root system. Now, the old survivor is getting some recognition as a "Hero of Horticulture."

jill torrance / arizona daily star

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Trees. They don't say much.

But, if the 2007 Hero of Horticulture out at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum was in a talkative mood, it would probably say something like, "You've got some stones, a guy who makes his living on dead trees asking me what I think.

"For a hundred or so years I've been baked by the sun, parched by the droughts, snowed upon, peed on by Mexican gray wolves, gnawed on by mule deer, fenced in with a bunch of prissy flowers and then they dig a 30-foot hole next to me and chop through one of my roots. I tell you, I'm lucky to be standing.

"So, thanks for the award. Now leave me alone," said the unnamed 18-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide desert ironwood.

The tree was nominated last year by the museum staff for the Cultural Landscape Foundation's 2007 Landslide theme "Heroes of Horticulture," said George Montgomery, the museum's botany curator.

The national program — which honored 21 trees, or groups of trees, from around the United States for their cultural significance — included the museum's formerly anonymous old ironwood "as a symbol of the strength and survival instinct that desert inhabitants embody," according to a statement by Charles A. Birnbaum, the foundation's founder and president.

It's in good company.

There's a horse chestnut in Rochester, N.Y., that shaded Susan B. Anthony in the late 1800s; a 230-year-old bigleaf maple that was a traditional meeting place for Clackamas Indians in Oregon; and some southern live oaks that were standing during — and long before — the Civil War.

"We don't know how old it is," Montgomery said of the museum's ironwood. "You can't tree-ring-date ironwoods and some desert trees; they're opportunistic growers." They grow when there's water.

But Montgomery said this tree is probably about 100 years old, more or less, and has seen good times and bad. Since the museum was built in the 1950s, it's been good and bad.

At first, it was just a tree out in the desert. Then it was fenced in as part of the compound for the museum's breeding program for the Mexican gray wolf. The program brought the museum worldwide fame. It also brought the ironwood a little extra precious water, Montgomery figures, overflow from watering the wolves.

Then mule deer moved into the compound. The tree probably got a little extra "fertilizer" and, again, more than a natural ration of water.

Then, the compound was used as part of the museum's plant nursery. More water and less of the yellow stuff.

Thanks to the extra water, Montgomery figures, the ironwood is larger than it would have been if the museum had never moved in around it.

But it wasn't all fat times. In the last couple of years there was a building project that popped up around the tree. There's the Duncan Taylor Plaza that paved a ring outside its canopy area. And there are two new buildings, the Warden Oasis Theater and the Priscilla V. Baldwin Education Building ringing the plaza.

Excavation for the buildings went deep, Montgomery said, and involved chopping at least one arm-sized root.

But, the tree seems to be thriving.

It's in an area open to the public during museum operation hours.

And there are pictures of it and the other hero trees by famed photographers that can be seen at the Heroes of Horticulture Web site, and in the upcoming January edition of Garden Design Magazine.

George Eastman House International Museum of Photography: www.eastmanhouse. org/inc/exhibitions /exhibits.php

Heroes of Horticulture: www.tclf.org/landslide/