Fri, May 16, 2008
 Six young saguaros thrive in the shade of an older ironwood tree at the Audubon Society Mason Center, which will host its ninth annual Ironwood Festival on Saturday. Ironwoods can live up to 800 years. Jim Davis / Arizona Daily Star
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Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.04.2008
Well, old-timer, it took you 500 years to grow 30 feet tall, but you did it. Nice pink blossoms, by the way. Guess when you're your age, you can wear anything.
In honor of your longevity and the upcoming Ironwood Festival planned in your name, we've asked a few friends to sing your praises.
Ironwood tree, Olneya tesota, this is your life:
Do you recall this famous voice?
You may not have noticed me at first, I was such a little plant for so many seasons, but your branches shielded me from sunburn, frost and getting tromped by the cows that used to graze this bajada.
I remember when I got my first arm, at about age 30, I'd thought I'd reach up and pat your branch in appreciation, but apparently I've got a few more decades of growth before I can do that. Anyhow, my great-grandpa told me that, even though we saguaros get all the love hereabouts, a lot of us wouldn't be here without you and your fellow ironwoods.
Here's another celebrity, flew in with her family just for the occasion.
Thanks for the roost, my friend. The Harris family has spent many hours in your topmost branches, feeling the breeze, watching with our hawk's eyes for the movement of some tasty critter caught out between burrows, getting ready to team pounce in our uniquely choreographed fashion.
And this gentle creature has a few words.
Is the Harris hawk gone? I'll be quick — she and her brood make me nervous. I just wanted to thank you for sheltering and nourishing those wonderful wildflowers. We rabbits appreciate a little variety in our greens, not having developed the ability to make a tasty salad dressing.
Now, we all know that just about any old tree offers shade and protection from getting trampled. Heck, your garden variety mesquite will nurse a saguaro, but the ironwood is truly the champ hereabouts.
When the area's most noted naturalists conducted studies in support of creating the Ironwood National Forest, they came up with some amazing facts and figures.
The ironwood is a "habitat-modifying keystone species," according to the biological assessment coordinated by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
Scientists have identified beneficial interactions between the ironwood and 674 plant and animal species (this includes, of course, the ants and bees).
"As nurse plants, ironwoods provide safe sites for seed dispersal, protect seedlings from extreme cold and freezes, protect saplings from extreme heat and damaging radiation, and function as prey refugia," says the Biological Survey of Ironwood Forest National Monument.
"Also, like other legumes, they alter the soil composition beneath their canopies, enriching the soil with nutrients such as nitrogen."
On the walks she leads through the Audubon Society's Mason Center grounds, Lia Sansom, the society's community outreach coordinator, likes to point out the "nine-ironwood tree," which has nine saguaros growing beneath it.
A host of other vegetation also grows within its canopy.
Ironwoods are the tallest trees in the neighborhood, and therefore, the champion roost sites.
The birds who make use of them in turn enrich the soil beneath the branches with a "rain" of seeds, fruit and fertilizer. Talk about your perfect storms.
The ironwood will never be the signature plant of this region, so long as the saguaro is around. That's understandable. Nothing looks like saguaro. Ironwood, for all its many qualities, looks like a tree, and a dull one at that.
"Everybody knows mesquite," says Sansom, "and palo verdes are real showy and obvious."
But the ironwood's blue-green leaves provide denser shade, and they are much longer-lived.
They survive by shedding leaves and dying back when times are tough — coming back to live up to 800 years and developing a trunk denser than mahogany. Ironwood does not float.
And it barely biodegrades. The ironwood, its trunk resistant to bugs and rot, is a useful perch long after it's dead.
Longevity alone makes your average ironwood more valuable than those lesser trees, Sansom notes.
But she doesn't want to diss the other plants at her 20-acre preserve on the Northwest Side simply to make a point about the ironwood.
"It's the entire ecological community we want to protect," she says.
And to celebrate.
● Contact reporter Tom Beal at 573-4158 or tbeal@azstarnet.com.
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