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The vacant northeast corner of Broadway and Country Club Road is being redeveloped to accommodate a larger population — of birds, bees and butterflies.

In the past month, an army of volunteers with picks and shovels joined a guy in a grader to transform a flat lot filled with scrubby mesquite and landscape invaders into paths, ridges and mounds that will direct rainwater to feed basins filled with native vegetation.

Out with the Bermuda grass; in with the sacaton. Goodbye oleander; hello wolfberry. Farewell African daisy; welcome desert marigold.

The work is being led by the Ironwood Tree Experience with design assistance from the Watershed Management Group. Additional labor is supplied by the Volunteer Center of Southern Arizona.

On Saturday, about 80 volunteers from the three organizations and neighbors from nearby El Encanto Estates swarmed the site.

They planted, mulched, watered, contoured dirt and arranged rocks in a series of earthworks designed to make the most of the scant rainwater that falls on Tucson yearly.

The most amazing thing about this corner is not that it is sprouting plants, but that it hasn't sprouted buildings and asphalt over the past eight decades.

It was 1939, after all, when the lot diagonal to it became Tucson's first suburban shopping center — Broadway Village, designed by Swiss-born architect Josias Joesler and developed by John and Helen Murphey.

Lesser examples of commercial architecture now line Broadway for most of its many miles.

Cele Peterson, who started her long-running retail career in Tucson in October 1931 by opening her first dress shop Downtown, said she resisted multiple purchase offers for the lot over the years as it shrank to its current 1.5 acres with various widenings of Broadway and Country Club Road.

The lot was first transformed into community-friendly garden in the 1960s when Peterson, who had bought the lot and a home nearby in the late 1930s, joined with the Men's Garden Club to blade the lot and seed it with African daisies.

"I'm very happy to see this," said Peterson's daughter Katya on Saturday as she used her cell phone to cajole a landscape-materials firm that was donating rock to the project to also donate the cost of delivery. "It's enhancing the neighborhood," she said.

Cele Peterson, who visited the site midday, said the volunteer outpouring simply reinforced her long-held view that Tucson has retained its small-town cohesiveness even as it grew from the 30,000 population it had when she opened that first shop to the 1 million people it holds today.

"It's easy to become a metropolis," she said. "It is not easy to stay a unique, tight community. We are very fortunate to be a small part," she said.

Peterson noted that the water-harvesting techniques being employed on the lot are not new. "Permaculture has been around for many, many years," she said.

It is trendy again, as proponents of rainwater harvesting and lovers of birds try to spread the message that adapting landscape to the desert doesn't have to mean cacti and decomposed granite.

The push for this particular transformation, in fact, started with the Tucson Audubon Society, which has a goal of creating bird-friendly demonstration gardens all over town.

The idea is to create multiple stories of vegetation, from grasses to shrubs to trees that provide the variety of spaces needed for multiple species of birds. Audubon had its eye on Broadway/Country Club but needed a long-term lease to nab a grant.

The Ironwood Tree Experience, which is associated with Prescott College, stepped in when Audubon was unable to make its plan work.

The main goal of the Ironwood group, said director Eric Dhruv, is to "empower youth and connect them to their community" through outdoor experiences and projects such as this one, the first of several planned "GreenPlots" around town.

Ironwood's partner in the venture, Watershed Management Group, was created to encourage judicious use of rainwater and storm runoff by showing people how to do it, said Executive Director Lisa Shipek.

This plot joins four other demonstration sites designed and developed by the group. At some, cisterns catch and hold rainwater for irrigation. Others, like this one, work passively and will ultimately rely on the water that falls on site or runs off from nearby streets.

For the first year, volunteers will rotate watering duties, said Shipek, but once the plants are established, rainfall should do the rest.

Other rainwater harvesting sites designed by Watershed Management Group

• Originate Natural Building Showroom 526 N. Ninth Ave.

• Argentina Polo and Leather 37 W. Fifth St.

• The Nature Conservancy 1510 E. Fort Lowell Road

• Ward III City Council Office 1510 E. Grant Road