Tohono Chul

Richard and Jean Wilson bought desert land northwest of Tucson in 1966, piece by piece, assembling what would become 49 acres overlooking the Santa Catalina Mountains. Developers came calling through the 1970s. Jean Wilson turned them down. "I don't want to sell the land," she said. "I don't want it cemented over. I want to preserve it."

The land had been citrus groves in the 1920s — frost-sensitive trees and date palms planted by Maurice Reid when this entire northwest stretch of Tucson was farmland. By the time the Wilsons arrived, subdivisions were closing in. They marked trails with lime, labeled plants, opened the ground to the public. In 1980 the Tucson Audubon Society cited them for saving the desert greenspace. By the early 1980s they'd established a nonprofit foundation to hold it.

Tohono Chul — "desert corner" in the language of the Tohono O'odham — was formally dedicated April 19, 1985. The Wilsons deeded the property to the foundation in 1988. Local tradition holds the park grew again in 1995, when an 11-acre parcel to the north came up for rezoning, and once more in 1997 when the Wilsons' Haunted Bookshop closed and they donated that final acre.

What you walk today is a botanical garden and nature preserve, not a manicured showpiece. Thirty-eight bird species live here year-round; fifty-seven more pass through seasonally. Gila monsters and bobcats move through the scrub. The Santa Catalinas rise to the north. The desert is doing what it does — the garden simply holds the space for it, in the middle of a city that paved over most of what used to be here.

Travel + Leisure named it one of the Great Botanical Gardens of the World in 2008. The Wilsons would probably say they just refused to let it get cemented over.