The Arboretum Tomé, A Living Laboratory, Is Open Year Round

The Arboretum serves as a living laboratory and is available for school field trips, students, home gardeners, researchers, and individuals. The Arboretum is a great place to observe mature native trees, to study, to be inspired, or to see the great variety of native landscaping trees the southwest has to offer. If you're in the area, call us, for access!

During Fall, The Arboretum Tomé, presents a great variety of colorful fall foliage,

a visual sensation for the eyes!

The Arboretum Tomé is a collection of trees endemic to the desert Southwest. The collection includes a huge collection of Oak trees, the genus Quercus, along with Redwoods, Giant Timber Bamboo, and Maples, including a Western native sugar maple called the Big Tooth Maple, Acer grandidentatum.

The Arboretum also contains the production nursery for Trees That Please Nursery and is the proving ground for Soil Secrets products. All plants on the Arboretum grounds and Trees That Please Nursery are fed exclusively using the products and protocols developed by Soil Secrets.

Learn more about the products of Soil Secrets by following their blog at: http://www.soilsecretsblog.com

The Arboretum is open for tours by appointment only by contacting Trees That Please Nursery at

Phone: 505-866-5027
Email: treesthatplease@comcast.net.

Photos & Narrative By:

Stephen Sain
Staff Plant Physiologist

Comments

Weed Identification: Goatheads or Stickers

Goatheads ( Tribulus terrestris ) are native to Southern Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. Goatheads are also called stickers, sticker weed, bullhead, devil’s weed, and puncturevine. Goatheads are easily recognized by their prostrate growth form, leaves with leaflets, yellow flowers, and stickers (Goatheads). If you miss’em visually then they will stab you painfully in the fingers as you work your garden, or stick to your clothing and shoes. Goatheads are the primary reason local bicyclists must get “thorn proof” tires for riding on area trails and streets. Goatheads have prostrate stems that radiate outward from one central point. Leaves are compound with smaller leaflets. Lemon yellow flowers form along the stems and fertilized flowers form fruits. Fruits consist of several attached structures called nutlets (Goatheads). Each nutlet is a single seed that becomes hard or woody when mature. Each seed has two sharp spines that easily pene...

All About the Shantung Maple!

The Shantung Maple ( Acer truncatum ) is also known as the Purple Blow Maple due to the color of its newly emerging leaves which are red-purple (see photo below). These young expanding red-purple leaves change to green as they mature. Leaves are small, about the size of Japanese Red Maple leaves, perhaps 3’-4’ wide at maturity. The Shantung Maple grows 1′-2′ annually reaching 25″ tall and wide. This is our tree for all planting situations. This Maple does well in heavy clay, sandy soils, full sun, or part shade. It can be planted in a lawn or next to a hot asphalt street (see photo below). It seemingly is a happy tree enjoying life wherever it is placed. One place we would not recommend planting this tree is in a rockscape which is just too hot and inhospitable to support this beautiful tree. A smaller tree, the Shantung Ma...

How does nitrogen work in the soil, and where does it come from when we don't have a bag of fertilizer to supplement it?

I've spoken many times on this subject at conferences and it was the main theme of my talk when I represented North America at the World's 1st Humus Experts Meeting in Vienna Austria back in 2013. Most of the Nitrogen used by the vast tropical rain forests, or the fastest growing biomass place on Earth, the Coastal Redwood Forests of California, comes from the production of protein by the Free-Living Nitrogen Fixing bacteria in soil and the massive biomass structure of the mycorrhizal fungi. The proteins as it breaks down in the soil into amino acids are the building blocks of life and the explanation of the Soil Food Web. However, in order for those amino acids to enter a plant and be part of the nitrogen budget of the plant they must have the assistance of the mycorrhizal fungi. It's much more efficient for a plant to uptake amino acids whose molecules include nitrogen needed to build tissues than to uptake just nitrogen minus the amino acid. ...

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