Mission Garden is a living agricultural museum that interprets 4,000 years of Tucson’s history through heritage fruit-trees, traditional local heirloom crops, and edible native plants. It is a nonprofit, volunteer-run educational organization. It is an important part of Tucson’s UNESCO City of Gastronomy Designation.
Four-thousand years of agriculture in this general location were made possible by the Santa Cruz River and its fertile floodplain. Archaeological evidence of plots, fields, irrigation canals, dwellings, and farming villages at this and nearby locations is abundant.
Mission Garden sits at the location of gardens that were once adjacent to Mission San Agustin, the Spanish colonial mission founded in 1771. The mission itself and its later-built convento are no longer standing.
