Petey Mesquitey is usually recognized for his voice. At the Trader Joe’s checkout line, the cashier may ask how you’re doing today. After he answers, there is a long silence, then a spark of recognition.
“I can assure you that’s not going to happen at Benson Safeway,” he said with a laugh.
His voice has a warm, slow, musical sound that is recognizable to anyone who has listened to his radio show. “Growing Native with Petey Mesquitty” 31 years since the broadcast started. Every week on 91.3 KXCI, he entertains listeners with tales of desert-dwelling plants and animals, from the orange blossoms of fragile bushes in spring to the silhouettes of willow branches in the desert of winter. Starting at just over four minutes, this show is a short, beautiful ode to the Sonoran Desert.
“I have a lot to write about,” he said. “And ironically, I find myself coming back to many of the same plants. I said to a friend many years ago, ‘Oh, no more shows about Sotor or Dessert Spoon Dasirilion.’ You can’t make a .’ He said, ‘For thousands of years people have been talking about the same plant.
Petey Mesquitty was born Peter Giarach in Lexington, Kentucky, the son of two scientists. When applying to his colleges, Giarach chose the University of Arizona because it took him 15 minutes to apply and because he read “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac as a teenager. It is said that it was because
“Tucson sits on the beautiful Mesquite Riverbed and overlooks the snow-capped Catalina Mountains,” wrote Kerouac in 1957’s On the Road. From washrooms and trailers to bustling downtown streets with banners, it’s all California. ”
Giarach headed west.
“My staple joke is Kentucky, where the horizon stretches from ear to ear. And here the horizon is forever,” Giarach said.
My first major at the University of Arizona was anthropology. He took classes in entomology and ornithology. (“Ironically, I failed botany,” he said.) Giarach marveled at the endless possibilities of university studies—“that is, changing majors each semester. can’t you?”
He immediately fell irrevocably in love with Arizona. “My go-to joke is Kentucky. The horizon stretches from ear to ear,” Giarach said. “And here the horizon is eternal.”
Giarach is tall and slim in real life, with a long white mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. He speaks in a thoughtful, lyrical tone, laughs and swears, happily but gently appreciates sitting at the kitchen table overlooking the garden’s Emory oak trees on a 100-degree day. At 75, he is still in awe of the desert and its people.
While at UA, Giarach met George Hawke and together they formed Dusty Chaps. Giarach sang and played the accordion, or “squeezebox” as he called it. They began playing small clubs “drinking beer and smoking reefer”, and by 1971 played six nights a week at the former Poco Loco on Speedway and the Stumble Inn (now The Rock) on Park Avenue. It was way.
“We were a bunch of white men who were really influenced by country-western at first, but then we realized this whole borderline sound,” said Giarach.
On a school field trip to Kirika House, Giarach skipped school for Dusty Chaps’ gig on St. Patrick’s Day, choosing a career in music rather than finishing school. By 1977 the band had signed to Capitol Records and included Pat McAndrew on guitar, Leonardo Lopez on drums, Steve Solomon on keyboards, Bill Emry on violin, Red Davidson on piano and Ted on pedal steel. Added hockenberries. . Giarach said they were published in Rolling Stone magazine.
“We were crazy, but we had a lot of fun,” Giarach said.
Labor Day weekend, the surviving Dusty Chaps, Giarach and Hawk will reunite for a performance at the HoCo Fest at Club Congress.
Giarach, far right, posing for a photo with Dusty Chaps.
By the end of the 1970s, Dusty Chaps had broken up–“I was a cripple when it ended,” said Giarach–and started a small band called the Sonora Mudpuppies. His wife Marian, known to listeners of his show as Mrs. Mesquiti, told him he might as well find a job. Giarach became a $2 an hour worker at a local wholesale nursery school.
While working at the nursery, Giarach found himself having to learn the scientific names of the plants he was selling. During recess, he would sit down with his teenage colleague and try to remember the names of the plants.
“And it kept evolving. I went from nursery school to nursery school. Every time I got something that looked cool, I applied there. A lot of places got rejected,” he said. said. “I thought I was pretty cool, but I wasn’t. I’m always learning.”
After working at a nursery school in Santa Fe, Giarach, Marian, and their two daughters moved back to Tucson. He’s been a KXCI listener for some time now, so “I had to do a weird parking in the driveway and I heard it on the car radio,” he said. There, he took a disc jockey course from KXCI co-founder Steve Hahn.
Giarach had an idea for a show about the desert. he submitted the tape. The KXCI director at the time had a three-minute slot open on Wednesday at 3pm.
“I said, ‘I’ll take it.'”
Peter Giarach at his home in Cochise County.
He said the name Petey Mesquitty was given “stupidly”. A tribute to the mesquite tree.
Giarach first began recording “Growing Native” on a reel-to-reel tape that had to be erased using a magnet. The first episode was an interview show that Giarach described as “terrifying.”
“I heard that and said it wasn’t me,” Giarach said. “So I just said, if you’re going to do this, you better have some fun.”
These days, he records weekly shows in a studio with deer skulls on the walls and Dusty Chaps records on the bookshelves, and the small window facing the desert is his inspiration.
“Sometimes it could be something you saw while driving to the mailbox. Marian and I just disappeared into the hills one day a week during the pandemic. They feed me a lot, and when I see the magical oak tree, I can start writing right away,” said Giarach.
Giarach has been recording ‘Growing Native’ for 31 years. “As I said earlier, if you’re going to do this, you better have fun,” he said.
Carol Anderson, better known to KXCI listeners as Ruby from the 1985 music show Ruby’s Roadhouse, was one of Giarach’s early champions when the show began in 1992.
“People like me have lived in this desert for a long time and love it, but the way he presents it makes us love it even more,” says Anderson. I was. “He’s part of us. He’s part of our tribe.”
Thirty-one years later, “Growing Native” is still just as charming, funny, and moving minutes as it was in 1992, and it’s been going on so long that many Tucson residents are listening to Giarach on their car radios. I grew up listening to your voice.
“It reminds me of when I was in college in the ’90s,” said KXCI production manager Bridget Sam. “He had to listen to an entire episode, so he sat in the parking lot of the college’s west campus and waited for ‘Growing Native’ to finish before heading to class.”
Giarach is above all a storyteller. He observes the world around him carefully and reverently. He notices the chirping of cicadas, the smell of wet creosote, which he turns into poetry.
“His storytelling is very compelling, whether he’s talking on the mic or actually under the stairs,” Sam said. “I think it’s a real pleasure for him to be able to share his expertise with people.”
Giarach and his dog, Brawley, near his studio in Cochise County.
In 1996, Giarach moved from Tucson to what he calls “Appacheria” in Cochise County. He lives on his 40 acres of land that he shares with his wife Marian, dogs, chickens and of course plants.Giarach started spadefoot nursery He leaves his home to grow plants for wholesale. He was contracted by the Forest Service to plant saplings along a large stretch of the Mount Lemon Highway and worked as the director of native plant outreach at the Tucson Botanical Gardens.
In 2018, Giarach, her daughter Katie (known to KXCI staff as “Sweetie Mesquitty”), and son-in-law Jared McKinley brought Spadefoot Nursery to Tucson’s East Broadway retail space. extended to
In between recording “Growing Native”, Giarach gave lectures and occasionally went to the farmers market in Bisbee or Silver City, New Mexico to sell plants, where, like most places, and be greeted like a rock star.
“I met so many wonderful people,” Giarach said. “I laugh so much that my jaw hurts and I’m like, ‘Oh, I can’t say anything anymore.’ I like that part, I confess I left a little mark.”
Giarach told a story about when he was selling Emory oak at a farmers market. While other acorns can be soaked in water overnight and eaten, Emory oak (bellota in Spanish) acorns are sweeter and can be eaten right off the tree.
“When people saw me growing Emory oak, little granny and sometimes children would say with their beautiful accents, ‘Wow, you’re growing Bellota.’ Old people would say, ‘Oh, my parents.'” They took us outside and camped for days collecting acorns,” Giarach said. “They just started telling stories and then some of the women started crying. Just because I grew that oak tree and it brought them such memories. I didn’t realize I was creating magic.”
Giarach has no intention of stopping ‘Growing Native’. His show is currently playing on Tucson and Bisbee radio, Public Radio Exchange, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, allowing fans nationwide to hear “Growing Native.” Giarach said he receives fan letters and care packages from places he didn’t even know had listeners.
what’s next? “I don’t know,” said Mr. Giarach. “You know, I think it’s going to drop some nice acorns. Emory’s is already dropping and it’s one of my favorite oaks, so I’m going to grow a lot of it.”
Peter Giarach holds an acorn from an Emory oak tree on his property. “I wanted to live where oak and mesquite meet,” he said.
Giarach opens ‘The Best of Growing Native: Volume 1’, recorded in the late 1990s, with an accordion piece about the desert. Once that is done, he begins his monologue.
“In a sky that is almost always clear, clouds are special. Rain is very special. You know, a wildflower show happens every 15 years, even if it’s every seven or eight years. Even if there is, it’s very special. That’s the way it is, ‘that’s when you live in the land that we live in,’ he says. “Wildflowers and clouds. The shade of trees, the winter rains, the chirping of birds. All these become celebrations. We celebrate the land, the plants and the animals, and we are renewed.”
Perhaps that’s why Giarach’s show has been around for years. He shows us our everyday world through fresh eyes. The lilting call of the white winged dove, the majesty of the saguaro, the flowering of the Saguaro yucca flowers, and the fact that we are alive. I came here to witness that for him it was just a magic shot. In Petey Mesquitty’s Arizona, every leaf in the ironwood tree, every star in the desert sky is a miracle.
“The desert is beautiful,” Giarach says at the end of every show for the past 31 years. “The desert is beautiful, isn’t it?”
