Thursday, April 9, 2026 | 4-5:30 PM | All Ages
FREE EVENT
The Howard Scott Gentry Award honors those who have advanced the understanding and care of agaves and desert plants, continuing the legacy of Gentry’s foundational research in the Sonoran Desert.
In 2026, we recognize Wendy Hodgson is honored for her decades of leadership in agave and desert plant research and conservation, including field-based work documenting agave diversity, ecology, and cultural uses across the Sonoran Desert. Through her work at Desert Botanical Garden, she has connected science, conservation, and public education, leaving a lasting impact as a mentor and field botanist.
She traces the story of agave in the Sonoran Desert from pre-contact knowledge to present-day research and conservation, highlighting the importance of Indigenous leadership in stewardship.
Lecture: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
RSVPs are appreciated, not required to join!
EVENT SPONSORS
TUCSON BOTANICAL GARDENS
Previous Gentry Awardees
2025: Diana Carolina Pinzón and Fabiola “Faby” Torres Monfils
2024: César Iván Ojeda Linares
Gary Nabhan (Honorary Gentry Award)
2023: Carlos Camarena
2022: Luis Egiarte and Valeria Souza
2019: Tony Burgess (Listen below!)
2018: Patricia Coluinga and Daniel Zizumbo Villareal
2017: Ana Guadalupe Valenzuela Zapata
Howard Scott Gentry (1903 - 1993) was a botanist, ethnographer, and agricultural explorer recognized as the world’s leading authority on agaves.
Dr. Gentry made his first field trip to the Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico in 1933. He spent most of the next twenty years exploring and recording the plant life of northwestern Mexico, captured in among other works his beautiful work Rio Mayo Plants, documenting the plants and ethnobotanical knowledge of the northern Sierra Madre. He worked for the United States Department of Agriculture from 1950 to 1971 as an agricultural explorer traveling the world to collect useful plants. He was then a research botanist with the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, Arizona , where he pursued his investigations into agave, culminating in the seminal Agaves of Continental North America. Late in his life, he continued his work with arid land crops at his Experimental Farm in Murrieta, CA until his last day.
The Gentry Award recognizes and aims to perpetuate what Dr. Gentry’s recognized as the Human-Agave Symbiosis, in which, “the uses of agave are as many as the arts of man have found it convenient to devise."
For more information on the life and work of Dr. Gentry, please see this 1994 article by Isabel Shipley Cunningham, “Howard Scott Gentry, 1903–1993.“
Caption of picture: Howard Scott Gentry, February 1981. Photo by Richard Felger.