What are the Carefree Desert Gardens?
Fifteen minutes north of Pinnacle Peak, the small town of Carefree has a free public garden in the middle of town. The Carefree Desert Gardens cover about four acres around 101 E. Easy St., with short paths past hundreds of desert plants, including a boojum tree and a crested saguaro, plus water features and public art. They opened in November 2011, and the self-guided walk is available year-round.
At the center is something older and stranger: the Carefree Sundial, built in 1959. It’s a steel frame covered in anodized copper, with a dial 90 feet across and a gnomon that rises about 35 feet over the plaza. It wasn’t only built to tell time. Solar engineer John Yellott and architect Joe Wong designed the gnomon as a solar heat collector, with copper tubes that heated water for a neighboring office building.
It’s an easy hour: walk the garden, figure out the sundial, then eat on Easy Street. Families and visitors who want desert plants without a hike will get the most out of it.
How to visit
Go in the morning. In winter, a 9 a.m. visit gives you long shadows on the dial and cool air for the garden. In summer, go early or skip it; there’s little shade.
Read the sundial correctly. The dial shows local solar time, about 27.7 minutes behind Mountain Standard Time, because Carefree is far west of the time zone’s meridian. The hour lines are adjusted for that, and an equation-of-time table on site corrects for the time of year. A small 1/48-scale model is there too.
Look for the standout plants. Find the boojum tree (a Baja California oddity that looks like an upside-down carrot) and the crested saguaro, whose top grows into a fan instead of arms. On some Saturday mornings, experts give free or donation-based talks; check the town’s calendar.
Park once. The gardens, the sundial and the restaurants and shops on Easy Street are all within a short walk.
Add a hike. The Black Mountain Summit Trail is about five minutes away, a steep sunrise climb that pairs well with an easy garden walk afterward. For longer desert trails, Spur Cross Ranch is just past Cave Creek. Back in Scottsdale, Pinnacle Peak Park is the closest city trail.
A sundial built to collect heat
Carefree was planned in the late 1950s as a desert community, and its sundial reflects the period’s interest in solar energy. John I. Yellott (1908–1986) of Phoenix was a pioneering solar engineer. He designed the dial with architect Joe Wong, and it was dedicated to K.T. Palmer, one of Carefree’s founders. The top 52 feet of the gnomon were coated with a special paint to absorb sunlight, and three copper tubes inside carried heated water to a building next door.
When it was new, you could see the dial from about two miles away. Shops and offices built up around Sundial Plaza over the following decades, and now you mostly find it by walking in. Carefree has long called it one of the largest sundials in the Western Hemisphere, a claim disputed by Sun City’s dial and two in San Francisco. Sources even disagree on the gnomon’s length.
Why it matters
Most of north Scottsdale’s desert is either preserve or private. The Carefree Desert Gardens are an easy, free, central place to see a wide range of desert plants up close, centered on a 1959 sundial that was also one of Arizona’s early solar experiments.