If you're a plant lady, you're going to love learning about Kate Sessions. In fact, you might just add her to the list of famous people you would invite to dinner. Sessions was an iconic and well-respected botanist, horticulturist, and landscape architect who literally changed the landscape of San Diego, California.
Originally from San Francisco, Sessions studied science and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, according to the San Diego History Center. She took a job in San Diego where the Mediterranean-climate landscape consisted mostly of dirt and brush.
Local gardeners didn't have access to exotic plants and the area was in desperate need of trees. Sessions decided to help bring more-attractive and verdant vegetation to San Diego.
It wasn't long before Sessions owned a nursery and a flower shop. In 1885, at the age of 28, she started a nursery with two partners in San Diego. She also founded and led a gardening club, helping to educate local gardeners and provide them with seeds and plants.
Sessions became a landscape architect and taught gardeners about ornamental plants. Soon front yards of homes around San Diego were overflowing with eye-catching plants. She also taught the gardening club members about growing edible plants in their vegetable gardens.
In 1892, Sessions leased 30 acres in the future Balboa Park, and used the land to cultivate non-native plants. She made a deal with the city to plant 100 trees onsite each year of the lease. The deal also included Sessions planting 300 trees annually in San Diego itself.
Sessions happily made good on her end of the deal and put great care into every step of the process. The botanist curated a collection of tree seeds from around the world, many of which had never been seen in the San Diego area. The exotic trees Sessions selected included cypress, eucalyptus, jacaranda, pine, oak and pepper trees. She grew the plants in her gardens before transporting them and planting them throughout San Diego.
Sessions was so passionate about plants that she traveled the world on months-long trips to find inspiration and collect seeds to grow and plant back home in San Diego. She traveled to Mexico and Europe to see trees that her city didn't have yet.
Sessions didn't just grow foreign plants, however. Sessions was also one of the leaders in making native Californian plants available in nurseries. She propagated the native plants at her nurseries before making them available to the community to add to their gardens.
The legacy of Kate Sessions lives on today in San Diego. The Mission Hills Nursery that Sessions opened in 1910 still exists, the gardening club that she co-founded is still active, and many of the mature trees seen in Balboa Park today were planted by Kate herself. And the more than one thousand trees planted in her lifetime is more than enough to keep her spirit alive.
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