Planting of 2 Trees Honors Kate Sessions, Adds to Her Legacy
Rocco Torres is now 81, moves a little slowly and stands with shoulders slightly stooped. But he “just can’t stay away from plants.”
On Friday, in a crowd of more than 30 smiling people, Torres chuckled as he recalled the woman who played a major role in developing his deep love for nature.
Torres described for his audience how Kate O. Sessions, known as the Mother of Balboa Park and the dean of California horticulturists, planted her trees and flowers around town more than 50 years ago.
Some laughed, while others smiled as they watched Torres physically act out Sessions’ way of planting trees. Taking three measured strides, he then dug his heel into the ground, forming a “V,” all the time looking intently at his feet. When he was through he pointed back at each one of his steps and said, “Plant one there, there and there.”
Torres was Sessions’ chauffeur as well as co-worker from 1924 to 1930, but his frequent smiles and colorful memories betrayed a fondly remembered friendship with the woman whose birthday and memory everyone was gathered to celebrate. The celebration, which also commemorated the 100th anniversary of the founding of her Mission Hills Nursery, was marked in Presidio Park by the planting of two rare trees that Sessions introduced to San Diego. It was a tribute that Sessions would no doubt have appreciated. Sessions died in 1940 on Easter Sunday in La Jolla at the age of 83.
Donald Hartley, vice president of the San Diego Historical Society, shed some light on why Sessions is considered such an important part of San Diego’s history.
“This girl we’re talking about is responsible for most of the trees in Balboa Park . . . It was nothing but scrub” before she began planting there, he said.
In a book about Sessions, author Elizabeth C. MacPhail said, “She was one of the state’s first environmentalists and conservationists long before the terms became popular.”
Katherine Olivia Sessions was born in San Francisco on Nov. 8, 1857. Both of her parents were natives of Connecticut and newcomers to California.
Sessions attended the University of California, Berkeley, where she received a degree in science. After graduation, she came to San Diego in the late 1880s. In 1892, Sessions leased 30 acres of city parkland at 6th Avenue and Upas Street for a plant nursery in exchange for setting out 100 trees a year in the park and giving the city another 300 trees.
Sessions introduced many foreign trees to the city, such as the cork oak from Spain, camphor from Asia, rubber trees from the tropics and several kinds of eucalyptus from Australia. She also cultivated seeds from Baja California, South America and elsewhere.
Said by many to be primarily responsible for all the greenery in San Diego, Sessions was instrumental in landscaping the 1,400-acre Balboa Park. She was also responsible for landscaping the grounds of Hotel del Coronado, was instrumental in the planting of Presidio Park, and became known as the “No. 1 Citizen of Pacific Beach” for her landscaping work there.
As much as Sessions loved her plants, she didn’t love them too much to give some away. According to Kristy Freeman, a member of the San Francisco Historical Society who has done an extensive amount of research on Sessions, “Sessions gave away more plants than she sold. If it were not for the generosity of local businessman George Marston and others, her debts would have been unpaid at her death.”
Torres also remembers Sessions as a woman who didn’t seem to care a lot about money.
“You can give her the money, but she don’t care about the money at all,” he said.
Torres, who did some of the original landscaping work with Sessions, remembers one time in particular where her love for trees surpassed any concern for money. Sessions had told him about a landscaping job they were to do for a woman whose home overlooked La Jolla Shores. When they arrived at the home, the woman answered the door with her dog close behind. Sessions asked the woman if the dog was hers, and when the woman said that it was, Sessions reportedly said, “If you’re going to keep the dog, then I can’t work for you. Rocco, let’s go.”
Torres also recalled what Presidio Park looked like before Sessions worked with it.
“The park was one dirt road . . . it was nothing, just wild,” he said.
Presidio Park is now almost a painting of various multicolored trees and flowers. The two additions planted Friday were donated by Frank Antonicelli--whose family currently owns the Mission Hills Nursery and whose father previously worked with Sessions. They are a Firewheel tree whose scarlet and yellow flowers will be arranged in clusters “like spokes of a wheel” when it blooms in three years and a Markhamia Hilderbrand Tii, a tropical tree that will be displaying golden trumpet flowers within a year.
