F.A.Q.

From her earliest days in San Diego, Sessions championed City Park (later Balboa Park). While leasing park land between 1892-1902, she planted more than 1,000 trees on park land and demonstrated the park’s horticultural potential with her nursery crops and flower fields. Throughout her life she advocated for park preservation and development. She did not, as is sometimes reported, landscape or “lay out” the entire park.

No. Sessions chose to lead an independent life, but she remained close to her parents, her one sibling, Frank, and several cousins.

Sessions and Mary B. Coulston of the Park Improvement Committee organized San Diego’s first observance of Arbor Day on March 17, 1904. Trees were planted in City (Balboa) Park.

Although there is scant documentation of Sessions’ involvement with these issues, she attended a lecture on rights for women at age 19 and was a founder of an organization devoted to women’s education and societal elevation. She spoke out on occasions when she felt discriminated against as a woman.

No. Although this claim appears in some sources, it is Rosa Scriver who achieved this distinction, earning a UC science degree in 1874. Other women followed in the seven years before Kate Sessions earned her degree in 1881.

Sessions was not formally educated or trained as a botanist. After graduating from college she studied for a time with botanist Sarah Plummer Lemmon and over the years acquired a respectable depth of botanical knowledge through self-study, her applied botanical work, and through her correspondence and association with leading botanists.

Sessions was not formally educated or trained as a landscape architect and she never referred to herself as one, but her business advertised “gardens planned and planted.” She was an in-demand creative garden designer who is now acknowledged as a leader in the Arts & Crafts garden style. Sessions did not landscape Balboa Park.

Sessions constantly experimented with new plant species to learn which were good choices for Southern California. In her time, many varieties of eucalyptus were seen as miracle trees in this climate. They were easy to propagate, grew quickly and did not demand much water once established. In more recent decades it has been shown that some eucalyptus species are not the best choice for residential and dense urban environments. With this knowledge, Sessions would be likely to employ her usual pragmatic judgment, championing the kinds of eucalyptus we should still plant and identifying those best avoided.

Sessions had a special fondness for queen palms, acacias, jacarandas and tipuana tipu trees, but did not single out one tree as a favorite. She encouraged the planting of trees generally and popularized several species that still brighten San Diego with colorful seasonal blooms.