Collected by the San Diego History Center
Oral histories on file at the San Diego History Center include interviews with people who knew or worked with Kate Sessions. While interesting to read and offering an insight, oral histories must be read for what they are: one person’s subjective views and opinions and one person’s memories, which may or may not be accurate in regard to dates and events.
Andersen, Walter A. (1940- ) Interviewed Oct. 9, 1997.
Knows little of Kate Sessions except her reputation for being difficult and impatient with her workers.
Antonicelli, Frank (1924-2014). Interviewed Nov. 20, 1985.
(Frank Antonicelli is the son of Guiseppe (Tony) and nephew of Pasquale (Anton) both employed by Sessions in 1913 to learn the business. The Antonicellis purchased Sessions’ Mission Hills nursery when she moved her business to Pacific Beach.)
Sessions bought Mission Hills property from the Calvary Cemeteries [now Pioneer Park] north past Lewis Street, including parts of what is now Francis Parker School. Her office was on West Lewis and the site of the current nursery office was planted in poinsettias. “She was into this thing [poinsettias] well before Ecke.” “She was very much into production. More than having a retail nursery, she was a grower, more of a researcher.” “She was more of a horticulturist, interested in planning and production.” “Kate was not good at finances and she owed the Antonicelli brothers back wages so she sold them land.” Antonicelli bought out nursery around 1922-23.
“In 1913 Kate was making a tour of Europe, in Italy. There was a connection there, and she bonded the two brothers to come to San Diego and work for her. In those days you had to have a sponsor, and so they came to San Diego right from Italy and worked at Mission Hills Nursery. . . . The only story I can figure out–because my dad didn’t talk too much about past history–he was a conductor on a train and she was making a tour; and through some interpreter they were talking about America. . . . This lady made it possible for these two young men to come to America.” [Editor’s note: This story in the Frank Antonicelli oral history is inaccurate. Sessions did not travel to Italy in 1913. Whether she had a role in the Antonicellis’ immigration to the United States is unrecorded. When she traveled in Italy in 1925, she visited the extended family of the Antonicelli brothers in Gioia del Colle, delivering letters and gifts.]
She worked them very hard seven days a week but it didn’t bother dad a bit. San Diego–Mission Hills–was the center of the nursery business in the country there were 8-10 nurseries all abound her they moved in around Kate. Kate was instrumental in developing retaining walls. We did not have concrete block, so she would take a car to Camp Kearny and dig out big chunks of red field stone. She wanted to make more use of hillsides and slopes for planting. She was educating people that they could use retaining walls.
Present Pioneer Park: [Early on, the City of San Diego set aside five acres for Catholic and five for protestant burials in Calvary Cemetery.]
“On a portion of the property they had the Catholic cemetery, which was developed and then the protestant cemetery which was not. A Portion of the Protestant cemetery they used for a school ground. . . . The cemetery was run down. The Catholics cut out burials there in 1935.” . . . and stopped maintaining it people in Mission Hills were looking at it as an eyesore.
Kate Sessions planted the trees as a dividing line between the Catholic and protestant cemeteries.
“Some original plantings of Kate are the oak trees behind the nursery. She planted those and those are original oak trees.” “She was always looking for unusual plants. This is why she traveled around the world like she did, looking for things that would grow here, ones that would take our climate.”
Antonicelli, P.16: “Kate was very professional. She was dedicated to trees and bushes and plants. She didn’t have children but her plants and flowers were her children. This was her life. . . . Some ten or fifteen years ago I had tree plants for Kate in Balboa Park. ...” She scientific knowledge from university put her way ahead of other nursery people who were more like farmers, just doing the best they could with the plants.
Baldwin, Alice Margaret Brown (1890–?). Interviewed Dec. 18, 1971.
She moved to San Diego with her family in 1900. P. 18: Met Sessions “in her own garden which was down there on Upas Street at 6th.” She had a beautiful lathe house of violets and we used to pick them for her. Mother and Dad knew her well. “Then one day I was on the streetcar with her and she was talking about past times, and she said you know Margaret, your dad is the only man that ever gave me a bouquet of flowers and she said I always blessed him for that. She had so many flowers herself probably no one ever thought of giving her flowers, but that was one of my dad’s special things; he loved to give flowers to people. And when she was ill he sent her flowers. And when he was so ill–he died in November 1939, Miss Sessions wrote him a beautiful letter for mother and dad’s anniversary which had been the year before that.”
p. 19: Q: Was she like one of these girls you see now–one of those so-called rebel type or hippy type. “Oh, no, . . . I don’t think she was a rebel as far as women’s rights are concerned. She was just a perfectly wonderful woman herself. To shake hands with her, to hold her hand, you had the feeling of all the love that she had for the earth, for the world and for people.”
p. 21: “She was a very warm person and her eyes always twinkled when she was talking to you. They were blue. Her hair and her complexion had changed because most of the time when I knew her, her hair was just gray and sort of straggly. We have a picture of her at the Floral Association when she’s all dressed up, but her hair is gray there, but her eyes are just that lovely blue and she has a very sweet smile on her face. To me she was a very loveable person and lots of people thought she was so mannish about her clothes and not caring about being dressed up and that sort of thing, but underneath it you knew she was very much a lady. And she had a lot of influence on young people, as well as older people, I think, here in San Diego. [Editor’s note: Sessions’ expressive eyes are commented upon in various accounts, but this is the only instance in which her eyes are said to be blue. All other accounts refer to Sessions’ dark eyes.]
Bloomenshine, Helen L (1902-1995). Interviewed Aug. 10, 1989.
P. 19: “[My husband] and I bought a Chilean jasmine from [Kate Sessions] and she told us exactly how she wanted it planted. The hole should be so wide and so deep and so we bought the plant and she was on the truck that delivered the plant, and she examined the hole and agreed that it was okay. She wanted to see where her child was going to live.”
Bowersock, Earle Herbert (1885-1965). Interviewed Nov. 6, 1959.
Moved to San Diego in 1893 as a schoolboy and became acquainted with Kate Sessions, her brother Frank, and father Josiah Sessions. Later worked at the Sessions nursery doing some jobs. Kate and Frank rented property in Mission Hills from Bowersock’s mother at Lewis and Ingalls Streets, it was planted in fruit trees and eucalyptus trees. “Frank Sessions, I believe, was the first one to start commercial poinsettia growing. He had about three or four blocks, including ours, which he put into just nothing but poinsettias. Then, right across the street from us, [Lewis & Ingall] he put up a shed where he boiled the stems of the poinsettias and packed them in boxes and moss and shipped them to New York. That was the beginning of the poinsettia business here in San Diego. The blocks of poinsettias were really colorful.”
Gute, Helen Lowrey (1906-1998). Interviewed Sept. 22, 1994.
P.20-21: “Let’s talk about Kate Sessions who would come out in her long black skirt and her big straw hat to lecture on botany” [at Ocean Beach School]. Interviewer (and Gute’s school classmate, Ruth V. Held: “We had to go out and pick wildflowers and put them on pages for a notebook and identify them properly.” Gute: “And we had to press them. But she was the one who ultimately designed Balboa Park. . . . . “She was so renowned in San Diego for her wisdom in planting the Park.” . . . “She had straw in her hair practically. [Editor’s note: Kate Sessions did not design Balboa Park; rather, she supported the hiring of a professional landscape architect, Samuel Parson, Jr., in 1902 to create the first formal plan for City Park.]
Jerabek, Chauncy Irgens (1890-1978). Interviewed Mar. 8, 1977.
Recounts that Sessions could not give him work, but referred him to E. W. Scripps who hired him immediately. Sessions “was a different kind of woman than any kind of woman you’d ever imagine. She had a wonderful background, I mean her educational background. But she was all out for plants. Plants were the only thing in life that interested her. Of course, when I wanted to learn about plants, I don’t think there’s anybody here you could learn more from . . . . I’d go over there every Sunday–go over to her house. She didn’t go out so much for the money, she wanted to see things grow. She wouldn’t sell anything to anybody unless they’d plant it her way. If you wanted to buy some plants and wouldn’t plant them her way, forget it, she just wouldn’t sell them to you.” He tells another story of her strong-willed nature. With her full black skirt, a typical maiden lady.”
Minshall, Jane A. (1920- 2015) Interviewed Sept. 24, 1990.
Quotes Frank Antonicelli story about Sessions planting a straight line of eucalyptus trees in the Mission Hills cemetery, now Pioneer Park, to divide the Catholics from the Protestants.
Minshall worked as a landscape architect for the San Diego Schools (1947-75) and sometimes came across unusual plantings in school yards that had been done by Sessions. These were preserved where possible. Minshall landscaped the Kate Sessions Elementary School when it was built and interviewed people who had worked with Sessions to learn more about the plants that Sessions introduced and popularized. The most useful source was Ethel Bailey Higgins of the Natural History Museum, then in her 90s.
McClammy, Fern Lee [Vickery] (1907-1995). Interviewed Oct. 1, 1988.
P.2: Kate Sessions hired her father as a foreman at her nursery in 1907. P. 3: “Miss Sessions was a very remarkable woman. She had graduated from Berkeley with high honors in horticulture. She had started a nursery first in Coronado, then she made arrangements with the city fathers of San Diego to allow her to use property along Sixth Avenue for a nursery, and in exchange . . . She agreed to plant [areas of the park]. “She was a very sturdy, strong sort of woman. I can still remember her long, full, ankle length skirts and very heavy shoes. These shoes were important because in those days they didn’t have a lot of containers to grow their plants in. The plants had to be field grown and dug up in balls and vocered with burlap tied around them in order to sell them, to be transplanted to peoples’ homes. She had a picturesque vocabulary, I am told, although I never heard it. . . . “While she was very harsh and demanding of the men who worked for her, and called them by their first names, she always treated my father with the greatest respect . . . . She always called him Mr. Vickery. P. 5 “He worked for Miss Sessions for approximately five years and then he was very anxious to have his own business, as most men are, I think. So he bought a piece of property at University Avenue and Herbert Street and there he established his own nursery. [Editor’s note: Sessions did not have a degree in horticulture with high honors from the University of California at Berkeley. At the time students elected either a science or a classics curriculum. Sessions studied science.]
Montijo, Joseph Vincent (1901-1996). Interviewed Nov. 17, 1976.
[Kate Sessions] was a wonderful woman. I knew her [well]. She was a wonderful woman to talk to; she was very sensible. She would talk to you and she’d talk sense . . . .
Rainford, Alice Mary (1880- 1960). Interviewed Feb. 25, 1960.
Met Sessions when she was about eight and asked to work for her. Sessions said ask when you are older and Rainford did. She started working for Sessions in 1898. Rainford specialized in cactus which she had collected. At the 6th and Upas nursery the cactus had been neglected and Rainford was asked to clean them up and propagate more. She was the expert Sessions took along when planting cactus gardens. Sessions had shops in the Sefton Building and the Griswold Building, but she moved temporarily to a tent structure on Fifth Avenue and liked it–Rainford worked for Sessions for ten years then bought the florist business. p.8: “[Sessions had] an acreage of poinsettia. Those poinsettias are an interesting point in the history of San Diego, because poinsettias had never been grown in quantity. Miss Sessions developed a large field of them . . .and we shipped them to San Francisco, to Los Angeles, and all over the country. The packing of poinsettias was a very big thing during the winter season. Her brother, Frank Sessions, was in charge of that, of the growing of them, and later took over the entire management of them. That much preceded the Eckes’ growing of poinsettias at Encinitas and Cardiff.” “Miss Sessions would pack these in large wooden crates’ it had to be carefully done. . . .I used to go up there on days when we were doing heavy packing and help. They were packed in wooden crates, and the ends of the stems had to be boiled in order to make the flowers keep for shipment. Then we paced damp newspapers, and sometimes we put wet sphagnum on the stems. Then the stems were fastened down with a piece of wood well braced in there and they shipped really nicely.” “ We shipped them to San Francisco, New York–all over the country. But I think our best customers were in Arizona, and that was strange, because of course they could grow them there. But they didn’t at that time. And we used to ship much statice. Sometimes that is called “sea lavender.: . . . Miss Sessions used to grow great fields of that and we packed that in the spring months, after the poinsettia season was over. It too was shipped all over the country.” I bought the store in 1909 and didn’t work with Miss Sessions in the poinsettias after that.
Rainford, P.10: “I have very many happy memories of Mr. And Mrs. Alfred D. Robinson. ... we became good friends. In fact Mrs. Robinson was the one who urged me to purchase Miss Sessions’ store and financed it for me. They were interested in young people who wished to go into business for themselves, wished to accomplish something, and they financed a number of businesses and stores around San Diego.” After I purchased the business they grew a great many flowers for me. They were very generous with the amount of flowers, and when I was doing some special decorating, with special materials, I would go to them for flowers. They were most wonderful people. Mr. Robinson had barred-rock chickens and had a nice horse or two and a cow or two. But they went into the garden so thoroughly that they gave up all the land to his garden, built lath houses, a glass house, and became authority over the begonias. They were really his specialty in the later years of his life–begonias and choice ferns. He named his place Rosecroft Gardens.
Rainford, P.11: “Mr. Robinson established the Floral Assoc . . . he called a group of friends together . . . Miss Sessions was one of the very prime movers; she and Mr. Robinson, you might say, planned the whole thing. I should have mentioned her first, probably. She was tremendously active. Just at that time Miss Session became very busy, and I think that was one of the reasons the Robinsons were interested in my going into business, because they realized that Miss Sessions would have more time to devote to flower shows and nursery work if she were free of the cares of the store. And also, they wanted me to advance.” p.17: One of the first things in Miss Sessions store, before I purchased it, was her having a Japanese man come and open a class in Japanese flower arrangement. His methods were very similar to those the Japanese people use nowadays, and that women are studying now. His school of arrangement was the “Idenobo school.”
Rainford, P.19: We worked 12-14 hours daily and if there was a 10:00 funeral service we had to work from 4:00 a.m. as there was less refrigeration for flowers then.
Sessions, Milton (1900-1995). Interviewed Nov. 1, 1900.
Started working for his aunt, Kate Sessions, as a boy from age 8 through high school and briefly as a member of the firm. They were all dominant and ambitious, so he did not get along with her, she was “a very strong-willed person.” started his own business in Old Town in 1921. Meanwhile his father, Frank Sessions, had become the grounds superintendent at Camp Kearney.
P. 8: My Aunt Kate was a founding member of the SD Floral Assoc and she supported it through many years. She was partly a creator of the magazine and wrote many, many articles. Kate Sessions and Alfred Robinson “had no other interests, really, except their immediate interest in their plants”....
In 1928 traveled to Europe with Richard S. Requa on a study trip of Mediterranean architectural details he studied the gardens. Later did a similar trip in Mexico.
p. 15: My aunt and father “together bought a considerable piece of property that fronted West Lewis Street., running from Lark to Stephens “My father planted what was then raising cut flowers, poinsettias, and shipping them all over the US. He took a large place and put in poinsettias and my aunt established a nursery there. They had a very considerable enterprise there that went until about 1913. P. 15: “I never tried to get in the limelight that my aunt enjoyed a good part of her life.” p.16: “We got along well but there was only a reasonable period of time where we could work so closely together being a partner. I still have a contract in my safe which her attorney drew up making me a partner in that business.” P. 19: My aunt persuaded me to come into the nursery business and to live with her. My wife and I both lived with my aunt in a little portable house on the corner of Randolph and Ft. Stockton Drive We lived with my aunt until I decided to go into business for myself. P.22: “I felt that I certainly stood pretty close to the head of my profession. . . .
Stitt, Kathryn K. Garrettson (1892- ). Interviewed April 6, 1978.
P. 2: “People say Kate Sessions didn’t like children, but I think that’s entirely false. She insisted that each child got to plant something around their home to give them a feeling of proprietorship. When father would take us up to Kate Sessions’ nursery [from their home in National City], she would always have some little plants or sets in shoe boxes which she would give to whatever children came along. I remember getting some pansies which were just beautiful. She was a wonderful person.”
Switters, Emily Kelly (1900-1992). Interviewed Mar. 9, 1979.
P. 10: “We moved to San Diego in September 1914 . . . . The year before my father had a house built in Mission Hills [that was at one time part of the Kate Sessions nursery]. . . .My father had the whole block on the corner of Stephens Street and Montecito Way . . . Montecito Way . . . was down through a dip and in this dip was a p. 11 high fence covered with white small roses. Kate Sessions’ Nursery was across the street to the east. One block, or at least half the block was covered with a lath house and in this lath house there were ferns of all kinds. Where the street would eventually go through–and did go through–was her manure pile for fertilizer. There was a beautiful Papagontier rose that grew through the lath house roof. It was beautiful to see that rose in bloom from our second story.” p. 21 “Kate Sessions had her nursery across the street. At that time her north part faced on Stephens Street. She had two blocks there covered with shrubbery and so on and some beautiful palm trees. She hired Frank–he was just a young Italian boy, who worked there in the yard. We would see Kate around, with her sloppy hat; she wore men’s shoes and a floppy skirt with pockets, which she would reach into for this or that, pruning shears or whatever she might be handling. She was very determined. She knew how she wanted things done. She was a very interesting neighbor. She lived a couple of blocks down further east where her home was.”
Torres, Rocco (1903-1994). Interviewed Dec. 16, 1985.
An Italian immigrant who was hired to work at the nursery in 1923 or 1924 and became Kate Sessions’ driver in 1925 after an accident in which she was knocked down by her own Ford car after cranking the engine. His impression was the Sessions cared little about money and he saw her refuse a job at a La Jolla home when the owners had a dog. In 1930 the nursery had to lay him off, but Torres learned so much working for her that he earned his living as a gardener, later operating the Roseville Nursery on Rosecrans Street from 1940 until 1969. He called her “a really nice lady” who was thoughtful enough to alert him not to injure his back by too-heavy lifting. She presented him with a set of dishes when he married. He recounted her theory of the “dollar plant, five dollar hole”–that a large deep hole with amended soil would produce an excellent plant. Her landscaping style he described as natural–like, seeing the plants in a natural setting. Her style of landscape design was to place a heel mark where each plant was to go or to make a quick rough sketch with plant names.
He identifies a photo of elderly Sessions standing next to plant as being taken on her 80th birthday looking at a sweet pea growing on a trellis at Antonicelli’s house next to the nursery.
Wellington, Gerald Colburn (1907-1979). Interviewed Jan. 16, 1978.
P. 9: Wellington tells that his stepfather got him into the growing business, he had a nursery at 4th and Orange in Coronado. p. 8: “Kate Sessions, as you know, introduced into this country the mesembryanthemum (iceplant) and other exotic plants. And she pushed some of our native dorothy anthns (sic) She wanted to get this aloe and agave (century plant) garden going at the Park and in between them, they planted all these different mesenbryanthemums which she had introduced from the valley.” (“Them” refers to Kate Sessions and Chauncey Jerebek.) Kate Sessions was “a wonderful person, you can’t get away from that” [but she knew the swear words of a “muleskinner.”]. Follows what is probably an apocryphal story because it quotes Kate Sessions using an ungrammatical sentence.
Whitney, Walter K. (1888- ). Interviewed Dec. 13, 1977.
“Kate Sessions was the first, I think, to ship poinsettias to the eastern markets and I worked for her during Christmas vacations.” p.3. Kate Sessions was very businesslike. She ran the outfit. Her brother worked for her, but she was in charge and I thought at the time . . . she know what it was all about, she was the mover. What I remember of the plant where we worked . . . we had racks of steaming water. They would cut the plants, and stick the stems right in the steaming water to hold the sap. We had redwood shake boxes about 3 feet long, two feet wide, 2.5 feet deep. We lined these with newspapers. At one end of that box we had damp moss in which the stems were put. At the other end was a pillow of excelsior covered with oiled paper. As each plant was put in, each flower leaf was separated by little squares of oiled paper, then another layer of newspapers and then another layer until we filled the box. I worked in packing, not the field. It was quite a large workshop. On the wall was a long board covered with tools, painted gray except where the tool was outlined in black, and a sign that said, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” I enjoyed working for her and had no gripes. [year he worked for her not clear–1901??)