Kate Olivia Sessions (1857-1940)
Kate Olivia Sessions, was born in 1857 on Nob Hill, San Francisco went Oakland High School and studied chemistry, botany, agriculture, and horticulture, becoming the first woman to earn a science degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1881. As a child and teenager she helped her mother in their Oakland garden and reveled in collecting and arranging flowers, and in college she studied the molecular structures of the plants she was so fond of. After graduating she became a math teacher in San Diego, but soon found herself gravitating towards her familiar passion of working with plants and started a nursery and flower shop from her home. In 1892, Sessions leased 30 acres of the park now called Balboa Park in San Diego under the agreement that she would add one hundred trees to the lot each year and the city would in turn donate three hundred trees each year. This exchange is responsible for many of the elm, oak, pine, cypress, pepper, and eucalyptus trees found in the city today, which helped earn her nickname as the Mother of Balboa Park.
Sessions traveled around Hawaii and Europe, bringing back different species to San Diego’s landscape. She is responsible for introducing the now ubiquitous Jacaranda Mimosifolia, more commonly known as the fern tree, to Southern California, among many other plant species.
She also shared her work extensively with the world through papers and magazine articles and had a large network of botanist peers, among them Alice Eastwood, whom she shared a close friendship with, once writing to her in a letter, “Our friendship developed through flowers…our children, which I am and you are naming.
Flowers and plants were indeed her children, and she and her botanical cultivation work forever changed the landscape of San Diego.