Kate Sessions Memorial Park

This guide to Kate Sessions Memorial Park in San Diego follows the woman who reshaped the city, leasing barren mesa in Balboa Park decades earlier and covering it in eucalyptus, oak and pepper trees from three continents until people called her the mother of Balboa Park. In nineteen thirty-three, pushing eighty, she petitioned the city with her neighbors for two acres of the hill above Pacific Beach, where she had moved her own nursery and house, asking for matilija poppies, bougainvillea and blue plumbago. The city agreed to what they called Color Park.