Sessions-Brandegee Hesper Palm Grove: Hiding in Plain Sight

By Nancy Carol Carter

A Balboa Park garden with both historical and botanical significance has been hiding in plain sight for more than a century. Recent action by the San Diego Parks and Recreation Board lifted the garden from obscurity by officially naming it the “Sessions-Brandegee Hesper Palm Grove.” The garden will be added to park maps and marked with an interpretive sign.

In her only foreign plant hunting expedition, horticulturist Kate Sessions ventured to the tip of Baja California where she collected seeds of a palm new to science. She introduced the newly named San Jose Hesper palm to cultivation in the United States, propagating them by the hundreds at her Mission Hills nursery.

As Balboa Park was landscaped for the 1915-16 Panama-California Exposition, Sessions oversaw the planting of 325 small Hesper palms in a canyonside grove near the west end of the Cabrillo Bridge. The now endangered and increasingly rare palms are growing northeast of the San Diego Lawn Bowling Club green.

Sessions dedicated the planting to Townsend Stith Brandegee (1843-1925) and his wife, Dr. Katharine Curran Brandegee (1844-1920). Active field botanists and respected scholars, the Brandegees settled in San Diego in 1894 where they developed the area’s first botanical garden, built a scientifically important herbarium and advised on improvements to Balboa Park.

T.S. Brandegee led the 1902 Baja expedition that introduced the Hesper palm to the United States; its botanical name is Brahea brandegeei. ”Brahea” is Latin for the Greek “hesperos,” meaning evening or western as in the western edge of North America. San Jose refers to the San José del Cabo area at the tip of the Baja peninsula where the Brandegee expedition operated.

Photo: Rachel Cobb