Lester Rowntree Native Plant Garden

When Lester Rowntree heard that the city of San Francisco was planning to sell the land where a cemetery lay, she lobbied the city to save the land. They ignored her. They probably hoped she’d go away, but Rowntree, a self-taught botanist and researcher on native wildflowers, wasn’t going anywhere. Not when a Franciscan manzanita, a low, spreading shrub native to California, was growing there. During the 1930s, this was a rare plant, and even today it is listed as endangered. Rowntree knew she had to do something.

Late at night, she snuck into the cemetery, and as KQED reported, “crawled among the gravestones, extracted the specimen (illegally), and rushed home to the Carmel highlands.” When Rowntree later told this story in her 1936 book, Hardy Californians: A Woman’s Life with Native Plants, she recalled that she’d “garnered it ghoulishly in a gunnysack.” Her life was devoted to cataloging and preserving native flora. While she lived in Carmel Highlands (in a house she bought from her earnings writing about plants) during the winter, she spent most of the year crossing the state in her car, packed with camping supplies, hiking gear, a camera, and seed bags. 

Rowntree often found her greatest discoveries when she parked her car and hiked. “My car is purely a means of transportation to the vicinity of these places,” she wrote. “No one who has not left the highway and followed out-of-the-way trails can have any conception of the poignant beauty of the haunts of California wildflowers.”

She later started a seed company, co-founded the California Horticultural Society, and left a treasure trove of over 700 articles and two books, including Hardy Californians, which catalogs hundreds of the state’s wildflowers. It’s no wonder that a garden blooming with native plants bears her name. 

Located inside the Mission Trail Nature Preserve, the Lester Rowntree Native Plant Garden is an acre dedicated to highlighting and preserving native plant life. Managed by volunteers, each of the over 100 plants in the garden are labeled with their names and information about the species that Rowntree worked her whole life to spotlight. And though the flora is the highlight, the area also offers opportunities for birdwatching as chickadees, juncos, and hummingbirds swoop and fly nearby. 

It’s a spot for quiet reflection, both on the plant life that surrounds you and for the woman who made it possible. As Rowntree wrote of her flora expeditions, “​​I didn’t take this up for the poetry of it. […] I honestly wanted to find out about California wildflowers. There was little written about them in their habitats and nothing at all about their behavior in the garden, so I made it my job to discover the facts for myself.”