1907; it is the oldest garden club in Southern California. The garden club was influential in teaching San Diegans how to grow ornamental and edible plants, at a time when most San Diego landscaping consisted of dirt and sagebrush. Sessions worked with architect Hazel Wood Waterman on the garden design of a single-family home near Balboa Park built by San Diego socialite Alice Lee. Personal life Sessions never married. Sessions maintained a close and lifelong friendship with Alice Eastwood and may have been a member of the LGBTQ+ community. Sessions lived to be 82, when she died in San Diego on March 24, 1940. She is interred in Mount Hope Cemetery. Honors Her work with plant introduction, as well as her extensive writing on the subject, won her international recognition. At the California Pacific International Exposition on September 22, 1935, the day was dedicated to Sessions, where she was named the "Mother of Balboa Park". In 1939, she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Frank N. Meyer medal of the American Genetic Association. In the San Diego area, the Kate Sessions Elementary school in Pacific Beach bears her name, as does Kate O. Sessions Memorial Park on Mount Soledad, located less than a mile from the school and constructed only a few years later. A bronze statue of Sessions, dedicated in 1998, is situated in a prominent location in Balboa Park, in the southwest corner of Sefton Plaza, near the Sixth Avenue entrance to the park. In 2006, the Women's Museum of California inducted Sessions into the San Diego County Women's Hall of Fame, under the title of Trailblazer. In popular culture A 2013 children's picture book, The Tree Lady: The True Story of How One Tree-Loving Woman Changed a City Forever, tells the story of Kate's life, education, and contribution to San Diego civic life. Selected works References Bibliography External links Kate O. Sessions Collection 1891-1940, San Diego City Clerk's Archives Kate Sessions Collection 1876-1940, San Diego History Center Finding aid to the Kate Sessions Collection, Online Archive of California. The San Diego Natural History Museum Research Library houses a significant collection of Kate Sessions' papers. 1857 births 1940 deaths American horticulturists American landscape and garden designers American landscape architects American designers Scientists from California Women botanists Women landscape architects Women horticulturists and gardeners American women architects California people in design Landscape design history of the United