In Love with Everybody

Let me tell you about about my walk in the Botanical Garden with Helen McKenna, whose connection to the place stretches over more than 50 years.

Helen with the bench dedicated to her mother-in-law Elizabeth Gallup Ridley. She dedicated another bench for her mother located near the bathroom and the water fountain. “Because that's what my mom always liked. when we'd go to the Park.

She’s been a volunteer on projects such as mapping all the bloom cycles of the Garden’s magnolias. She worked as docent for more than two decades and for a long time, she and her husband, Allan Ridley led birdwatching and moonlight tours. She also served on the Garden’s board for 13 years, through many tumultuous decisions including the name change from Strybing Arboretum in 2004, and the 2010 decision to start charging an entrance fee, which was so contentious, the director received death threats. She stopped doing anything official a few years ago, but still visits regularly. “It’s like a second home.”

She’s 82 now with sparkling blue eyes. On this cold day in late June, she’s wearing bright red lipstick and a fuzzy wool cap. She has the curiosity and enthusiasm of someone who spent a career in education. She taught high school science, then worked as principal at Wallenberg High School and remains eager to share information. Even before we’d passed through the entrance, she guided me over to a potted succulent I wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.

“It’s a spiral aloe, from the Drakensberg mountains in South Africa, and it's rare and endangered.” The petals can spiral either clockwise or counterclockwise, she added. The pinwheeling petals were mesmerizing

What makes the difference? I asked.

“DNA!”, she said cheerfully. “The same things that makes difference in everybody.”

Once inside the Garden she asked what I wanted to see and I suggested she show me the parts she liked best. “Oh you know, I’m in love with everybody here in the park,” she said, and it soon became clear that wave of affection swept broadly. ”Everybody” included exotic plants and natives, all types of trees and flowers and cacti and birds and squirrels and fat carp in the ponds and kids dipping their hands in the fountain and hard-working staff and volunteers and maybe even well-designed walls made of monastery stones, benches named in the honor of family and friends, and staircases that lead down to shady dells. Her delight and deep knowledge of the place made for the ideal guide. Here are some highlights of our afternoon together.

“So this is a wonderful garden. It’s a great collection of plants,” she said as we entered the MesoAmerican Cloud Forest.

It’s a section filled with vine-covered trees and a dense understory of epiphytes, ferns and shrubs, most collected from the Mexican highlands. Helen herself joined took part in at least one collecting expedition with botanist Glenn Keator. Those were the days “before permits. You would just take some seeds and cuttings and bring them back.”  

She and her husband chose the Cloud Forest  for a bench dedicated to the memory of his mother. “We wanted to pick a place that was secluded, where we could work on our homework. We had a lot of papers to correct since we were both science teachers. Back then the overstory wasn’t as developed. It was pretty sunny in the afternoons.” We sat for a moment on the bench now pooled in a shade that indicated time’s passage.

Helen next took me to see what she said was her favorite tree in the Garden: a massive California buckeye with branches reaching wide in every direction.

“Look at the form,” she said. “There’s not many trees is you see in San Francisco with that much space to grow.”

Longtime Golden Gate Park superintendent John McLaren planted the tree there at some point before the arboretum was officially established. From his earliest days as superintendent, he wanted to include a botanical garden in the park, Helen said. Long before wealthy widow Helene Strybing left a bequest to build the garden in 1926, McLaren “was putting in anything he thought was going to be pretty fabulous in this place. He didn't have a plan.”

A bit later we entered the Redwood Grove, “McLaren had his guys planting this in 1906. And the earthquake happened. And he told his workers a couple days after the earthquake, you have to come back to finish planning that redwood grove. He was a hell of a taskmaster.”

She had me feel the soft, bright green tips of the redwood leaves – the year’s new growth – and smell the perfumey wild California azaleas. She pointed out the elderberry bushes, wild ginger and big-petaled oxalys carpeting the ground. “What's so remarkable about this garden is it replicates native habitat completely. It's the only garden like that that we have —  that has the plants of the redwood forest where they're supposed to be.” Maybe that’s why it feels more like a world unto itself than any other part of the Garden.

She pointed out one redwood with white shoots sprouting from its base. “Even though this is a regular redwood tree, a part of it has the gene for the albino form. Now these shoots could not live unless they were tapping in to the green guys who are making the sugar. And that is because they're albinos. They can't make sugar. They can't photosynthesize.”

A pair of squirrels scurried across the path and into one of the trees. “Now these are Eastern grey squirrels. Nobody knows whether they took the train or what they did to get out here. But they've been in the park for a long, long time. Probably when McLaren was here, they'd already arrived.”

Further on we came to the succulent garden which is terraced on walls made of the famous monastery stones — the limestone remnants of a 12th century Spanish abbey that William Randolph Hearst acquired, disassembled and later dumped in the Park. (See my summer solstice post.) The garden exists, said Helen, because “we had an early garden director who absolutely loved these monastery stones and was crazy about succulents.” So mad for the them, in fact, that he reportedly used to spend the night in a small gardeners shack nearby so he could wake up to work on his beloved plants first thing in the morning.

She walked briskly along the winding paths, greeting people we passed with a big smile, and drawing my eyes to favorite plants –big orange proteas, a magnolia with a heavenly fragrance, a tree that only releases its seeds when it senses smoke. She tsked when she spied weeds poking out of the ground or signage that seemed inadequate. Both suggested to her that the Botanical Garden isn’t getting the love and support it needs. “These gardens require a lot of labor. And we don't have the gardening manpower to maintain them. The only way we can possibly survive is with volunteers.”

Funding was a perennial issue during all her years on the board. Raising $10 million to replace the ancient nursery where the garden’s plants are raised and propagated took more than 20 years. The new building is slated to open this fall.  “Plants don’t lobby. Plants don’t have people picketing for them,” she said. “Plants are not important to most people, even though they wouldn't be here without the oxygen that the plants are making or the food that they eat. But there's a huge disconnect in humans about their relationship with plants.”

She, of course, is deeply tuned to the connections. Minutes earlier, she’d been talking about how people don’t acknowledge the importance of plants before interrupting herself to note a rusty-throated Allen’s hummingbird sipping on a milkweed flower. “There’s the famous milkweed that monarch butterflies rely on,” she’d said.

Next stop was a place I’d never been: the Moon Viewing Garden, another of her all-time favorite gardens.

Nestled in a low spot, surrounded by magnolia trees, the garden is based on a centuries-old Japanese tradition of holding parties to view the full moon. “Isn’t that a great idea!” A deck overlooks a pool oriented eastward to catch the reflection of the rising moon. Helen and her husband used to light lanterns and bring visitors here for their moon walks. One night, after they’d ended the walk and were locking up “here comes this fox.  He goes right under the fence and comes into the Garden like, ‘You guys are gone. I'm coming.’ That was the only fox I've ever seen in San Francisco.”

To finish our tour, she took me to the Zellerbach Garden, created to showcase California perennials. It was a Monet brought to life: all soft pinks and purples. We sat on a bench and looked out over one of the Garden’s few long views. Far off, a man was practicing Tai Chi. Nearby, a robin sang. ”This is one my favorite places to just hang out,” she said. It was easy to understand why.

“So this view, the Buckeye, the succulents, the Redwood Grove. I mean, these are magical places,” she reflected. “I see people sitting together here having talks all the time. I’ve met several people who were proposed to here in the garden. It's that kind of place. We can just sit here and talk about anything. Nobody's listening. Nobody's around. You know, where can you find that in the city? Nobody's trying to sell you anything. Nobody's dog is coming by sniffing you, It's just a wonderful refuge. Right?”