Natural History Wanderings

from the Marin CNPS

The roots of CNPS go back to 1938 when Howard McMinn, professor of botany at Mills College in Oakland, conceived of the need for a native plant botanical garden in northern California and headed up the committee that chose the site in Wildcat Canyon in the north Berkeley hills. He also succeeded in bringing on board James Roof, working at the time at the California Forest and Range Experiment Station in Berkeley.

The Regional Parks Botanic Garden for California native plants was built in 1940-42 by the East Bay Regional Park District with the aid of the Works Progress Administration. Starting in 1940, James Roof began the process of designing and laying out the different sections that would eventually be filled with plants from 10 diverse native plant communities of California. Unfortunately, the garden’s auspicious beginning was largely undone when Roof was drafted and sent overseas for four years during World War II. In his absence, the garden went untended, and on his return in 1946 he found a tangle of poison oak, head-high grasses, and weedy forests of willow and bay trees. Starting over with only a few helpers, he cleared the brush with fire and chain saws and returned to the field over a period of years to collect the majority of the garden’s plants a second time.

Read more at  The Start of Something Great – CNPS Marin