Explore Balboa Park Gardens: Cactus, Lily Ponds & Kate Sessions Audio Tour On the night of August 11, 2012, several thousand people descended on the Lily Pond in front of Balboa Park's Botanical Building, trampled lily boxes, broke a critical water pipe, and drained the century-old reflecting pool to two inches. The incident triggered a mayoral campaign firestorm, a felony vandalism investigation quietly closed without charges, and a $50,000 volunteer-funded restoration that included 27 hand-built lily boxes assembled with help from the Girl Scouts. That same pool had, in an earlier life, served as a Navy swimming training pool during World War I and a rehabilitation pool for wounded sailors in World War II. That is Balboa Park: a place where world-class horticulture and century-long civic drama exist side by side, and where almost none of the drama makes it onto the signs. The Balboa Park Gardens: Cactus, Lily Ponds & Kate Sessions self-guided audio tour delivers the stories the placards leave out. It covers nine of the park's most storied gardens and does so stop by stop, with grounded, specific narrative at every turn. The Story No Garden Sign Tells You Balboa Park draws more than 5 million visitors a year. Most know it as a collection of museums, a famous zoo, and an unusually green stretch of urban landscape. Fewer know that nearly everything green here traces back to one botanist and one deal struck in 1892. Kate Sessions leased 32 acres of barren chaparral mesa and agreed to plant 100 trees in the park per year and supply the city with 300 more. Over the decade that followed, she planted more than 1,000 trees in Balboa Park alone. She introduced species from Hawaii, Mexico, and Europe. She popularized the jacaranda in San Diego. She earned the title the city eventually gave her: the Mother of Balboa Park. The Botanical Building: A Lath Palace With a Secret Past At 250 feet long, 60 feet tall, and built from 12 miles of redwood lath over a steel frame, the Botanical Building is the largest lath structure in the world. It was nearly demolished in 1944. A neighborhood newspaper misidentified it in 1955 as a former Santa Fe railway terminal, and that error was reprinted as fact for more than 20 years. The building was condemned, shuttered for a decade, and reopened in 1959 minus its original stucco arcades. Those arcades returned only with the $26.5 million restoration completed in December 2024. Inside, the tour leads you past cycads between 75 and 150 years old, sourced from South Africa, Mexico, and Central America, many nearly impossible to obtain commercially. Above the entrance doorway, a staghorn fern spreads its antler-like fronds: the most photographed spot in the building, and one of the few plants that survived the renovation while hundreds of others spent years at an off-site city nursery. The Lily Pond's Surprisingly Turbulent History The official name is Laguna de las Flores. Built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, it was also called the Lagoon of Mirrors. Over the century that followed, it became a Navy swimming pool (twice), a political flashpoint, and a vandalism crime scene. The tour walks you through all of it, including the 2012 incident when a water gun flash mob of 1,500 to 2,000 people broke the pond's supply pipe and briefly made this reflecting pool the biggest local news story of the year and a proxy battleground in a San Diego mayoral race. Kate Sessions and the Gardens She Built From Nothing Sessions' tree-planting deal is one part of her legacy. The cactus work is another. She spent years pushing for a dedicated desert garden in the park and finally got her chance at the 1935 California Pacific International Exposition, when she and succulent enthusiast Chauncey Irgens Jerabek designed both an aloe-agave garden and a cactus garden, filled with donations from the Huntington Botanic Gardens, Cactus Acres of El Paso, the Oklahoma Cactus and Succulent Society, and nurseries from Nogales and Palm Springs. The Desert Garden you can visit today came four decades later, established in 1976 on a 2.5-acre wedge shaped by 12,000 cubic yards of bulldozed earth, but many of its most imposing specimens are older than the garden itself. The Japanese Friendship Garden: A Living Symbol of Two Cities The Japanese Friendship Garden opened in 1991 as a formal expression of San Diego's sister-city relationship with Yokohama. It now spans 12 acres of Balboa Park canyon, with 160 ornamental cherry trees double-grafted to bloom reliably in San Diego's mild climate, 20 varieties of koi, 40 varieties of azalea, and a bonsai collection including a 200-year-old California juniper. Its Japanese name is San-Kei-En: Three Scene Garden: Water, Pastoral, and Mountain. The tour surfaces what the garden does not advertise: a tree grown from a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, a bonsai stolen in broad daylight in February 2023, and a 1993 reunion in this very garden between a Japanese woman named Mitoko and the American Navy crew that had funded her education after World War II. It also explains why the curved pathways are designed to confound evil spirits, which according to Japanese garden tradition can only travel in straight lines. Alcazar Garden: Seville's Courtyard, Rebuilt in San Diego Alcazar Garden started life in 1915 under a different name: Los Jardines de Montezuma. It was redesigned in 1935 by San Diego architect Richard Requa, who had spent years sketching and photographing the courtyard gardens of Andalusia in southern Spain. His redesign drew explicitly on the Real Alcazar palace gardens in Seville: two star-shaped Moorish-style tile fountains, eight tiled benches, a vine-draped pergola, narrow pathways along a single central axis. On opening day of the 1935 exposition, 10,000 pansies were in bloom inside it. The two fountains that look like matching twins are actually two completely different designs. The Rose Garden That Came From Downtown Construction Dirt The Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden holds 1,600 roses in nearly 130 varieties and has been honored by three international bodies: All-America Rose Selections named it the outstanding rose garden in the country in 1978; the World Federation of Rose Societies gave it its Award of Garden Excellence in 2003; it was inducted into the Great Rosarians of the World Hall of Fame in 2014. The garden's east wing exists because new construction in central San Diego during the 1980s and 1990s needed somewhere to discard excavated soil, and Florida Canyon was the destination. The garden used it to expand, and the shape of what you see today was partly determined by a downtown construction project that had nothing to do with roses. The Desert Garden: 1,300 Plants and a Dr. Seuss Connection The Desert Garden holds more than 1,300 plants on 2.5 acres, open 24 hours a day with no entry fee, and most visitors to Balboa Park never find it. From January through March, yuccas throw up colossal sprays of white flowers and aloes blaze orange and red. The Dr. Seuss connection is grounded in fact: the looping, gravity-defying shapes in his illustrations were not invented but observed, in gardens like this one and in La Jolla, where he lived and worked. What the Tour Covers and How to Take It The tour moves through nine garden areas with multiple audio stops at each, covering the Botanical Building, the Lily Pond, the Japanese Friendship Garden, the Alcazar Garden, the Inez Grant Parker Memorial Rose Garden, the Desert Garden, the Sessions Cactus Garden, the Moreton Bay Fig Tree, the Casa del Rey Moro Garden, and Redwood Circle. Each stop delivers the grounded, specific story behind what you are looking at: the people who built it, the events that shaped it, and the details that do not appear on any sign. Balboa Park is one of the most visited urban parks in North America. This tour is the version of it that rewards curiosity. Download the app and take the Balboa Park Gardens: Cactus, Lily Ponds & Kate Sessions self-guided audio tour to hear these stories where they happened.
