By Kay Stewart
The landscape that welcome visitors to Cabrillo National Monument Visitor Center has a beautiful new look. A great team has implemented a landscape plan developed as a collaborative effort to renovate the site. Together, they removed thirty years of non-native and weedy shrubs, and replanted plant species native to Point Loma.
The thirty total participants included Greg Rubin and the crew of his company, California's Own Landscapes; Kay Stewart, Landscape Architect; Al Field, CNPS member and project manager for the renovation; Lorraine Kelley and Joel Kalmonson, with a team of five volunteers; and Keith Lombardo, Adam Taylor, Nicole Ornelas, and six other co-workers at the Monument.
This big team cleaned out the overgrown beds, and planted over 300 plants grown mostly by CNM staff at their own greenhouse and yard. Al and Joel deserve special thanks for their extra volunteer work, prepping the site for two weeks before the 3-day work party.
The planning and landscape contracting services were paid for by a $5,000 grant from the San Diego Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects under their 2016 Community Outreach program. This program, administered by its chair, landscape architect Jen Webster, invites organizations to work with landscape architects to apply for grants for one-year long community projects that improve our regional landscape.
For more on this project, see https://www.nps.gov/cabr/blogs/cabrillofieldnotes.htm
All photos by Al Field