Golden Gate Park: A Stroll Through History January 19, 2012

Golden Gate Audubon's featured speaker in January is Heath Massey.

Many dedicated naturalists have left memorable footprints in Golden Gate Park over the years. William Hammond Hall, the park's first superintendent, applied principles of natural plant succession to stabilize the sand dunes that underlie the park. John McLaren, longtime park superintendent and experimental horticulturalist, arrived at the great variety of plants in the park through trial and error. Dr. Luis Baptista, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences, studied the vocalizations of the park's White-crowned Sparrows and memorably whistled their calls at scientific meetings. Heath Massey will recount the stories of these and other fascinating individuals who helped chart the natural history of this remarkable park.

Heath Massey lives in San Francisco and is a professor of landscape architecture at U.C. Davis, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1990. She is a licensed landscape architect and a landscape historian and is the author of Picturing California's Other Landscape: The Great Central Valley (Heyday, 1999) and Melodramatic Landscapes: Urban Parks in the Nineteenth Century (University of Virginia, 2009). Her blog on the park, Golden Gate Park: Views From the Thicket, can be found at http://fromthethicket.wordpress.com.

Official Website: http://www.goldengateaudubon.org/education/speaker-series/