My name is Lauren Jones and I’m a nursery intern at Sutro Stewards located on Mount Sutro in beautiful San Francisco, CA. Currently I am a senior at San Francisco State University, majoring in Geography, with a minor in Design.
I’m a native San Franciscan, and as a small child I spent a lot of time at the parks and open spaces where I enjoyed playing in the City’s unique flora and observing its wildlife. As a ‘tween and in my early teens I started landscape painting and developed an appreciation of San Francisco’s overall beauty and the natural progressions seen in nature. However, due to its overgrowth and lack of accessible trails, Mount Sutro was not one of the open spaces I frequently visited. For me Sutro Stewards mission is of high importance since it preserves an area of San Francisco’s natural habitat by curtailing the population decline of plants and animals that depend on this unique environment, yet by building and maintaining accessible trails, it allows the community to interact in and appreciate this open space.
This is my first time doing work for an organization that focuses on habitat conservation. I feel that my focus is similar to theirs, and I am looking forward to learning more about the various indigenous bird and plant species. More importantly, I like seeing the results from the output made by Sutro Stewards’ facilitators, volunteers, and interns; I like seeing that we are all making a difference and that as stewards we are helping to preserve this open space so that future generations can also enjoy it.
In the short time since I started interning at Sutro Stewards I have seen a bird use a plant in the nursery as a nest, have heard the chirps of a bird that is rare to be seen in the city, and have witnessed bees pollinating plants in the nursery—more to come I’m sure!