Landscaping around Balboa Park’s Botanical Building will get a $10M makeover

The grounds surrounding Balboa Park’s Botanical Building are slated to return to their former glory with the park’s lead nonprofit soon remaking the area with lush landscaping and historically appropriate adornments befitting the newly restored structure.

Next week, Forever Balboa Park will pick up where the city of San Diego left off, starting a $10-million phase of exterior restoration work that extends from El Prado to the back of the Botanical Building.

The project includes completing nine themed garden spaces, installing dozens of historically accurate benches near fountains and around the Lily Pond, and recreating a grand pergola to match the one that disappeared during the federal government’s wartime takeover.

The nonprofit is responsible for paying for and completing the second phase, and has raised nearly 70% of costs, Jacqueline Higgins, Forever Balboa Park’s vice president of planning, told the Union-Tribune. The exterior work is expected to take nine months to complete, she said.

“I’ve been working in the park for eight years now, and to be able to realize this dream is amazing,” Higgins said. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime project. This is the gift that our generation gets to give back, that our forefathers and foremothers had visualized over 100 years ago.”

Reopened in December, the Botanical Building is a horticultural and architectural landmark at the center of Balboa Park. It is just one of four remaining permanent structures built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. The city spent nearly three years and $26.5 million reconstructing the popular park attraction before passing the baton to Forever Balboa Park to finish the exterior work.

Formed in 2021, Forever Balboa Park is the reincarnation of two now-defunct park groups, the Balboa Park Conservancy and the Friends of Balboa Park. The nonprofit provides park care above the city’s baseline services, and is responsible for raising donor funds to improve public assets not operated by the museums or cultural institutions. The group also runs the Balboa Park Visitors Center, operates the House of Hospitality and is the owner-operator of the Balboa Park Carousel.

In the fiscal year ending in June 2024, Forever Balboa Park reported $4.8 million in revenue, including $2.5 million in donations and grants, according to the nonprofit’s Form 990 filed with the IRS. Donations grew 36% from the prior year.

The Botanical Building gardens project is more than a decade in the making and the first true test of Forever Balboa Park’s status as the lead park group. The project is a potential showcase of the nonprofit’s ability to complete a big project as it seeks to expand its relationship with the city.

The organization is redoing nearly everything between El Prado and Old Globe Way, with the exception of the Lily Pond. The project includes themed gardens along the boundaries of the lawns, with plants and trees specific to each area’s sunlight and shade qualities.

Forever Balboa Park is paying special attention to the garden areas west of the Botanical Building, as they will welcome park-goers to the project’s showpiece: a pergola that replaces the one that went missing.

“It was a beautiful, rectangular pergola … with Doric columns, like what you see in the Alcazar Garden. But it was a little more grand because the space is a little more grand,” Higgins said. “This one will be five bays long. There’s a really beautiful forecourt, and then three little steps up to the pergola itself.”

No one can account for what happened to the original pergola. Based on historic documentation, the pergola was present before the U.S. Navy took possession of Balboa Park during World War II, and it was no longer there when the federal government left, Higgins said.

Phase two plans include a sensory garden with specialized plants and a decomposed granite path that will meander from Old Globe Way to a fragrant garden near the new pergola.

“There’s this interplay between the sensorial garden and the gardens that will surround the newly reconstructed pergola, and that area is what we’re referring to as the aromatic gardens,” said Higgins, who is also a licensed landscape architect. “So because that space will be a space where people can sit and contemplate the building and the redesign, that’s where we’re really introducing all the lavenders and jasmine and more sages and stuff like that.”

The project also includes a re-sloped, ADA code-compliant pathway at El Prado and a new ramp to complement the steps down from the upper courtyard by the Casa del Prado Theatre. In addition, the nonprofit will repave the hexagonal areas surrounding the two fountains on the west and east sides of the grounds as circular shapes that are true to the layout of the original design.
Forever Balboa Park has already completed portions of the phase-two project, including the restored balustrades and urns along the bridge, as well as the fountains. Those elements were fixed up in time for the building’s reopening late last year.

Higgins said Forever Balboa Park will tackle the gardens project in sections, starting on the west side of the site. The nonprofit, she said, will ensure that there is always public access to the restored Botanical Building during construction. Work is expected to be completed in early 2026.