Rhododendron Island

If you’ve ever taken part in a One Brick gardening project the chances are fairly high that you already know about or have worked on the maintenance of Rhododendron Island in Golden Gate Park. If you’ve driven past Spreckels Lake, run along the western end of John F. Kennedy Drive or have completed the entire San Francisco Bay to Breakers course you’ve probably seen Rhododendron Island without knowing it.
Rhododendron Island sits on John F. Kennedy Drive and 36^th Avenue sandwiched in between Spreckels Lake and the Golden Gate Park Equestrian Center. As the history of this patch of land goes it had always been a garden filled with a wide array of rhododendron varieties until City budget issues and neglect turned it into a forest of non-​native plants, overgrown weeds and litter. Enter volunteer organization One Brick in the summer of 2003 whose volunteers assembled on site on a regular basis to clean up the patch of land, remove the plants that didn’t belong and re-​introduce different varieties of rhododendrons and azaleas. It took the volunteer group an entire year, but in the summer of 2004 they completed their project transforming this patch of land back to a garden filled with rhododendrons, azaleas and different tree species.
Today, Rhodendron Island is one of the signature events for One Brick. There is a project nearly every month, rain or shine, where volunteers come out to help maintain the gardens, pull out new weeds, lay down weed cover, spread mulch, trim or remove unwanted plants. In my five years of volunteering through One Brick I have probably worked on the island over a dozen times and I’ve done all of the things listed at one time or another, but I did something two weekends ago that I had never done here before.
It was a Saturday and rain was forecasted for that morning. About fifteen or so hearty volunteers including myself turned out. The skies were overcast but dry when we gathered. We noticed the drops of water slowly come down plopping onto the surface of Spreckels Lake across the street. The San Francisco Rec and Parks Department gardener told us he wanted us to prepare the land and help him plant some azaleas into the garden. In less than two hours under a steady rain our group of muddy, wet volunteers dug out weeds and unwanted grass patches and replaced them with 90 azalea plants of different varieties and different sizes. Ninety! In the words of the gardener himself we were a planting machine, and had he not run out of plants we would have kept going as we were all quite enthusiastic about adding new life to the garden.
Rhododendron Island is best to visit in late March or early April when many of the plants begin to flower. For me anyway it’ll be interesting to see how many of our 90 plants survived. I’ve posted some photos taken in April, 2009.