The California Native Horticultural Foundation is excited to announce that we are working with Los Angeles-based horticulturist Katherine Pakradouni to find a home for a CNHF native plant nursery in the Los Angeles area.
Katherine brings extraordinary depth to this work. Her practice is rooted in ecological landscape design, urban habitat restoration, native plant horticulture education, and what she calls “nursery catalyzation,” the art of building the community infrastructure needed for native plants to truly take hold in a place. She is deeply committed to hyper-local, community-centered, and innovative approaches that go far beyond simply planting natives.
Many in the native plant world know Katherine from her remarkable work as founding nursery manager for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the world’s largest wildlife crossing, currently under construction over the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills. For that project, Katherine spent months hand-harvesting seeds from both sides of the future crossing site, carefully tracking GPS coordinates for each collection, and cultivating roughly 60 species with the goal of restoring not just the plants, but their indigenous microbiota and the genetic diversity that will allow the landscape to truly self-sustain. As she put it, the goal was for the plants to do what the crossing is meant to do for mountain lions, connect and mix across a divided landscape.
That same philosophy–patient, meticulous, place-specific, ecologically whole–is exactly what California Native Horticultural Foundation is looking to bring to Los Angeles.
We believe that LA, with its extraordinary biodiversity, its urgent need for fire-resilient and drought-adapted landscapes, and its deep community of native plant enthusiasts, is ready for a permanent home for this work. If you have leads on a potential site, or would like to learn more about this effort, we’d love to hear from you.