Long before he advocated to protect San Francisco’s native plants or fought in the off-leash dog wars, Jake Sigg was a kid living on a remote ranch in Montana during the throes of the Great Depression.
The long-retired Recreation and Parks Department gardener spent decades fighting to preserve the city’s wildlife, and his new memoir, “Notes on a Long Life,” reveals how his life’s work was molded in a world far different from where he now resides in the Sunset.
Sigg, along with his six sisters, slept outside, and their only toilet was an outhouse perched on a hillside to allow run off. The stretch of untamed land in the family’s backyard represented the last of the American frontier, where he bore witness to man’s evolving relationship to the natural world.
“Now there is nowhere that you can roam land uninhabited by humans, their artifacts and possessions,” Sigg wrote in the book. “Human conquest and destructive behavior dominate the land masses. Mt. Everest is a garbage dump. All this in one short human lifetime!”
Now, just weeks after the April 26 publication of his memoir, Sigg marked another milestone: his 99th birthday, celebrated on June 2 atop San Bruno Mountain with friends, fellow plantsmen and the same windswept landscape he fought to protect in his chapters detailing the battle for San Bruno Mountain.
Sigg has long cared for Ingleside's mini parks. | Courtesy
In that “one short human lifetime,” the naturalist has had a legendary impact on Bay Area plant conservation. He is the namesake of the “Jake Sigg Award for Vision and Dedicated Service” from the California Invasive Plant Council, which he received in 2003. His advocacy helped shape conservation efforts across the Bay and led to the creation of Rec and Park’s Natural Resource Division.
“The changes I witnessed are more changes in society, rather than in the natural world,” Sigg said, when asked about his memoir. “And many of those changes have not been to my liking.”
Eileen Ecklund, a retired writer and editor who met Sigg through the California Native Plant Society, took it upon herself last year to begin organizing the autobiographical excerpts from the archive of Sigg’s widely read email newsletter Nature News.
“People have been telling him for eons that he should put it all into a book, and I knew he had been looking around for an editor,” Ecklund said.
With the help of Lisa Wayne, a retired manager of the Natural Resources Division, the pair gathered all the notes they could and arranged them in chronological order, taking care to retain Sigg’s voice, familiar to readers of his newsletter.
Wesley Saunders, a gardener for RPD and a subscriber to Sigg’s newsletter, has enjoyed hearing about “the old days of rec and park” through his perspective.
“Jake’s newsletter has been equal parts appreciation of our natural world, a call to action to defend it and poetry,” Saunders said. “I have always appreciated the combination.”
The book is a reflection on the early days on the Sigg family ranch, where they tended to their orchard and flock of sheep. The lives of Sigg and his sisters are something straight out of a Mark Twain adventure, when local “Goof Christopherson” was depicted castrating the rams with his teeth, free of charge, for the chance to take home the “Rocky Mountain oysters” in a pail.
Sigg wistfully tells of the falcons he raised after swiping them from their nest as a boy. Despite their bond, which continued long after the birds could hunt for themselves, he still feels a “deep sadness about the mother losing her brood.”
He recounts being assigned to Treasure Island during World War II, before eventually deciding to become a gardener while on a walk with his mother in Golden Gate Park. Throughout his 30s, Sigg recalls dedicating much of his free time to practicing ballet at the Royal Academy of Dance and dreaming of dancing with the Russians in Moscow after the Cold War cleared.
John R. Adkins
“It was such a phenomenally different world that he grew up in and spent most of his career in,” Ecklund said. “The fact that he still manages to process and make sense of what's going on around him now. It's amazing.”
When the National Park Service clamped down on pet parents who let their dogs run off-leash at Fort Funston, it sparked a civic conflict that led to the launch of Sigg’s newsletter in 2002. Although the measure was designed to protect native flora, off-leash advocates reacted to its enforcement as if rallying against tyrannical bureaucrats. Sigg said the movement, led by “an unemployed contractor” named Steve Cockrell, tried to destroy the Natural Resources Division. The coalition overwhelmed committee meetings and slowed Rec and Park’s efforts to draft new management plans, but the conflict came to a tragic end when Cockrell took his own life, as well as the life of his dog, only weeks after deciding to collaborate with Sigg and fold the efforts with his own movement.
Playful at times with his dry sense of humor and direct delivery, one theme Sigg often returns to is the speed of change. Being born in 1927, he states in his closing reflections that the changes he saw in his lifetime would “rival the cumulative changes in human society up to the time I was born.”
Closing in on a century in age, Sigg still goes out to pull weeds at local parks and publishes an email newsletter, which readers say has gotten more philosophical over time. Maybe it began with his travels in Tibet in the ‘80s, but he took an interest in eastern philosophy and, in his book, referred to the “ego” as influencing the decisions behind what plants are chosen for decorative value, and also for being responsible for “part of the imbalance in the way the world operates.”
When asked about the experience of recording his memoir, Sigg was direct. He asserted that he never sees himself as a writer, and that his ambitions remain firmly rooted in the conservation of native plant life.
“I don’t think about the book from the standpoint of a writer,” Sigg said. “I didn’t have the ambitions of writing a book. What materialized is just the result of years of experience.”
Sigg may no longer be practicing ballet, but his mind is still sharp, and he has little interest in nostalgia. The rejection of the ego a fitting mantra for San Francisco’s resident John Muir, as he continues to make sense of the world around him with a clarity and charm that keeps his readers poring over every word.
Print copies of the book can be ordered here. Ecklund said the book's cost is only to cover printing and shipping, as Sigg has no interest in profiting from the project.
