Community Challenge Grant Funds New Interpretive Signs on Mount Sutro

The next time you walk through the UCSF campus or hike past Rotary Meadow on the way to the summit of Mount Sutro, keep an eye out for a new series of beautifully illustrated interpretive signs highlighting key relationships between native plants and animals.

Allen’s hummingbird (2), which is an important pollinator species that spends its summers along the California coast, siphoning nectar from a native pink flowering currant (1). Each day, this hummingbird may visit as many as one thousand flowers and consumes twice its weight in nectar, giving it ample opportunity to spread pollen between many plants.

Over the past year, funding from the City of San Francisco’s Community Challenge Grant (CCG) program has made it possible for Sutro Stewards to commission and install six signs with support from UCSF. Staff worked with artist Jane Kim, co-founder of Ink Dwell Studio in Half Moon Bay, to develop the illustrations, each of which features a colorful combination of local plant species and associated pollinators.

Kim is known for her lifelike and morphologically accurate renderings of the natural world. Her growing portfolio emphasizes large-scale public art installations at high-profile locations around the United States, including a 2,500 square-foot mural at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology that depicts 375 million years of avian evolution.