Charlotte Millikin Hoak

Charlotte Milliken Hoak (1874–1967) was a 20th-century teacher, horticulturist, occasional botanist and garden columnist in Southern California. She advocated the use of native plants for landscaping public places including roadsides because they were best suited for the environment and did not draw on scarce water resources. As a teacher she taught organic gardening and composting techniques to her elementary school students and members of the community. Charlotte received recognition and awards from several plant societies, garden clubs, and well known botanists and horticulturists with whom she worked. Her contributions to the field of horticulture and her advocacy for the conservation of natural resources and preservation of wild-lands is documented and warrants recognition.

Biography

Lottie May Hoak was born on October 24, 1874, to a pioneer son of a Maine farmer, in an area that was to become the town Comptche, California. To mark her birth, her father planted a grove of redwood trees which still stand today. Hoak became a devout student of nature and horticulture. She spent her first 17 years on her family's homestead in the heart of the redwood forest, helping her father plant his orchards and her mother beautify the yard with flowers and trees, ordered by mail, from all over the world. In 1883, when Hoak was 9 years old, her mother died but not before expressing her death-bed wish that her first daughter obtain an education at the University of California, Berkeley.