Thornewood Open Space Preserve is a small

regional park A regional park is an area of land preserved on account of its natural beauty, historic interest, recreational use or other reason, and under the administration of a form of local government. Definition A regional park can be a special park distr ...

located in the

Santa Cruz Mountains The Santa Cruz Mountains ( Mutsun Ohlone: Mak-sah-re-jah, "Sharp Ridged Mountain of the Eagle" or "People of the Eagle Mountain") are a mountain range in central and Northern California, United States, constituting a part of the Pacific Coast R ...

San Mateo County San Mateo County ( ), officially the County of San Mateo, is a county (United States), county located in the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 764,442. Redwood City, California, Redwood City is th ...

. The park lies in the

San Francisco Bay Area The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a List of regions of California, region of California surrounding and including San Francisco Bay, and anchored by the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose, California, S ...

and is operated by the

Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD) is a non-enterprise special district in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formed in 1972 by voter initiative, it has acquired and preserved a regional green belt of open space land and provides oppo ...

. It offers approximately of hiking and equestrian trails and is dog-friendly. The Schilling Lake Trail leads to Schilling Lake, a protected wildlife habitat. This trail offers brief views of the southern San Francisco Bay,

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

(including Stanford University's

Hoover Tower Hoover Tower is a structure on the campus of Stanford University in Stanford, California, United States. The tower houses the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, an archive collection founded by Herbert Hoover before he became president of ...

) and surrounding cities, and the

Diablo Range The Diablo Range is a mountain range in the California Coast Ranges subdivision of the Pacific Coast Ranges in northern California, United States. It stretches from the eastern San Francisco Bay Area at its northern end to the Salinas Valley a ...

. From Schilling Lake, the Bridle Trail leads to Old La Honda Road. The name ''Thornewood'' comes from Julian and Edna Bloss Thorne, who developed the land in the 1920s. The Thornes built a house designed by Gardner Daily and surrounded it with extensive gardens. Those gardens included Schilling Lake, named after the nearby August Schilling land. The Thorne and Schilling estates were both part of Rancho Cañada de Raymundo in old California. When Edna Bloss Thorne died in June 1970, she bequeathed the land to the Sierra Club Foundation, with the requirement that the land surrounding her 86-acre summer home be kept as a nature preserve and not developed. The foundation donated the acreage to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District in September 1978. In 1986, Robert Procter and his wife gifted 3.4 acres to the district that were added to the preserve. Second-growth redwood trees grow in portions of Thornewood Open Space Preserve, especially by the lake. There are

false brome ''Brachypodium sylvaticum'', commonly known as false-brome, slender false brome or wood false brome, is a perennial grass native to Europe, Asia and Africa. Its native range includes most of Europe, northwestern Africa, Sudan and Eritrea, Wester ...

grasses throughout the area. In 2005, the district approved a $1.2 million plan to eradicate a newly-discovered invasive strain of slender false brome that was displacing native plants.

Bibliography

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References

{{Reflist Protected areas of San Mateo County, California Regional parks in California Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District Nature reserves in California