Garden sights in San Francisco
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A
Yerba Buena Gardens
A spot of green in the swath of concrete South of Market. With Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and SFMOMA on one side and the Metreon on the other, this is a prime spot for sun and downtime in between art and a movie. Free noontime concerts in summer feature world music, hip-hop and jazz. The show-stopping centerpiece is Houston Cornwell and Joseph De Pace’s sleek Martin Luther King Jr Memorial Fountain, a wall of water that runs over the Reverend’s immortal words: ‘…until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’ A pedestrian bridge over Howard St links the popular esplanade to its tagalong kid sister, an often overlooked playground and ente…
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B
Japanese Tea Garden
Have your moment of Zen in the Zen Garden, or while enjoying green tea under a pagoda, watching kids ogle doll-sized bonsais that are pushing 100 years. These bonsai are a credit to the dedicated gardeners of the Hagiwara family, who returned from WWII Japanese American internment camps to discover their prized bonsai had been sold. The Hagiwaras spent the next two decades tracking down the trees, and returned the bonsai grove to its rightful home.
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C
San Francisco Botanical Garden & Strybing Arboretum
There’s always something blooming in these 70-acre gardens, which cover a world of vegetation from South African savannah to New Zealand cloud forest. The Garden of Fragrance is designed for appeal to the visually impaired, and the California native-plant section explodes with color when the wildflowers bloom in early spring, right off the redwood trail. Free arboretum tours take place daily; for details, stop by the bookstore inside the entrance.
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D
Conservatory of Flowers
The Golden Gate Park does have its outlandish attractions, including carnivorous plants and outer-space orchids in the 1879 Conservatory of Flowers.
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