San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WORLD’S BOTANICAL MAP
Living museum of hundreds of thousands of plants is in the care of a meticulous team
A couple days before everything changed, I found myself walking through the San Francisco Botanical Garden with a few members of its staff. We kept at a distance as we cut through the park’s 55 acres on paths paved and unpaved. The garden, we joked in a notjoking way, was a very good place to practice our new normal.
At one point, Stephanie Linder, the executive director, plucked a leaf off a tree and started crunching it up in her hand. After a few seconds of this, she lifted it to her nose, closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She caught herself as she went to offer her hand.
“Oh, I’m not supposed to hand you anything,” she said. “But I would recommend — pick a leaf, crumple it up in your hand and smell.”
So I did. The leaf was crisp and dry and fell apart like a cracker. I smelled it a few times, wondering what that sweetness was. It smelled a bit like childhood.
“Cinnamon,” said Ryan Guillou, the garden’s curator.
Technically, the San Francisco Botanical Garden opened in 1940. But like the garden itself, with its trails and private moments and cinnamon leaves, its history is more sprawling and complicated than a single year.
From almost the beginning of Golden Gate Park’s development, John McLaren, one of the park’s original architects and later its superintendent, wanted to include a botanical garden. He even took the step of detailing plans. But while he had the desire, he did not have the money. Still, he and others began to plant trees in the vast sand dunes, and some of those, planted all that time ago, stand as the highest trees in the garden today. They offer their branches in service of the vast canopy and their roots in service of the hidden foundation.
The trees came from places far and wide. If you’d like a “classic example,” Guillou can show you one, right at the center of the park. It’s a great big New Zealand Christmas Tree. (Guillou could probably tell you the scientific name, something Latin with syllables rubbing against each other. “Just think of all the things I can’t do because I can remember to do that,” he says.)
The tree, which probably arrived during the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition exposition, is now a huge and deeply rooted tangle of thick branches and arterial roots that start brown and turn a deep red as they stretch toward the ground. In a few places, they come together and bunch up so that they look like long dog ears or maybe paddles.
Do you have any favorite spots or trees or plants?
When I wrote this question down in the back of my mind, I knew it was an obvious question. I don’t think I considered that it might also be an impossible one.
“He refuses to answer,” Linder said of Guillou.
“I like spots. I have spots,”
Guillou said.
“He won’t answer favorite plant though.”
Guillou’s been the garden’s primary architect for three years now. It’s like managing a living museum. “Our pieces of art can grow really big. Our pieces of art can die. Our pieces of art can spread themselves.”
He says it took him a year to walk every path. His first year on the job “was my brain exploding,” but he was meant for this as much as anybody can be meant for anything. When he was a kid, he curated aquariums, each one an ecosystem — an Amazonian river, one made to look like a piece of Lake Victoria in Africa. “At one point I had over 200 gallons of water in my room.”
So now this is his “aquarium,” and he has to balance conservation and climate and aesthetics. Right now, he’s working on a new Afromontane cloud forest, drawing from Africa’s highelevation tropical regions. San Francisco’s climate is uniquely suited to plants from cloud forests. A blessing, really, given that those regions are endangered with development, extractive industries, climate change all pushing them higher and higher. “The mountains don’t go up forever,” Guillou says.
According to their records, there are about 27,000 “plant centers,” or groupings of a single species, and hundreds of thousands of plants growing on this piece of land. So says Steve Gensler, the man who has been in charge of meticulously mapping the garden for the past 10 years. His official title is “GIS manager” (geographic information system), and he’d found us wandering near the greenhouse.
Gensler’s time is spent tracking down the history of the specimens and recording their lives. Each plant center has its own identification code, and he can pull it up on a tablet and find a long list of facts, pictures and video, too.
“You have a medical record, right?” he asks. “So you might have gone to the doctor at one point and had a cold. Next time you went you might have the flu or you broke your arm. Well, same thing for the trees. We create historical records of the plants that we have in the garden, so that way we can track what’s going on with them and how they’re doing, measuring their growth. So 100 years from now when people look — ‘This tree went in the ground as a sapling at 3 feet tall, and over a period of 50 years has started to bloom on this year and grew to this height and this size.’ ”
Two days after our walk, I went back to the garden for another. It was one of the few places still open to the public. The numbers were against me, but I wanted to find my own favorite place — then maybe my favorite branch and petal and leaf.
There is the grove of redwoods, full of 100yearold giants. About halfway up, many of them explode sideways with branches in every direction. There’s some debate about why and how this happened. Maybe it was a single destructively windy day or maybe it was lots of windy days, finally calmed by new neighborhoods growing up and sheltering the grove.
There is the Puya alpestris — “sapphire tower” — a bromeliad that blooms with a long, alien stalk covered in flowers the color of every single shade of blue all at once, and then right at the center, a burst of orange. The flower of the King Protea looks like an exploding sun, and its petals feel like satin.
People have carved messages and initials into the pads of a prickly pear cactus and also on tall, thick stalks of bamboo. The bamboo feels like cold steel to the touch, and if you put your ear up to it and knock, you can hear it’s hollow.
Up front, the aging Monterey cypress, one of the garden’s very first trees and three times taller than anything you’d find in nature, is losing limbs and near the end of its life. Its bark is white and rough like a grandfather’s hands. There was another tree with ribbed bark, and another with bark covered in bumps that felt like braille. One tree was the color of dark chocolate, and another looked like it was full of fire.
After all that and so much more, I finally understood — really undersood — something from two days before.
“We’re trying to get people not to get attached to tree, because plant conservation isn’t about protecting that tree,” Linder had told me. “I think it’s sort of like the way researchers don’t name the animals. It’s not about the one tree that’s here. It’s about biodiversity on the planet.” The same day she told me that, I found myself constantly thanking everybody — again and again — for giving me their time on a hectic day and on short notice and with everything going on. I think, though, I was also thanking them for letting me be in that space, for holding it open and clear of the city and all its complications.
It was fine, Linder said. She’d rather be outside anyway, and once we were done with our walk, she’d have to go write a long note about the garden’s contingency plans.
“We’re staying open by the way,” she said.
That was only true for two more days. On Monday, like much of the rest of the Bay Area, the San Francisco Botanical Garden finally closed.
The news cut deeper than most of the other closures. Maybe that’s because I’ve been thinking about the garden so much lately. Or maybe it’s because the garden is a single place that also feels like the whole world all at once. At least when this is all over, we know the garden will be waiting.