The Trees of Golden Gate Park and San Francisco

Essays. Field Guide. Edited and arranged by Richard G. Turner Jr. THE TREES OF GOLDEN GATE PARK AND SAN FRANCISCO was created to help residents and visitors alike understand, appreciate, and preserve a priceless horticultural legacy, the city's splendidly diverse urban forest. A little more than a hundred years ago, the San Francisco landscape was mostly sand dunes, meadows, marshes, and rocky outcroppings. Only a scattering of native trees, mostly windblown and stunted, grew naturally. Early city and park planners, bent on creating a magnificent city, transformed this sparse, fog-swept landscape by planting trees from around the world - trees selected especially for their beauty and adaptability to the city's climate. Based on the writings of botanist Elizabeth McClintock, whose column on the trees of Golden Gate Park was a feature of Pacific Horticultural magazine for twenty-five years, THE TREES OF GOLDEN GATE PARK AND SAN FRANCISCO present the reader with the stories of 170 different tre