A Window to the Botanical World

Photograph by Kevin J. Frest

On a cool December night in 1995, a ferocious windstorm ripped through San Francisco, felling 400 mature trees in Golden Gate Park and seriously damaging the park’s Conservatory of Flowers, a national historic landmark that houses more than 15,000 tropical plants from around the world. While the sprawling 100-year-old Brazilian philodendron remained intact, many other plants weren’t so lucky.

Now, after a $25-million fund-raising and rebuilding effort, the conservatory is poised to reopen. Friends of Recreation & Parks, a nonprofit group, persuaded individuals, foundations, and the government to contribute toward repair of the city-owned structure, which was built in 1879.

The effort marks the third time major renovations have been needed. Twice before, fires nearly destroyed the domed glass-and-wood Victorian building.

During the rebuilding, thousands of trees, plants, and flowers — including Polynesian palm trees, South American vanilla orchids, and Ecuadorean cycads — were moved to temporary quarters while engineers disassembled the 12,000-square-foot building to replace rotting wood and broken glass.

Nearly one-fifth of the money raised helped establish new exhibits on tropical, aquatic, and potted plants, as well as a rotating exhibit that will feature pollinating and medicinal plants in its first year.

Scot Medbury, the conservatory’s director, estimates that 165,000 visitors will come to the restored building next year. “We have an enormous opportunity to really showcase the splendor of plant diversity in the tropics and share some idea about how you might grow them in your own home, as well as what we might do to save the biodiversity that is left,” he says.

Here, a workman replaces one of the conservatory’s 10,800 glass windowpanes in preparation for the building’s reopening this month.