Conservatory of Flowers

The conservatory’s story begins in the estate of James Lick, a businessman and former piano maker who died in 1876 leaving, among his possessions, the still-crated parts of a large wood-and-glass greenhouse. A group of 27 prominent San Franciscans, including Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Claus Spreckels, bought the components and in 1877 presented them to the city for the newly created Golden Gate Park. Where the kit was made remains debated: some sources credit the New York firm Lord & Burnham, which the park commissioners hired in 1878 to supervise its erection, while Pacific Horticulture argues that the physical evidence points to a Northern California manufacturer.

Opened in April 1879 at a cost of about $30,000, it is the oldest building in the park. A fire gutted the dome in January 1883; Charles Crocker gave $10,000 toward repairs, and the dome was rebuilt about six feet higher with a new clerestory. Further fires followed in 1895 and in 1918, when the furnace room caught light. In 1933, in the depths of the Depression, severe rot forced the building to close.

In the winter of 1995–1996, storms with winds of around 100 mph shattered the dome and much of the glazing, and roughly 15 percent of the collection was lost. Placed on the World Monuments Fund’s Watch list in 1996 and taken into the Save America’s Treasures program in 1998, the conservatory was dismantled in phases from 2000, set on a new foundation and seismically strengthened. The project, first estimated at $10 million, ended up costing $25 million, and the building reopened on September 20, 2003. It has been a California Historical Landmark (No. 841) since 1970, on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971 and a San Francisco Designated Landmark (No. 50) since 1972.

A masonry base carries a frame of coast redwood, a timber plentiful in the West at a time when cast-iron greenhouses were still seldom manufactured in the United States. The plan is a shallow E aligned east–west: a central octagonal pavilion, topped by a clerestory and a dome nearly 60 feet (about 18 m) high, extends into two arched wings for an overall length of some 240 feet. A gabled glass vestibule projects to the south.

The structure is built on four-centred Tudor arches made from small identical members that could be machine-cut from templates, which makes the conservatory a rare Victorian example of prefabricated construction. Inside the rotunda, eight wood-clad cast-iron columns stand in pairs. The panes are lapped like shingles along the curve of the arches; there are about 16,800 of them, amounting to some 26,000 square feet of glass. When the building was reassembled in 2000–2003, more than half of the original wood was reused.

When it opened in 1879 the conservatory displayed more than 9,000 plants, including a giant Victoria water lily, then a great rarity in North America. Today the plants are arranged in climate-controlled galleries. Beneath the dome, the Lowland Tropics (kept around 70°F) hold palms, kapok, coffee and cacao, along with several centenarians: an imperial philodendron (Philodendron speciosum) acquired around 1901, which stayed in place under protective sheeting throughout the rebuilding, cycads such as Dioon spinulosum and Zamia lindenii, and a pygmy date palm shown at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The cooler Highland Tropics gallery (about 65°F) recreates an Andean cloud forest with tree ferns, rhododendrons, gesneriads and a noted collection of pleurothallid orchids, Dracula species among them, built up by former director George Marcopulos. The Aquatic Plants gallery keeps two ponds at about 83°F for water lilies, Victoria and carnivorous plants, and there is also a rotating Potted Plants gallery and a fern-filled West Gallery, where a corpse flower occasionally blooms.

The conservatory stands in Golden Gate Park and is one of the three “Gardens of Golden Gate Park”, alongside the Japanese Tea Garden and the San Francisco Botanical Garden, with a combined pass available for all three. The route loops through the galleries, from the warm, humid dome to the cooler highland rooms, and is best taken at an unhurried pace. Occasional corpse-flower blooms draw large crowds, and in recent winters a free after-dark light show called Photosynthesis has been staged. A visit pairs easily with the neighbouring gardens and museums in the park.