A Day Out at the San Francisco Botanical Garden

While visiting San Francisco, we decided to spend a few days exploring the sites and seeing whatever we could. One of the places that Dann was most excited for was the San Francisco Botanical Gardens, which is a huge gardens and green space with plants from all over the world! California has really good weather at this time of year, so walking around the gardens was a really fun time.

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San Francisco Botanical Garden is free to those who have a California drivers license or proof of living in California, but is $10 for anyone else who wants to visit during the day, paid at the entrance. If you come early in the morning or on specific holidays, it is actually free to enter for everyone. There are maps there too, which you can grab for free, that showcase the area and the different gardens. We walked around for quite some time, exploring all of the different flowers and plants there was.

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One of our first stops was the moon garden, which has a big viewing platform above a small pond for looking at the moon. Though it was daylight, there were lots of little birds around and ducks in the pond, which is very cute. I love the idea of having a moon viewing platform in a garden – and it’s a really unique feature that I had not seen before at the other gardens that we have visited in London! Dann was eager to go to the Redwood Forest within the garden, which had loads of really tall, old, redwood trees. This area was very peaceful, with tall canopy’s and a covered floor of small shrubs. There were plenty of benches and places to sit in the shade and just look around at nature. This area was completely different from other aspects of the gardens – which is something super unique about the San Francisco Botanical Gardens – each area felt like a different biome from the other.

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Another major area that Dann was excited for was the succulent garden. Dann is a big fan of cacti and of desert plants, so going to the succulent garden was a must. This area had giant versions of succulents we had seen before in miniature versions. It was really neat to feel like we were walking around among these giant plants! This area was very warm too, and in a lot of direct sunlight, built up the side of an area. Nearby, we also enjoyed walking through a thick and shaded bamboo forest, that had many bamboo plants carved for some reason by people visiting the gardens. I had never been in such a thick area of bamboo, so that was super excited for me.

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Along with these areas, we did some general walking around, checking out the plants from Chile and the plants from California. There were a bunch of different places that were defined in the garden, showing plants from that specific place in the world – though nothing from England! The San Francisco Botanical Gardens is a place you can easily spend a few hours at, walking around and enjoying the plants around you. We also enjoyed taking pictures of all of the flowers we found interesting.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!