Anticipation builds...

for the opening of the new California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park.

"The first living full-time residents of the California Academy of Sciences took root inside the new Golden Gate Park building. Four of the six trees that will be part of the museum's rain forest exhibit completed an 18-month journey and were installed inside a four-story glass dome."

There is a short QuickTime video, and lots of pictures, at the link.

I think it's great we're going to have a tropical rain forest in Golden Gate Park to showcase biodiversity. But I'm always a little concerned that tropical biodiversity gets so much press, when the California floristic province is itself a biodiversity hotspot.

Conservation International's 25 biodiversity hotspots here.

Criticism of hotspot designations discussed here.

Japanese Tea Garden

(Link to the Flickr set if the blog page loads too slowly for you.)


I haven't been to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park in about 25 years, even though it's right next to the Botanical Garden and I go there all the time.

In fact, I was at the Botanical Garden today for a this volunteer appreciation luncheon. I love this place and these people. As far as I'm concerned, I'm honored to volunteer here and I don't need to be feted. It was great to see everyone today and reconnect with some people I haven't seen in over a year.



We had delicious Asian cuisine and of course lots of wine. Seating places were set with plants in 4" pots that attendees could take home. I got a rooted cutting of Luma apiculata!



This is one of my favorite small trees. I included a picture of L. apiculata in a post from last July.



Warmed by good food (and wine), I was ready to visit the Japanese Tea Garden on this cold, cloudy fall day.

The structures loom over the garden fence from a ways away.



The garden dates from 1893 when it was built as part of a Japanese village exhibit for the Midwinter International Exposition of 1894. A brochure I bought at the gift shop details the history of the garden which becomes especially interesting during WWII when the descendants of the builder, Makoto Hagiwara, were evicted from their residence in the garden. You can read the brochure here if you're interested.

According to many sources, this is the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States--which begs the question, where is the oldest private Japanese garden in the United States?

Everybody I know in San Francisco right now

is very excited about the opening next year of the new California Academy of Sciences.

You would be too:

The entire top of the museum, with the exception of the piazza's glass ceiling, consists of the biggest sustainable roof in the world. It is essentially a planted garden stretching to all four walls, supporting 1.7 million plants, including California poppies and strawberries.

Counting the tops of the two domes - Morrison Planetarium and the living rain forest - the roof sports a total of seven soil hills, mimicking the seven hills of San Francisco. This serendipitously also echoes the seven hills of Rome - capital of the home country of the man who designed the new museum, Italian architect Renzo Piano.

And I think this sounds very exciting:

Perhaps the most visually stunning feature of the new building will be the four-story-high glass dome that will house an exhibit of four rain forest habitats, all kept at a constant 82 degrees.

This dome will feature several palm and other trees soaring 70 feet high, and a winding ramp and an elevator will lead visitors to the four different habitats.

The first floor of the dome will imitate the rain forest of Borneo, with a live colony of bats living alongside snakes and flying geckos, frogs and lizards. The second floor will house Madagascar ants and chameleons, and the third floor will feature the birds and butterflies of Costa Rica, all flitting through the canopies of the dome's gigantic trees.

Finally, the basement will take visitors beneath a living mockup of a flooded Amazonian rain forest floor. To save visitors the trouble of swimming through heated muck, there is a long, acrylic tunnel that will allow them to stroll through and gaze directly into the bottom of the forest with its mangroves, soggy tree roots and freshwater fish.

And that's just the botanically-related stuff.

"The plans for every room, every glass-walled tank, and every exhibit of rain forest trees will bespeak the museum's basic mission: to tell the world how life evolved on planet Earth, how its diversity has spread across all the seas and continents, and how every visitor must come away newly committed to protect and sustain these infinitely varied life forms that are now threatened everywhere."

(In my fantasy world, major American cities would compete with each other to have the best science museum.)

Link to the current Cal Academy webpage.

Other Golden Gate Park news.

In today's paper:

Forget the coyotes. Do you really think your biggest concern is getting bitten by a wild animal?

Frankly, if you are in Golden Gate Park, a far greater danger is that you, or your child, or your pet, will step on a dirty hypodermic needle. Step off the paths, and you'll have plenty of chances...

"Needles?" said homeless park resident Christopher Ash when we asked him if there were any syringes at his camp site near the 25th Avenue-Park Presidio Boulevard split. "Sure. I stuck one in a tree right over here."

Ash found a needle in 30 seconds. A cheerful soul, he says he began taking LSD at the age of 13 and insists he has been living in the wilds of Golden Gate Park for five years...

"It's kind of like one big family," camper Valo Astonea said when he poked his head out of his sleeping bag. Among the 10 to 12 campers in the area, Astonea said, there were sometimes intravenous drug users, "but we kind of frown on that here."

That's not good enough. Inevitably when we write a story like this, there are complaints that we are unsympathetic to the homeless. But this isn't a homeless issue...

Volunteers like Bakewell and Stan Kaufman are doing their part cleaning up areas on their own. Now it is time for city government under this mayor to do its part.

"I am ... paying $8,500 a year in property taxes," says Kaufman. "In an ideal world, it wouldn't fall to volunteers to do this."

Of course, this is no ideal world. It's San Francisco.

Link.

Do you ever watch the television show Intervention? (We're hooked on it--heh, heh.) It's worth checking out just to see some of the interesting ways families and friends service their loved one's addiction. For example, parents frequently give their addict children money to buy drugs believing that it will keep them from resorting to prostitution or violent crime as means of funding a spiraling addiction. Eventually, something gives and they arrange an intervention. By that time, the damage is usually extensive and severe. (The 30-minute television format imposes some provocative limitations; the show is very watchable and easily engenders complex discussions that I won't get in to here. But you can if you want.)

Anyhow, I want to say San Francisco and its homeless (if those two things can be made separate) share a similarly co-dependent relationship. But where individual families can eventually come together and agree 1) that something must be done and 2) what that something is, it seems impossible that a whole city will ever be able to do that. Two contributing factors: a lack of strong leadership, San Francisco's deeply ingrained suspicion of strong leadership when it appears.

The result is variously comic, pathetic, frustrating, maddening and all kinds of other things.