I’m not a huge gardener. I don’t really like plants anyway, and I never even tried them. I don’t even own a plant that’s not a fruit, vegetable, or herb.
For the last few months Ive been working with a small group of people to start a project called San Francisco’s gardens. We all share one passion: the ability to make the city we live in an oasis of greenery. So naturally we made a video about that, and I have been working on a documentary about the project and our efforts to make it happen.
What I loved about San Francisco is that I can get away with a lot of silly mistakes in my garden. People are very good in San Francisco, and in the video I talked about our attempts to create a small urban oasis. I think it was pretty easy to get that right.
San Francisco was first conceived as a city park and garden, but it expanded into a whole city when John Sanborn moved to the city in 1873, and the city’s original landscape design was never fully completed. One of the biggest mistakes we made was to leave the flower beds empty so they would get cut down and left to rot, but that was pretty easy to fix once we got the city’s design down pat.
The next step was to take the lawns and flowers, the paths, and the streets and plow them over, but that wasn’t too hard as most of the soil was already removed. The gardens themselves were created to fill in the space that had been taken up by the citys original landscape design.
The citys original landscape design was basically a big box that had been surrounded by a huge fence in the middle. This box extended for a long way around the city, but it was not long enough to fully enclose the actual citys main square, and the space between the box and the fence was used as a public park.
The main purpose of the gardens was to enclose the citys main square and make it bigger and better than before. The gardens are set out in a grid of interconnected smaller boxes. The boxes are set in a square pattern that represents a large circle (or triangle, depending on the version you buy). The boxes are filled with soil that will be used to create a garden that will cover the entire area of the city of San Francisco.
The designers of the gardens set out to encapsulate the city in a single space. They did this with a series of carefully constructed boxes that are made to look like the citys main block at the center of the space. The gardens are also set out in a series of long rectangles that are offset slightly from the main straight line of the space. The space between the boxes is used as a public park.
When I think of the design of San Francisco, I think of the city as being very large, so the idea of a garden being part of the city’s design seems really obvious. The gardens aren’t actually meant to be permanent. They’ll be torn down and replaced with new gardens as they’re used, but for now they are meant as a kind of museum piece.
It is a common practice in San Francisco for new development to set up “common” garden beds. These are large areas of grass, or the top of a hill, or a bit of a square at the edge of a city, where new buildings can set out new plants and flowers. There are also a few very well known gardens like the Bayshore (which has a huge grassy area that’s perfect for kids to run around in.