Home to the beautiful and the bizarre
James Lick was brilliantly weird, and a quintessential character in 19th-century San Francisco. He started out as the son of a carpenter in Pennsylvania, and wound up in Argentina in the 1820s crafting high-quality pianos. At one point he traveled to Europe and on his return voyage was captured by Portuguese mariners. He escaped, and eventually made his way to California, where he arrived just in time to catch the wave of the Gold Rush.
His genius was buying land, which he parlayed into hotels, farms, and other developments. Then, having become the richest man in the state, he set out to build huge statues of himself and his parents in downtown San Francisco. But just in the nick of time, the head of the Academy of Sciences rescued Lick from his delusions and directed his fortunes to other local projects, including a state-of-the-art observatory on Mount Hamilton east of San Jose, and also the Conservatory of Flowers, which is a replica of the Palm House in London’s Kew Gardens.
Info
Address 100 John F. Kennedy Drive, San Francisco, CA, 94118, www.conservatoryofflowers.org, +1 415.831.2090 | Public Transport Bus: 5 (Fulton St & Arquello Blvd stop) | Hours Tues–Sun 10am–4:30pm| Tip At Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Middle Drive East is the Garden of Shakespeare’s Flowers, featuring plants and flowers mentioned in the Bard’s poems and plays. You can try to guess the "name of the work" as you pass each of the 150-odd specimens.
The all white, wood and glass Victorian greenhouse for exotic plants is situated in Golden Gate Park, across from the tennis courts. Lick died before it was built, and for years the various pieces lay about in crates. The building finally opened in 1879, and though it escaped the 1906 earthquake unharmed, it subsequently burned down and was rebuilt, twice. In 1995, it was devastated once again by a winter storm and wasn’t reopened until 2003.
There are three rooms in the conservatory: one with an assortment of orchids and vines; the others with lowland and highland tropics and aquatic plants. It’s all a trove of the beautiful and bizarre. Note especially the carnivorous fanged pitcher plant from Borneo, known for its curious relationship with ants: the plant provides the ants with food and shelter in exchange for nutrients supplied by the little bugs.
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