ABSTRACT
Golden Gate Park is a masterpiece of bio-engineering. The site was originally part of a vast area of shifting sand dunes on the Pacific coast of California. Construction began in 1871 and it is probably the first example in the world of a large-scale ornamental landscape created through human manipulation of land form and plant associations. Pioneer plant species – grasses and legumes – were planted to stabilize the sand and provide a sheltered micro-climate conducive to the establishment of woody plants. The park is a three-and-a-half-mile (5.6 kilometre) long by a half mile (0.8 kilo metre) rectangular strip of land aligned east–west at 90 degrees to the coast – comparable in shape, at least, to Central Park, New York. The site is naturally divided by the higher land of Strawberry Hill (rising to 400 feet – 122 metres – above sea level) into a roughly 600 acre (240 hectare) western section designed primarily as woodland and a roughly 400 acre (160 hectare) eastern section intended as a more pastoral landscape. This division was exaggerated by the construction in 1936 of the north–south Cross Over Drive. A three-quarter-mile-long (1.2 kilometre) by one-block-wide (250 foot / 75 metre) ‘Panhandle’ extends eastward from the park towards the downtown a further three miles (4.8 kilometres) or so to the east.
