The Zoo's Amazing Gardens

The San Francisco Zoo’s stunning plant collection is divided into five, often overlapping categories:

• Public “park-like” landscapes
• Animal exhibits
• Browse plants for animal diets
• Windbreak forest
• Native plant gardens, restoration and conservation areas

For example, the Zoo’s African Savanna exhibit integrates public pathways landscaped with a variety of attractive South African plant species, naturalistic savanna-like pastures for the hoofed animals, pre-existing Monterey pine and cypress trees serving as a windbreak, and an area of the original native coastal dune habitat on which the Zoo was built. Elsewhere in the Zoo, trees and shrubs that define and enhance the ornamental landscape of public areas also serve as browse for Zoo animals to eat!

Browse

The San Francisco Zoo continually supplies natural, home-grown browse materials (branches and leaves of eucalyptus, coprosma, acacia, bamboo and other trees and shrubs) to our animals that feed on them. This enriches their diets and stimulates their senses.

Our most significant browsers are our koalas. Since these picky marsupials need three varieties of fresh eucalyptus daily, meeting their needs requires daily cutting of 120 to 160 branches, each four to five feet long!

How You Can Help

Due to the size of our needed harvest and limits to the Zoo’s agricultural potential, we also must rely on resources off-site throughout the Bay area to supplement browse. This solution is temporary, however, as it is expensive and time-consuming. We are working to establish a single, centralized, farm-type operation to meet our immediate and long-term browse needs. If you would like to help this program, please call (415) 753-7084.

Conservation Through Specialty Gardens

Throughout Zoo grounds, the plant collections serve and emphasize the Zoo’s conservation mission. Exhibit plantings recreate the animals’ natural habitat as closely as possible and promote global habitat conservation and restoration. Butterfly and hummingbird gardens, as well as those featuring native coastal plants, demonstrate to Zoo visitors what they can do to preserve native habitat and promote biodiversity in their own backyards.

Native Gardens

The Zoo’s native and endangered plant gardens provide food and cover for local animals and require less water and care than gardens of exotic plants. The Horticulture Department uses drought tolerant plants when possible and irrigation control systems that further reduce water demand. We protect the health of our gardens with integrated pest management, rather than herbicides or pesticides. Plant pots are sent back to the nursery to be reused.

Dune Restoration

The Horticulture Department’s Dune Restoration Project is restoring the dune area between the Great Highway and the Zoo’s west end parking lot to its natural state. Dune restoration provides important coastal dune habitat for native plant and animal species. In addition, our adult volunteer program helps with the Coastal Conservancy Habitat Restoration Partnership.

How You Can Help

Spend a Saturday helping beautify the Zoo by volunteering for Renew the Zoo. Visit our native gardens – at the east end of the Lion house and in the Children’s Zoo in front of the Meerkat and Prairie Dog exhibit – for ideas for your own garden. Then, ask an expert at your local garden center about the kinds of native plants you can grow. Remember, native plants mean less work for you.