San Francisco Botanical Gardens Review

One of the best things to do in San Francisco - take a long walk in this beautiful botanical garden. Don't miss the yearly Flower Piano event! Bring a lunch and have a picnic here.

Amazing collection, variety, staff, and occasional events. Don't miss the bamboo forest, it really feels like another world!

We go with our close friends and our kids every New Year's Day to this wonderfully beautiful place in Golden Gate Park! And it's open to the public free of charge on January 1st! It has open spaces for kids to run around and run off all that winter vacation energy!

Absolutely beautiful, went early for the free entry and we were blown away at the size of the place!

Easy to spend a few hours here - highly recommend the bamboo pond. Succulent garden is hidden behind redwoods so is tricky to get to, but well worth it.

You might miss a section if you don't keep track of all the paths, though most are well marked.

Beautiful place just to relax and spend quality time with your family!!

Beautiful place to walk around with kids or by yourself. Free for SF locals (bring ID!).

Nice stroll around the garden, lots of paths to zig and zag around.

Walk and stop. Look and feel the magic of the love of this garden. I was in San Francisco to give lecture on orchids and bromeliads and this was the site of those talks. I was in awe at the diversity and design. I learned so much.

It some amazing plant life from all over the world.

Great place! Definitely should check it out if you're visiting SF. The place is huge. There was so much to see. If you go early morning, parking shouldn't be bad. You can park on the side of the street. When we left around noon time, it was PACKED. Just to put it into context, this was in the afternoon on a Wednesday. Not even the weekend. So if you want to get a good parking space, go early. It's worth it. All of the flowers and plants were beautiful. Definitely a lot bigger than the Japanese Tea garden right across the street. Non-SF residents have to pay to get in but we thought it was worth it.

Definitely a stop to make. Bring a blanket and picnic out on a beautiful day

We love it very much, a very lovely, wonderful peaceful place t spend a couple hours there.

Stunning! The place is vast, beautiful, well organized and such a pleasure to visit with kids. There are several well organized sections - California, Americas, Australia, South Africa etc. All with excellent representation of native plants. We caught magnolia blooming season and it was marvelous. It s very easy to visit with kids - paths are stroller friendly and older kids will have plenty of activists to do - reading plaques, learning about plants, playing by the fountains and looking up fishes in the pond or exploring prehistoric gardens. Everything is nicely labeled with a lot of interesting tidbits and facts. Highly recommend coming several times a year to catch various seasonal exhibitions and blooms.
Restrooms are plenty and clean.
Parking is on the street (come early or drive around until find a spot).
Stag is very helpful and pleasant.
There are docent tours several times a day.

Now you can totally get lost for hours exploring in here.

Nice botanical garden inside Golden Gate Park. It's a treasure to have the park and it's very convenient, but, but nearly in the same league as New York, Brooklyn or Chicago's botanical gardens.

It is an exceptional and enormous botanical garden, with plants brought from almost every corner of the world, the second Tuesday of every month the entrance is free, and you save the $ 9 that normally costs the entrance. Nice way to spend a couple of hours very nice and surrounded by international nature. The Golden Gate Park itself is a marvel, one of many that the city of San Francisco has.

Just beautiful with many regions of the world on display. There were a bit of work and maintenance going on and obviously what you see depends on the time of year

Made for a great couple of hours of romantic walking around smelling flowers and snapping pictures of beautiful specimens.

It is a very nice garden with beautiful flowers and trees from around the world, including many magnolia trees. There is a very nice succulent garden too. A good place to meditate all day.

Beautiful winding paths and very interesting plants.

Very large space with plants from all over the world.

Really beautiful, many kinds of plants to see. Hope to come back and re-visit

Lovely rest from the city, I wish the whole Bay was a botanical garden

It's ok as far as botanical gardens go. Nice for a romantic stroll. Not really a Must See though. .I've seen a lot better.

Lovely place to spend an afternoon! The garden is free for SF residents, but not for visitors. The entrance fee isn't too steep though ($12/adult on weekends). We were able to breeze through the garden in about 2 hours, but we definitely could have spent more time! My boyfriend had taken me to see the magnolias for our anniversary and we only had enough time to follow the highlights map within those 2 hours. I wish we had gotten there earlier, because there was so much more to explore. I'm sure there would be more blooms in the warmer seasons, but it was still very pretty in late Feb. The parking garage is pricey, so I suggest trying to get there earlier in the day to snag free street parking. There were paved paths as well as some dirt paths. I saw someone in a wheelchair and they seemed to be enjoying what could be seen from the paved paths.

Beautiful but no longer free to nonresidents except certain times. I manage to get lost while trying to find my way back to the main gate. I encountered blocked off areas which made matters worse. Even though I tried to follow a map I still had trouble. It's a place I'd rather visit with company. I do better when with someone.

We had an awesome experience here at the San Francisco Botanical Garden! It is a beautiful place inside and out! It s a fantastic experience for people with any level of knowledge and varying interests in all things botanical. The living displays in each area were well-labeled and the visitors were able to go through at their own pace, which made the experience the best it could be. Thank you again to the staff and volunteers who take care of this amazing botanical garden!

One of the most beautiful and informational gardens ive been to. Bring your kids and family. Also great and safe place to play pokemon go and dont have to worry about cars inside the park .

Love this place. I came here for the Flower Piano event and it was pretty great. I would definitely recommend going during this event where grand pianos and baby grand pianos are put out in the flower gardens.

The garden is beautiful only that it made me somewhat expensive since they charge you $ 20 per person and there are no discounts to foreigners ...

Very beautiful botanical garden.
You don't see many people and you are very quiet.
You don't pay much and you see a lot.

Excellent place to stay or to enjoy an exhilarating bariety of plants and flowers from various parts of the world

I like this place very much, suitable for adults and children.

Great assortment of cool vegetation to appreciate, quiet and beautiful

The park is very beautiful and has varieties of plants that we do not know at a time if we realize just some of them come in different places of the world

They do have "truffles" on every menu, I guess it's their signature dish, and they're delicious! Thank you.

Beautiful, well-maintained garden with a variety of species from different areas of the world and time frames. Lots of open spaces for relaxing and picnicking on the grass, too. My only complaint was the map was very confusing.

Free for SF residents and pretty reasonably priced for visitors. Its a really beautiful park with a lot to see and it is swarming with hummingbirds

The price has gone up for non SF citizens (from $5 to $9), but it's still worth it.

So beautiful and relaxing. I went on a Sunday and it wasnt very crowded.

Located in Golden Gate Park, the San Francisco botanical gardens feature a wide variety of plants organized by habitat type, ranging from forest to meadow to desert, and including flora of different countries and regions.

The best. Absolutely gorgeous gardens. Well kept. Lots of unique plants and FREE is a San Franciscan. And super inexpensive even if you aren't. I have been here at least a dozen times and every time it is a whole new experience. The Australian section with acacia and banksia are my favourite...

Amazing place . Just it was windy and cold at that time of the year.

There is always something different to see on each visit to the Gardens. Must see spots include the fountain, the turtle pond, the Succulent Garden. There are also several gazebos that are nice to sit down and enjoy the views.

Nice botanical garden. I highly recommend going on one of the free two-hours tours!

Beautiful place to take a nice long walk through. The succulent garden is the most amazing!

Great selection of plants, got to see a few turtles and a blue heron! Only $9 when I was there!
The signage is really bad, it's hard to navigate through the gardens and often hard to distinguish where the actual paths are. Also saw a few mosquitoes during the day due to standing water in the moon garden that's under supposedly under renovation.
We ended up going here after seeing how absurdly high the academy of sciences had jacked up their prices and I certainly don't regret it, but they need to figure out how to line a path and put signs in areas that make more sense.

We arrived here as a visitor for the.first time without knowing we needed advance tickets, many thanks to a beautiful woman who was a member, she allowed us to enter under her membership. We love this place !!

Surely a hidden gem. A place to take your parents for serious talk or a significant other to pop the question. Either way, the indigenous plants and the plethora of colorful, fragrant botanicals leave you speechless. Bright and quaint enough to inspire fruitful thoughts.

We go there all the time, last week we saw a family of racoons, and this week a coyote.
The place is amazing, and great for walking around

Nice walks and lots of colorful and beautiful plants and flowers to see and smell. I've paid only $9 as a non-SF resident. My favorite place was the Moon Viewing Garden.

The Fragrance Garden is a great experience as well.

The Botanical Garden was a wonderful experience if you enjoy nature. For only $8 adults admission fee you get to know unique collections of plants from all over the world. Watching the contrast between the recreated microclimates from Africa, Asia, Chile, Australia, New Zeland and more is mindblowing. Don't miss it!

Easily one of the top botanical gardens I have visited. Great collections on diversed plant families. Well demonstrated natural forms of plants if done correctly. A little oasis and free for the residents for the urban San Franciscans. Plant labels can use some improvement though.

Seriously one of the nicest botanical gardens I've ever seen. And I usually stop by to see them in every city I go to. The garden is maaaassive and we didn't even get to go through the whole thing. They're divided into different regions from the world and you can get lost and spend all day there

There's a huge variety of flora in the garden to explore, which made for a great afternoon. The garden is very well maintained, and is well worth the small entry fee if you're not a resident. If the weather is nice, then treat yourself to a walk through the garden and enjoy the scenery.

I stumbled upon this gem while wandering the Golden gate park. Wow! The upkeep of these gardens is top notch, and the dedication the staff have shows. I was there while the magnolias are in bloom. Gorgeous!

Best ride I took in San Francisco. Immense and very well taken care of, the Chinese Garden next door is also very cool. There is one day in the month that admission is free.

Having a bad day or just want some peace and quiet time to yourself? Then come here. There is a small pond, with turtles, geese. Then there's a redwood trail deeper within the garden.

Come here, get lost in tranquility, then come back to reality and find your way out.

I love seeing all those amazing plants the scenery is gorgeous

Beautiful gardens and very big, be prepared to walk around quite a bit.

Beautiful, very large with an incredible variety of plants from various places in the world. Impossible to travel in a short time

My husband and I visited the SF Botanical Gardens last Sept 2017 - hadn't been there since the late 60s. We took another couple with us from the UK. I must say we were thoroughly disappointed! The place was a shambles and I was truly embarassed. All four of us thought....what is the City of San Francisco doing with all the money they receive at the admission gate? They're certainly not spending it on maintenance! If a city the size of San Francisco cannot maintain the garden then they should close it down and put the land to better use. Golden Gate Park is such a tremendous asset to the city and everything inside the park should be as well maintained as the Japanese Garden - especially when they charge to enter it!!!!

Lots of plants from many places around the world. This place is good for picnics, Frisbee and just any type of typical hangout at a park. Theres plenty of open space.