Natural Areas Locator

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Natural Areas

Golden Gate Park: Oak Woodlands

Location: Between Fulton Street and Lincoln Way, Stanyan Street and Cross Over Drive
Established: 1868
Size: Park: 1,021.0 acres/Natural Area: 26.2 acres
Park Type: Oak Woodland

While most of Golden Gate Park has been landscaped with lawn, flower beds and other ornamental areas, a few remnants of San Francisco's oak woodlands still exist in this world-renowned park. The northeast corner of Golden Gate Park is home to some of the oldest coast live oak trees in San Francisco.

Golden Gate Park once was part of one of the largest inland-reaching sand dune systems along the western shore of North America. It stretched seven miles from Ocean Beach across the entire peninsula to the present-day Financial District. The western areas near the ocean were covered with constantly drifting sand. Toward the eastern end, rock outcrops and ridges provided a protected environment in which oak trees thrived. Despite their rich biological diversity and stark beauty, the dunes did not meet the European aesthetic for park land. In 1870, William Hammond Hall submitted a plan to Mayor Frank McCoppin to tame the sand dunes and "fit a graceful curvature" to the natural topography. Using horse manure, the park designers transformed the ever-shifting sand into stabilized, arable soil. The actual dune reclamation project began in 1872 with the planting of grasses, lupine, and various trees. The introduction of nitrogen-fixing species such as lupine allowed ornamental trees and shrubs to survive where once they would have perished. Fortunately, the park was "built" around the oak woodlands, and today they remain a unique feature of Golden Gate Park and a historic remnant providing clues to an earlier ecosystem.

Natural History
Acorns, the fruit of oak trees, develop from the ovary of a single pollinated female flower. Oaks don't have showy, colorful blossoms like other flowering plants that rely on insects for pollination. Instead, pollen is carried by the wind, from male to female flowers. Since the wind can be unpredictable and scatter pollen in many directions, oak flowers produce large amounts in order to maximize acorn production.

The oak's path from acorn to tree is a difficult one. In order to sprout, the acorn must escape predation from many animals. Gray squirrels and scrub jays are voracious predators and wide-ranging dispersers of acorns. Scrub jays may bury several thousand acorns in one season. By hiding—and sometimes forgetting about—their acorn caches, these animals are inadvertently "planting" the future woodlands.

In order to sprout, acorns must either land or be hidden by animals in a place that is not too shady, hot or dry. Good spots include layers of decomposing leaves and cracks in the soil at the edge of existing oak trees. From the time when the acorn germinates until it becomes a young tree, it is susceptible to drought and herbivory (browsing by deer, insects, and other animals). New leaves are especially tasty to animals, but if too many are removed, the tree cannot make its own food through photosynthesis and will starve. As a result, many plants have evolved to produce tannins and other chemicals distasteful to herbivores. Although some oak leaves still are consumed by animals, the tannins discourage them from eating too many, allowing saplings to survive.

A world of ever-present creatures thrives among the shadows of an oak woodland. The acorn crop comes in the fall when other food sources dry up, and many animals must put on fat for the winter. There are several species of birds known as sapsuckers which drink from the phloem (vascular tissue which transports sugars throughout the tree) just below the bark. Western harvest mice strip the bark and Botta's pocket gophers eat the roots of saplings. Insectivorous bird species such as brown creepers and nuthatches scour the trunks, branches and leaves for the many insect species residing in oaks.