Golden Gate Park

This guide to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco follows John McLaren, the gardener who ran the park for fifty-three years starting in 1890 and turned drifting sand dunes into forest. It centers on his war against statues, which he called stookies and had his crews bury in dense groves of trees and shrubs, until a friend commissioned a bronze likeness of McLaren himself in 1911. McLaren boxed his own statue up and hid it away in the park's stables.