San Francisco Botanical Garden

This guide to the San Francisco Botanical Garden follows its Depression-era founding, funded by widow Helene Strybing and built with federal relief labor under German-born botanist Eric Walther, the garden's first director. In 1939, Walther planted a young magnolia he had brought from Asia, a variety no one in America had ever seen flower. Listen for how the collection of rare conifers and cloud-forest species from six continents grew up around that first tree.