San Francisco: Yerba Buena Gardens

Yerba Buena was named in 1835 when the English family of William A. Richardson settled in the area. Wild mint grew rampant in the surrounding hills, and the name translates from the Spanish for "good herb."  

In 1846, Captain John Montgomery took possession of the Yerba Buena settlement in the name of the United States of America.  Mexican General Vallejo bargained to give up a portion of his property in exchange for naming the new town after his wife, Francisca, so the entire settlement was renamed San Francisco.
At the time, its 462 inhabitants lived in tents, shanties, and adobe huts.
The present Yerba Buena Gardens opened in 1993.  The gardens include various cultural buildings, such as the Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, public art, a children’s garden, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, fountains and different kinds of gardens.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial is situated behind a majestic waterfall 50 feet high and 20 feet wide which cascades over Sierra granite.


You can walk behind the waterfall to see back-lit photos from the civil rights movement and twelve glass panels set in granite and inscribed with Dr. King's inspiring words.  These inscriptions are always wet with mist from the waterfall.


The water from the waterfall circulates around a small square garden.


Specialised gardens within the Yerba Bueno include the Cho-En Butterfly Garden and the Sister City Gardens  which present plants native to the 13 sister cities of San Francisco.  Sydney is one of them, and its plant is the Australian Bluebell Sollya Heterophylla which I have to admit I’d never heard of.  Looking it up, I found it’s a native of W.A.  (I hope that at least some grow in Sydney.)


Opposite the Yerba Bueno gardens is St Patrick’s Church, established in 1851 to serve the largely Irish population of the goldfields.


Inside St Patrick’s Church – very traditional.


The back of St Patrick’s Church contrasts sharply with the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where we saw the exhibition Gertrude Stein: Five Stories.


On the other side of the Yerba Bueno Gardens is the fabulous San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) where we went to see the exhibition The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde.  There’s Pat who can hardly wait to get inside.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Steins — writer Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael's wife, Sarah — were among the first to recognize the talents of avant-garde painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Through their friendship and patronage, they helped spark an artistic revolution. This landmark exhibition draws on collections around the world to reunite the Steins' unparalleled holdings of modern art, bringing together, for the first time in a generation, dozens of works by Matisse, Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and many others. Artworks on view include Matisse's Blue Nude (Baltimore Museum of Art) and Self-Portrait (Statens Museum, Copenhagen), and Picasso's famous portrait Gertrude Stein (Metropolitan Museum of Art).  See http://www.sfmoma.org/

This was a seriously splendid exhibition.

Caught up in the magic of the moment, I bought Gertrude Stein’s book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.  This is not the autobiography of poor Alice at all, but rather the memoirs of Gertrude (who always calls herself Gertrude Stein, in every paragraph).  The book gives an interesting insight into the Stein’s life in Paris, their friendship with these emerging artists and purchases of their paintings while they were still unknown.

However, I am finding Gertrude’s style irritating and condescending, she repeats herself, she repeats herself, she uses commas where most people use full stops, this makes her work tiring, very tiring to read, I find myself dropping off in the middle of paragraphs, yet I suppose this is what you should expect from someone who has coined the famous phrase “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” among others also the one "To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write".