San Diego Gardens

Everybody loves to go to the zoo to look at animals, right? Nobody would go to a zoom particularly the world-famous San Diego Zoo, to look at the landscape, right? Wrong, because that's precisely what more than 400 garden communicators did at their annual meeting in San Diego.

The Garden Writers Association of America, made up of garden columnists, newspaper/magazine garden editors and hosts of shows on radio and television, met in San Diego. This column will represent the first of a three-part series on some of the horticultural wonders of the Southern California area. Today, we cover the San Diego Zoo, San Diego's leading visitor attraction with more than three million people each year.

Zoo spokeswoman Georgeanne Irvine notes that there are more than 6,500 different plant species among the many more thousands of specimens in the 108-acre landscape. While visitors may marvel at the exotic landscaping, most don't realize that the plantings have been carefully developed over the years. From what once was scrub-covered sandy hillsides with few trees are now towering eucalyptus, graceful palms, bird-of-paradise and tropical hibiscus.

In fact, the zoo is an accredited botanical garden featuring many rare and endangered plants. Some of the prized collections include orchids, cycads, fig trees, coral trees and palm trees. The palm collection numbers more than 350 species alone and is considered one of the best public collections in the United States.

The zoo even grows some plants as dietary supplements for the animals. The giant pandas and lesser pandas receive bamboo. The koalas' sole food is eucalyptus. Galapagos tortoises, leaf-eating monkeys and tree kangaroos receive hibiscus. Giraffes and okapis munch on acacia.

The San Diego Zoo is different from many of its zoo counterparts in that many of these plants are incorporated right with the animals. No cement enclosures here. Plants, trees and grasses are tenderly cared for. Of course, whenever there are plants and animals together, trouble follows.

Take an exhibit of antelope-like Malayan tapirs. When the zoo put in the brand new exhibit, staff proudly took pictures of it 12 hours later, Irvine says. They ended up taking more pictures 48 hours later, but those pictures showed a landscape that was pretty much eaten away. Such an occurance -- animals eating away the plantings -- continues to be a constant challenge.

In many areas of the zoo, trees are fenced off from the animals. The use of perforated plastic pipe is common, often placed around tender tree limbs to protect from nibbling. But for some snaimals, there are no rules. Giraffes, for instance, continue to eat what they want when they want. Their height and sand paper-like tongues easily wiped out the Mexican fan palms that once were in their enclosures.

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