Quick answer
Golden Gate Park covers 1,017 acres of what were San Francisco sand dunes, a district once called the Outside Lands. Surveying began in 1870 under William Hammond Hall, who held the ground with barley, then lupine, then trees. John McLaren ran the park from 1890 until his death in 1943. Bison have been kept there since 1891.
Full transcript
Sand
Everything you are standing on was sand. In the 1860s this was the Outside Lands, shifting dunes that most people considered worthless. Frederick Law Olmsted, who had designed Central Park, was asked what to do with it and in 1865 came back with a plan built around drought-tolerant native planting, because he did not think an eastern-style park could be watered into existence out here. The city rejected it and asked for a Central Park anyway. So in 1870 a 24-year-old civil engineer named William Hammond Hall went out to survey the dunes. He camped a month, and one of the horses spilled its feed — soaked barley — onto bare sand. A week later Hall found it sprouted, holding several yards of loose dune in green. That accident became the method. Barley first, to hold the sand through the winter. Then lupine, to hold it through the summer. Then trees, into ground the earlier plants had already stabilized. Sixty thousand trees were in the ground by 1875 — mostly blue gum, Monterey pine and Monterey cypress — and the dunes stayed put.
Uncle John
In 1890 a Scottish gardener named John McLaren took over, and he stayed 53 years — he died in 1943, aged 96, still superintendent, in the lodge inside the park, having outlasted every mayor who tried to retire him. McLaren had rules. No signs, no statues if he could help it, and no keep off the grass. He hid the ones he was ordered to install behind shrubs, and some of them are still hard to find. He wanted a park that looked like countryside rather than a garden, and the result is that Golden Gate Park does not feel designed, which is the hardest thing to design. It covers a little over a thousand acres, which makes it about twenty percent larger than Central Park.
The Bison
Near the western end, along John F. Kennedy Drive, there is a paddock with American bison in it. They are not a novelty act. The first bison came to the park in 1891, when the species had been hunted to the edge of extinction — fewer than a thousand animals left on the continent. The park bred them, and more than a hundred calves have been born here. The rest of the park will take you days. The Japanese Tea Garden is the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States. The Conservatory of Flowers is a Victorian glasshouse that opened in 1879, and the Japanese Tea Garden dates from 1894. Stow Lake has a waterfall and rowing boats. Come on a Sunday, when the main road closes to cars and the park stops belonging to traffic.