A Valentine's weekend in San Francisco

The garden's magnolia collection, one of the most significant outside China, flowers in the depths of winter, enormous pale blossoms opening over the lawns. A few minutes north, the Japanese Tea Garden, the oldest public Japanese garden in the United States, laid out for the 1894 midwinter exposition, gives you a drum bridge, a pagoda, koi ponds and a tea house where you can share a pot while drizzle taps the roof. Go early: it feels very different with twenty people in it than with two hundred.

The Conservatory of Flowers, a white wood-and-glass Victorian greenhouse from the 1870s and the oldest of its kind in the country, is warm, humid and full of orchids, palms and a lily pond, and grey-day light through the fogged glass is lovely.

Standing under the Golden Gate Bridge with the surf hitting the seawall is the best free thing in the city, and February brings the clearest air of the year for it. Begin at the Palace of Fine Arts, last survivor of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, its Beaux-Arts rotunda reflected in a lagoon of swans. Then walk west through Crissy Field, a former airfield turned shoreline park, the bridge growing ahead, to Fort Point, the brick Civil War-era fort beneath the southern anchorage. About two flat, paved miles; turn back whenever you like.

If the waterfront is a wind tunnel, go east to the Ferry Building, the 1898 terminal under the clock tower: a long, high indoor hall of bakeries, oyster bars, cheesemongers and coffee, with the bay on one side. On Saturday mornings the farmers market wraps around it under awnings, and the F-line streetcars stop at the door.

Start on the slope of Dolores Park with the downtown skyline spread below, then walk two blocks to Mission Dolores, the adobe chapel completed in 1791 and the oldest intact building in San Francisco. Then go looking for murals: Balmy Alley, off 24th Street, painted continuously since the 1970s, and scrappier Clarion Alley between Mission and Valencia. Both are free and a block long; give them an hour and actually read them.

If the last day is a washout, cross to the Legion of Honor on the bluff at Lincoln Park: European painting and sculpture, a cast of Rodin's Thinker in the courtyard, and windows onto the Pacific and the bridge. Art inside, dramatic ocean weather beyond the glass.