Dates have been announced for the 11th annual Flower Piano in the SF Botanical Garden, in Golden Gate Park. The beloved, annual event brings a dozen pianos to different spots in the garden with both scheduled performers and free play sessions.

Flower Piano returns September 10 to September 20 in the SF Botanical Garden, and as always, it is free to attend for all SF residents. (Tickets for non-residents can be purchased at the gate, or purchased ahead here.) The event runs all 11 days, with scheduled performers concentrated more heavily on the weekends.

Around 100 performers will be participating in total, including professional jazz, classical, soul, and cabaret performers, many of whom have been featured in previous years. The full schedule includes The Pacific Jazz Group, John Brothers Piano Company, the Glide Ensemble, Kitten on the Keys, Allison Lovejoy, and moody "musical conjurer" Jill Tracy.

And, as always, you may happen upon some of the best music just passing through as a local sleeper virtuoso takes to the keys during open play hours.

Photo via Gardens of Golden Gate Park

"The most memorable experiences in our parks are the ones that surprise us, bring us together, and leave us seeing a familiar place in a new way,” says SF Recreation and Park Department general manager, Sarah Madland, in a statement. “That's exactly what Flower Piano has done for more than a decade, delighting hundreds of thousands of visitors and showcasing Golden Gate Park as one of the world's great public spaces."

This year, the cocktail lounge near the Main Gate, for which there is an extra paid entry fee and in which there are some nicer, dedicated restrooms than the regular park restrooms, is being sponsored by autonomous taxi company Zoox. And some performances will take place in the lounge, a schedule of which is here.

Flower Piano began in 2015 as an offshoot of the pop-up series Sunset Piano, co-founded by pianists Dean Mermell and Mauro Ffortissimo. Ffortissimo began by installing a single upright piano on a bluff near his studio in Half Moon Bay, so that he and his friends could play and enjoy piano music in nature, with the ocean waves crashing below them.

The 2015 event was conceived as part of the 75th anniversary celebration of the SF Botanical Garden, and it proved so popular that it has returned every year (except 2020).

Below is a PBS News Hour segment on the event from 2024