Visitors entering by the main Scott Street gate found themselves in the South Gardens, the exposition's great foreground and its "main distributing area" (Official Guide). The gardens stretched east to west between the green dome of Festival Hall and the glass bubble of the Palace of Horticulture, with the long south facade of the walled city and the Tower of Jewels rising behind the palms of the Avenue of Palms to the north.
The plan was a formal French garden. Todd compared it to the water gardens at Nîmes, framed by low balustrades crowned with great ornamental vases and by borders of veronica and box. At the center, on the Scott Street axis, stood the Fountain of Energy in a quatrefoil pool. From it two oblong pools, each 300 ft long, reached east and west, with Arthur Putnam's mermaid fountains at their far ends. Rumsey's Pizarro and Niehaus's Cortez, painted the green of old Pompeiian bronze, rode on tall pedestals in front of the Tower.
Color was managed like stage lighting. Six hundred thousand plants went in before opening day: yellow pansies, daffodils and yellow tulips, 200,000 of each, so that yellow carried the gardens until June. Twenty thousand pink begonias followed, making "a beautiful old-rose carpet around the Fountain of Energy." The Guide said the plantings changed every six weeks, raised by the hundreds of thousands in the exposition's greenhouses.
This was also the fair's front parlor. The official opening-day ceremonies were held on a grandstand built against the Tower of Jewels, facing the gardens, and the Press Building and Y.W.C.A. Building stood just inside the gate on either side.
The South Garden, the most pretentious of all the gardens, is laid out in the pattern of a formal French garden, surrounded by a low balustrade, with pools, fountains and vases of various designs to lend accent.
Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915)
