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William A. McNamara is an American horticulturist and expert in the field of plant conservation and the flora of Asia. Now retired, he was the President and Executive Director of Quarryhill Botanical Garden, a 25-acre wild woodland garden in Northern California's Sonoma Valley featuring wild-sourced plants from temperate East Asia. [1] In 2017, he and Quarryhill Botanical Garden celebrated their 30th Anniversary. [2] He retired from the Garden in October of 2019. [3]
McNamara was born in 1950 in Logansport, Indiana, moved to Palo Alto, California when he was 11, and graduated from Palo Alto High School. During college, he worked at various nurseries in the San Francisco Bay Area and became a California Certified Nurseryman in 1973. After graduating in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in English, he traveled around the world visiting gardens and remote areas. In 1980, he settled in Sonoma, California where he started Con Mara Gardens, a landscape contracting business. McNamara received a Master of Arts in Conservation Biology from Sonoma State University in 2005. He holds a third degree black belt in Aikido and received a Mokuroku Certificate in Tenshin Shoden Katori Shinto Ryu in 1997.
McNamara has been a Field Associate of the Botany Department at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco since 2000. McNamara shares his horticultural knowledge through presentations throughout the country and abroad, and he has been on the Garden Club of America's speakers list for conservation and horticulture since 2010. [4] [5]
He is considered a modern-day plant hunter. [6] In the company of horticulturists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Windsor Great Park, the Howick Arboretum, and others, McNamara has botanized extensively in the wilds of temperate East Asia. From 1987 to 2019, he participated in annual plant collecting expeditions to China, Japan, India, Nepal, Vietnam and Myanmar in search of plants for research, conservation, and stemming biodiversity loss. [7] [8]
Named Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America, 2018 [9]
The Veitch Memorial Medal from Britain's Royal Horticultural Society, 2017 [10]
Liberty Hyde Bailey Award the American Horticultural Society, 2017 [11]
Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal, Scott Arboretum, 2010 [12]
National Garden Clubs Inc. Award of Excellence, 2013 [13]
California Horticultural Society Annual Award, 2012 [14]
The Garden Club of America’s Eloise Payne Luquer Meda,l 2009 [15]
Field Associate of the Department of Botany, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA, 2000
Honorary Consultant of National Plateau Research Center of China, 2010
Honorary Researcher of the Scientific Information Center of Resources and Environment of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2001
The National Botanic Gardens is a botanical garden in Glasnevin, 5 km north-west of Dublin city centre, Ireland. The 19.5 hectares are situated between Glasnevin Cemetery and the River Tolka where it forms part of the river's floodplain.
Glen Ellen is a census-designated place (CDP) in Sonoma Valley, Sonoma County, California, United States. The population was 784 at the 2010 census, down from 992 at the 2000 census. Glen Ellen is the location of Jack London State Historic Park, Sonoma Valley Regional Park, and a former home of Hunter S. Thompson.
An arboretum in a general sense is a botanical collection composed exclusively or very largely of trees of a variety of species. Originally mostly created as a section in a larger garden or park for specimens of mostly non-local species, many modern arboreta are in botanical gardens as living collections of woody plants and is intended at least in part for scientific study.
Sciadopitys verticillata, the kōyamaki or Japanese umbrella-pine, is a unique conifer endemic to Japan. It is the sole member of the family Sciadopityaceae and genus Sciadopitys, a living fossil with no close relatives, and present in the fossil record for about 230 million years.
Magnolia virginiana, most commonly known as sweetbay magnolia, or merely sweetbay, is a member of the magnolia family, Magnoliaceae. It was the first magnolia to be scientifically described under modern rules of botanical nomenclature, and is the type species of the genus Magnolia; as Magnolia is also the type genus of all flowering plants (magnoliophytes), this species in a sense typifies all flowering plants.
The San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum is located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Its 55 acres represents nearly 9,000 different kinds of plants from around the world, with particular focus on Magnolia species, high elevation palms, conifers, and cloud forest species from Central America, South America and Southeast Asia.
The Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is a botanical research institution and free public park, located in the Jamaica Plain and Roslindale neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1872, it is the oldest public arboretum in North America. The landscape was designed by Charles Sprague Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted and is the second largest "link" in the Emerald Necklace. The Arnold Arboretum's collection of temperate trees, shrubs, and vines has a particular emphasis on the plants of the eastern United States and eastern Asia, where arboretum staff and colleagues are actively sourcing new material on plant collecting expeditions. The arboretum supports research in its landscape and in its Weld Hill Research Building.
Sonoma Botanical Garden is a 501(c)3 private nonprofit education and research botanical garden home to one of the largest collections of scientifically documented, wild-source Asian plants in North America and Europe.
Hoyt Arboretum is a public park in Portland, Oregon and is part of the complex of parks collectively known as Washington Park. The 189-acre (76 ha) arboretum is located atop a ridge in the Tualatin Mountains two miles (3.2 km) west of downtown Portland. Hoyt has 12 miles of hiking trails, two miles of accessibility paved trails, and is open free to the public all year. About 350,000 visitors per year visit the arboretum.
Nichols Arboretum, locally known as the Arb, is an arboretum operated by the University of Michigan. Located on the eastern edge of its Central Campus at 1610 Washington Heights in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the Arboretum is a mosaic of University and City properties operated as one unit. The arboretum is open daily from sunrise to sunset with no charge for admission. The Huron River separates a northern section of the arboretum's floodplain woods; the railroad marks the northern border.
The Stanley M. Rowe Arboretum is a public arboretum covering 3.6 hectares in Indian Hill, Ohio. It is owned by the Indian Hill city government and operated by a non-profit organization.
The JC Raulston Arboretum is a 10-acre (40,000 m2) arboretum and botanical garden administered by North Carolina State University, and located in Raleigh, North Carolina. It is open daily to the public without charge.
The Plant Collections Network (PCN) is a group of North American botanical gardens and arboreta that coordinates a continent-wide approach to plant germplasm preservation, and promotes excellence in plant collections management. The program is administered by the American Public Gardens Association from its headquarters in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in collaboration with the USDA- Agricultural Research Service.
The Guelph Arboretum of the University of Guelph is an arboretum modeled after the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, which was founded in 1872. The Arnold Arboretum is privately endowed as a department of Harvard just as the Guelph Arboretum is a department of the University of Guelph. The University of Guelph Arboretum was founded in the early 1970s and plantings started in 1971 which have developed into specialized gardens, botanical collections, and gene conservation programs. These Arboretums are demonstrations of American gardening which did not come into its own until the late 19th century. With Industrialization, cities grew in size with a need for natural areas, which were included through the creation of public parks. Views of botanical gardens began to change as they became sources for new material of potential horticultural use rather than only public spaces. Today these spaces act in the propagation of plants that have the potential as attractive and functional ornamentals.
Ernest Henry "Chinese" Wilson, better known as E. H. Wilson, was a notable British plant collector and explorer who introduced a large range of about 2000 Asian plant species to the West; some sixty bear his name.
The Memphis Botanic Garden is a 96-acre (39 ha) botanical garden located in Audubon Park at 750 Cherry Road, Memphis, Tennessee.
The Seed Herbarium Image Project (SHIP), is an initiative of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University to create a web-based repository of high-resolution digital images documenting the morphology of woody plant seeds and selected fruit structures. Headquartered at the Arboretum’s Dana Greenhouse facility and coordinated and photographed by curatorial assistant Julie McIntosh Shapiro, the Seed Herbarium Image Project supports the work of educators and professionals in horticulture and the botanical sciences, particularly in conservation research and management of rare and endangered species. The digitized images of seeds offer an important new aid for teaching seed identification—a fundamental skill in plant propagation, hybridization, and distribution—and serve as a resource for nurserymen, horticulturists, botanical curators, taxonomists, ecologists, and the general public. SHIP also provides an online resource for botanical institutions and nurseries to verify their collections and inventories. SHIP is made possible through the generous support of the Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust, Cabot Family Charitable Trust, and the J. Frank Schmidt Family Charitable Foundation.
Frank Nicholas Meyer was a United States Department of Agriculture explorer who traveled to Asia to collect new plant species. The Meyer lemon was named in his honor.
The John F. Kennedy Arboretum on the Hook Head Peninsula at New Ross, County Wexford, Ireland, is a park under public administration ).
Sidney Waxman (1923–2005) was an American botanist and horticulturist who served as Professor of Ornamental Horticulture at the University of Connecticut's main campus in Storrs for more than thirty years (1957-1991), continuing to work on his ornamentals long after retirement. His research interests included plant photoperiodism, tissue culture, and witches’ brooms. He founded UConn's experimental plant nursery and built a national reputation for cultivation of dwarf conifers from witch's brooms, developing and naming thirty-four distinct cultivars. He also cultivated Japanese umbrella pines, larches, cinnamon bark maple, hemlocks, and azaleas. Waxman raised more than 200,000 seedlings to create a total of forty cultivars. Many of his varieties were sold in plant nurseries and garden centers.