William McNamara (horticulturist)


William A. McNamara is an American horticulturist and expert in the field of plant conservation and the flora of Asia. He is 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 East Asia. In 2017, he and Quarryhill Botanical Garden celebrated their 30th Anniversary.

Early life and education

McNamara was born 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.

Career

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 frequent presentations throughout the country, and he has been on the Garden Club of America's speakers list for conservation and horticulture since 2010.
He is considered a modern-day plant hunter. 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 East Asia. For the past 31 years, each fall he has ventured into the mountains of China, Japan, India, Nepal, Vietnam and Myanmar in search of plants. McNamara and his colleagues are pursuing their mutual goals of research, conservation and stemming biodiversity loss.

Awards and honors

Named Honorary Member of The Garden Club of America, 2018
The Veitch Memorial Medal from England's Royal Horticultural Society, 2017
Liberty Hyde Bailey Award the American Horticulture Society, 2017
Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal, Scott Arboretum, 2010
National Garden Clubs Inc. Award of Excellence, 2013
California Horticultural Society Annual Award, 2012
The Garden Club of America’s Eloise Payne Luquer Meda,l 2009
Field Associate of the Department of Botany, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA, 2000 – present
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

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