William McNamara (horticulturist)

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. In 2017, he and Quarryhill Botanical Garden celebrated their 30th Anniversary. He retired from the Garden in October of 2019.
Early life and education.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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 Horticultural 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
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