William McNamara, executive director of Quarryhill Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen, California, has been named an honorary member of The Garden Club of America (GCA), one its highest accolades.
The nonprofit national organization composed of 200 clubs with some 18,000 members who devote energy and expertise to projects in their communities and across the United States.
In honoring McNamara, the GCA hailed him as “a stellar talent in the horticulture pantheon, with an inspiring commitment to the collection, germination and propagation of endangered plant species.”
Noted for his work at Quarryhill and in the wilds of Asia, McNamara is an activist for conservation worldwide.
Since the mid-1980s, McNamara has been instrumental in the garden’s development, fostering its mission of advancing the conservation, study and cultivation of the flora of Asia. Quarryhill now hosts one of the largest collections of scientifically documented, wild-sourced Asian plants in North American and Europe.
“Annual seed collecting expeditions to the wilds of East China and other parts of Asia, careful supervision of the germination of those seeds, cultivation of the plants and design of the garden have resulted in the wonder that is Quarryhill,” observed the GCA. “Under Bill’s direction, species on the brink of extinction are being propagated in California and returned to their native climes in Asia.”
In addition, plants from Quarryhill are in botanical gardens and arboreta throughout North America and Europe, providing researchers, conservationists and students with living examples of threatened Asian plant species.
The GCA also noted McNamara’s commitment to education. Developed by McNamara, Quarryhill’s educational programs highlight the worldwide plant extinction crisis and the importance of conservation efforts. Each year, 4th and 5th grade students from Sonoma County schools visit Quarryhill to learn about conservation, the process of seed germination and plant cultivation.”
McNamara has served as an international advisor for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and he contributes to scientific journals and other periodicals including Pacific Horticulture.
McNamara was awarded the 2017 Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society, for outstanding contribution to the advancement of the science and practice of horticulture, and the 2017 Liberty Hyde Bailey Award, the American Horticultural Society’s highest honor for significant lifetime contributions to horticulture. In 2010, McNamara received the Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal from the Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College for outstanding national contributions to the science and art of gardening. McNamara is one of only seven Americans to have received all three awards.
He was previously recognized by the GCA with its Eloise Payne Luquer Medal in 2009 for scholarly research, documentation, cultivation, conservation and the preservation of the genetic identity of endangered Asian plants.
The honor was presented at the GCA’s annual meeting April 29 in San Francisco. Orinda Garden Club of Orinda, California, member of the GCA, nominated McNamara for honorary membership.
Named along with McNamara were Roy E. Diblik, author, designer, horticulturist and co-owner of Northwind Perennial Farm in Burlington, Wisconsin, and Daniel J. Hinkley, intrepid plant explorer, prolific author and public speaker, horticulture consultant and educator.
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