From plants to poetry for Bill McNamara with ‘Collected Poems: The Later Years’

William “Bill” McNamara climbed the mountains and traversed the forests of China, Japan, India, Nepal, Vietnam and Bhutan, searching for rare and endangered plant seeds that he brought back to build the glorious Sonoma Botanical Garden (formerly Quarryhill Botanical Garden) in Glen Ellen. His work has been well documented, but no one realized that these trips would also bear fruit in the form of deeply personal poems that convey his love of and concern for the environment.

He was the driving force at Quarryhill while serving in leadership positions for 32 years until he retired in 2019. His passion for poetry came to light with the publication of his “Collected Poems: The Later Years” this year from The Mousetail Press in Sonoma.

McNamara, 71, became interested in poetry while attending the University of California, Berkeley, through some friends, classes and an inspiring reading by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder. He subsequently came to love Japanese and Chinese poetry and was also influenced by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the Beat poets. His wife, Joanna McNamara, has also been an inspiration.

“To write poetry, I believe one needs a muse, and one never knows when the muse will appear,” McNamara said. “After 26 years together, I can say that she is my muse in more ways than I can imagine. She is an artist and has traveled widely with me around the world, and especially in Asia.

“Some of her paintings and photographs are in the book. Through all of this, my poetry has become more personal. My other muse has been nature, especially trees.”

His intimate connection with trees began after he graduated from Palo Alto High School and began working as a firefighter for the California Department of Forestry.

“My foreman had been planting conifers around the station for a number of years and when there was time, he would take me around to see them and tell me about them,” McNamara said. “At the time, I couldn’t tell them apart, but by the end of the summer I wanted to know everything I could about them and clearly understood how different they all were. This began my interest in understanding and appreciating the world of plants.”

He furthered his knowledge of plants by working at nurseries while working toward a bachelor’s degree in English at U.C. Berkeley. He then worked at nurseries in Palo Alto and Berkeley as well as Wedekind’s Garden Center in Sonoma. After three years at Wedekind’s, he started a landscape contracting business.

In 1985, he met Jane Davenport Jansen, who hired him to install what would become Quarryhill Botanical Garden. From 1987 to 2019, McNamara traveled to Asia almost every year to gather seeds from rare trees, which were then planted at Quarryhill.

In the poem, “Trees,” McNamara writes:

When I was young

I used to climb

A lot of trees

When I was middle aged

I climbed trees in Japan, China, & the Himalaya

Now I am old

And I look at Trees and smile

Sonoma Mayor Jack Ding, a first-generation Chinese American, says he admires McNamara’s efforts to collect seeds in mountains and forests in China, thereby saving many endangered plants.

“He has added more value to Sonoma and enriched our community,” Ding said. “Reading Bill’s poems is a kind of ‘simple’ luxury. Small and short words build up a beautiful poetry, which is accessible to all people. Bill, as a poet, has expressed what readers want to express, but cannot yet.”

Ding notes that in order to address his concern about global warming, McNamara borrowed some wisdom from the legendary poet and environmentalist Li Po, who lived in China more than 1,300 years ago.

Sonoma resident Beverly Diplock, who served as a volunteer at Quarryhill, is touched by McNamara’s intimacy with nature.

“His book left me in awe as an unforgettable memorial to his love of the natural world, and as I mentioned to him at his book signing event at Reader’s Books in July, the poetry collection felt like one delicious love story,” she said.

Jim Shere, a psychotherapist and writer in Glen Ellen, says that McNamara’s spare phrasings and constant return to the presence of an abiding nature reflect Asian forms of poetry as well as Buddhist teachings.

“During his expeditions into the Far East to locate and preserve endangered species, we are fortunate that he also wrote poetry that preserves for us his personal view of — and concern for — an impermanent and vibrant nature,” he said.

This concern for nature runs through the book as McNamara laments the ways in which it has been abused and neglected.

“Before agriculture, all humans lived in small, egalitarian, nomadic bands with nature, foraging as hunter gatherers,” McNamara said. “They went where the food was. After agriculture, humans began controlling nature, cutting down a forest or making a meadow of, say, wheat or corn. They began to believe that they could control all nature and they were separate from it.

“We now are so far removed from nature, so domesticated that we don’t even understand that we are destroying our only home, destroying habitats, causing massive extinctions, changing the climate and over populating.”

He is alarmed that this could be leading to the end of civilization.

“I think civilization is collapsing, though few see it,” McNamara said. “I am very fearful how it will unfold.”

In “Before the Fall,” McNamara writes:

When and perhaps more importantly why

Did the symbolic replace the actual

What was it about the Tree of knowledge

Of good and evil

Was it knowledge of our innocence

That doomed us to die

And did the Tree of life sustain us

Before the fall

Or was it an attempt to control

With symbolic knowledge

Others and the Earth

That led to the fall

As we lost the gift to be wild and free

Yet McNamara is hopeful that today’s youth will cultivate greater synchronization with the environment, saying, “I think many youth today see this [abuse] and I am inspired by the likes of Greta Thunberg. I am hopeful that the young will wake up and stop the destruction.”

McNamara, who received a master’s degree in conservation biology from Sonoma State University, has been involved with environmental issues, focusing on horticulture on an international scale as an active lecturer, a member of several societies and committees, and a winner of a half-dozen prestigious awards.

He and his wife were renting a home in Sonoma until last spring, when they moved to a home they own in Truckee. McNamara often travels to Sonoma Valley to visit family members and continues to write poetry and horticultural articles as well as work in consulting.

“I also spend as much time as possible with my wife, admiring the wildflowers, shrubs and trees of the high mountains,” he said.

Reach the reporter, Dan Johnson, at daniel.johnson@sonomanews.com.