John McLaren

Background

John McLaren was born on December 20, 1846, on a farm near Stirling, Scotland. He was the son of Donald and Catherine McLaren.

Education

After serving an apprenticeship as a dairyman, McLaren became a gardener at Bannockburn House, and continued to learn the art of horticulture by working in succession at Blairdrummond, Manderson House in Berwickshire, the Earl of Kinoul's place, the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, and the Earl of Windsor's estate at East Lothian.

Career

At the age of twenty-three, McLaren came to the United States and soon took passage for San Francisco by way of the Isthmus of Panama. His earlier success in planting sea bent grass to bind the dunes near the Firth of Forth led to his first job in California, solving a similar problem on the estate of George Howard of San Mateo County. For some years, McLaren continued his gardening on various estates in the San Francisco area; a notable feat was his conversion of the wheat field of Leland Stanford into the garden of ornamental plants which later became the botanic garden of Stanford University. In 1887, McLaren was appointed superintendent of parks of San Francisco. He thus became responsible for half a dozen downtown squares and a thousand-acre area of Sahara-like sand dunes, lying between the city and the Pacific Ocean, which in an earlier attempt at development had been named "Golden Gate Park. " Only the extreme eastern end of the park, away from the ocean front, had been planted, in the early 1870's, by McLaren's predecessor, William Hammond Hall, before public opposition to the expense called a halt to what seemed a futile effort to bind the dunes. McLaren began his conquest by planting his proven sea bent, fertilized by manure swept from San Francisco's streets and delivered daily, as he had stipulated on taking the position. Gales uprooted his grass plots repeatedly; each time the grass was stubbornly reset by hand, and with extraordinary skill and determination McLaren gradually succeeded in establishing the sea bent. On the thin sod, he then planted Monterey pines and, nearer the coast, Monterey cypresses to anchor the sands, and these were followed by oaks, eucalypts, and redwoods. He ensured the nourishment of his trees by planting each one in a large hole, often as much as six feet square and six feet deep, which he filled with straw, loam, and manure, whose decomposition produced the necessary humus. When lack of water challenged his plan for Golden Gate Park, he drilled wells and erected two windmills to supply a thousand acres. Besides Golden Gate Park, he developed about forty-five smaller parks about the city.

Through the years the McLarens lived at "Park Lodge" in Golden Gate Park. Refusing to retire at the customary age, he continued with staunch public support to superintend the city's parks until his death, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of ninety-six. He died at Park Lodge and was buried in Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma, California.

Achievements

• International recognition came with McLaren's success in landscaping the Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. He grew pines and eucalypts thirty feet high from seed, in record time; moved full-grown palms from the old plantings of the nurseryman George Roeding of Niles, across the Bay; and created hanging gardens by fastening flats of flowering Mesembryanthemum, previously grown from cuttings, onto the walls of the exhibit halls. In 1923, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society awarded him the George Robert White Medal, and in 1930 the Royal Horticultural Society made him an Associate of Honour. The University of California honored McLaren in 1931 with the Doctor of Laws degree. By 1936, he had become a legend, and June 7th that year was decreed McLaren Day in San Francisco. With Eric Walther he worked out the basic plan for the Strybing Arboretum, established in Golden Gate Park in 1937. His Gardening in California: Landscape and Flower (1909), the best treatise in its field, went into a third edition in 1924.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Letters; With Letters from Ruskin, Thackeray, and Others. Edited by His Son and D.W. Forrest, with Biographical Introd. by Elizabeth T. McLaren

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

Politics

McLaren defended the integrity of the parks against both political and civil authority, and when the municipality proposed to construct a streetcar line that would bisect the park, he rallied his men and defeated the plan by spending all of one night moving trees and shrubs out of the nursery into what had been an unoccupied aisle.

Views

McLaren was firmly convinced that trees and shrubs grown from seed were more economical and better adapted for survival than was transplanted stock. He soon began experiments in growing plants from all parts of the world, including his favorite rhododendrons, grown from seed gathered in the Himalayas. Finding that gales and high waves frequently drenched his plantings with salt water, he determined to create a protective windbreak on the seaward side of the park. He started with a structure of laths and brush to trap the sand along the shore and, by building similar structures on top of and adjacent to the first, in the course of forty years achieved a broad barrier some twenty feet high. McLaren strongly objected to the increasing number of statues erected among his trees and flowers, and contrived to curtain the "stookies, " as he called them, with plant groupings.

Interests

• McLaren enjoyed playing dominoes, and was noted for his singing of Scottish ballads.

Connections

McLaren married Jane Mill in 1876; they had one son, Donald.

Father:

Donald McLaren

Mother:

Catherine McLaren

Wife:

Jane Mill McLaren

1847 - 4 October 1926

Son:

Donald McLaren

9 August 1878 - 4 June 1925