Who was John McLaren?

John McLaren, the father of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, was a horticulturist born in Bannockburn, Scotland in 1846. He studied horticulture at the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Gardens and after serving his apprenticeship he came to San Francisco in 1870. 

He spent most of his life developing Golden Gate Park, planting trees for fifteen years, and during those years the village that was along the water front of San Francisco Bay became a city. He patiently nurtured San Francisco's sand dunes into Golden Gate Park and became San Francisco’s Parks Superintendent in 1887.

From seeds that Mr. McLaren planted emerged the grove of Sequoia sempervirens, the evergreen redwoods, in Golden Gate Park.  He was eighty years old when he planted them.  He lived to be ninety-seven, a clear-eyed little Scotsman working almost to the day of his death.  And when he died, his grove of redwoods stood in Golden Gate Park, trees that were thirty feet high!  Mr. McLaren died in 1943.  For eighty years he had lived by his father’s admonition: "Me boy, if ye have nothing to do, go plant a tree and it’ll grow while ye sleep."  Mr. McLaren planted more than two million trees. 

Mr. McLaren was given an honorary doctorate by the University of California, Berkeley. He is memorialized in the headquarters building of Golden Gate Park, McLaren Lodge. In 1927, a 550 acre park he had created in the southern hills overlooking the bay was named John McLaren Park. His knowledge of horticulture was requested nationally and internationally for many landscape projects. The horticulture procedures he developed are used in parks, amusement parks, national cemeteries and monuments worldwide to this day.