Bernard McMahon or M'Mahon (Ireland ca 1775 — Philadelphia, 18 September 1816) was an Irish-American horticulturist settled in

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...

, who served as one of the stewards of the plant collections from the

Lewis and Clark Expedition The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery Expedition, was the United States expedition to cross the newly acquired western portion of the country after the Louisiana Purchase. The Corps of Discovery was a select gro ...

and was the author of ''The American Gardener's Calendar: Adapted to the Climates and Seasons of the United States'' (1806 and following years). He circulated the first extensive gardener's seed list in the United States, which he attached as an appendix to his ''Calendar''. McMahon's most enduring contribution was his ''Calendar'', the most comprehensive gardening book published in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. It finished in its eleventh edition in 1857. It was modeled on a traditional English formula, of month-by-month instructions on planting, pruning, and soil preparation for the "Kitchen Garden, Fruit Garden, Orchard, Vineyard, Nursery, Pleasure Ground, Flower Garden, Green House, Hot house and Forcing Frames". In some particulars, McMahon followed his English models so closely that

J. C. Loudon John Claudius Loudon (8 April 1783 – 14 December 1843) was a Scottish botanist, garden designer and author. He was the first to use the term arboretum in writing to refer to a garden of plants, especially trees, collected for the purpose of ...

suggested in 1826 that the derivative character of the ''Calendar'' was such that "We cannot gather from the work any thing as to the extent of American practice in these particulars." Ann Leighton notes the absence of

Indian corn Flint corn (''Zea mays'' var. ''indurata''; also known as Indian corn or sometimes calico corn) is a variant of maize, the same species as common corn. Because each kernel has a hard outer layer to protect the soft endosperm, it is likened to bei ...

among the "Seeds of Esculent Vegetables" in 1806, though he lists old-fashioned favorites like

coriander Coriander (;

, corn-salad,

orach ''Atriplex'' () is a plant genus of about 250 species, known by the common names of saltbush and orache (; also spelled orach). It belongs to the subfamily Chenopodioideae of the family Amaranthaceae ''s.l.''. The genus is quite variable and ...

rampion Rampion is a common name for several plants, including: * ''Campanula rapunculus'', a species of wildflower formerly cultivated as a vegetable * '' Physoplexis comosa'', tufted horned rampion * '' Phyteuma'', a genus of wildflowers * ''Valerianell ...

, rocambole and

skirret ''Sium sisarum'', commonly known as skirret, is a perennial plant of the family Apiaceae sometimes grown as a root vegetable. The English name skirret is derived from the Middle English 'skirwhit' or 'skirwort', meaning 'white root'. In Scotlan ...

. McMahon emigrated in 1796. By 1800 he was in Philadelphia, working for William Duane and the newspaper the Aurora. He entered the nursery and seed business , when he issued his broadsheet ''Catalogue of Garden Grass, Herb, Flower, Tree & Shrub-Seeds, Flower Roots, &c'' which comprised 720 species and varieties of seed. This was the first published seed list in the United States. In 1804 he published another catalogue, of thirty pages, mostly devoted to native American seeds.(Thomas Jefferson Center) "Bernard McMahon, Pioneer American Gardener"
Through the ''Calendar'' McMahon was

Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Fathers of the United States, Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 18 ...

's gardening mentor; a steady stream of correspondence passed between them. Jefferson selected him in 1806 as one of two nurserymen to receive and grow the seeds and roots collected by Lewis and Clark. In 1807, when it came time to find a draftsman to illustrate the published journals of Lewis and Clark, it was M'Mahon who recommended the German-born botanist Frederick Pursh, who found himself with the botanical materials when the natural history publication did not materialize, and took them with him to London, where he published 130 plants from the Lewis and Clark Expedition in ''Flora Americae Septentrionalis'', 1813. Jefferson received from McMahon seeds for

Monticello Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, V ...

. In 1808 McMahon purchased twenty acres on the Germantown Road, in Penn Township, Philadelphia for a nursery and botanic garden that would enable him to expand his business. He named it “Upsal Botanic Garden” in commemoration of

Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

' connection with

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in opera ...

. It was located at the north edge of the then urban part of the city. Part of the M’Mahon garden is currently occupied by Fotterall Square, a small park in Philadelphia. In 1818 botanist

Thomas Nuttall Thomas Nuttall (5 January 1786 – 10 September 1859) was an England, English botany, botanist and zoologist who lived and worked in America from 1808 until 1841. Nuttall was born in the village of Long Preston, near Settle, North Yorkshire, S ...

honored McMahon by bestowing the genus name ''

Mahonia ''Mahonia'' is a genus of approximately 70 species of evergreen shrubs and, rarely, small trees in the family Berberidaceae, native to eastern Asia, the Himalaya, North and Central America. They are closely related to the genus ''Berberis'' and ...

'' on a group of West Coast broadleaf-evergreen shrubs still popular in American gardens. McMahon, growing the seedlings that were protected from commerce as Federal property, had the mortification to see published in British journals, and to see '' Mahonia nervosa'' itself introduced by Prince Nurseries, Flushing, Long Island, at twenty dollars a plant.Leighton 1986:319. At his death the nursery business was left to his wife, Ann McMahon (d. 1818), and their son, Thomas P. M'Mahon, who continued to revise and republish ''The American Gardener's Calendar''.

References

Further reading