Biography

American land owner and botanist interested in the willows of North America and Europe, as well as a skilled draughtsman. Born in the school his father ran in the Miami Valley, Ohio, Michael Bebb soon moved with his family to Hamilton where he grew up on a large estate with a well kept garden and greenhouse. As a child Bebb befriended the gardener and acquired some books with which he was able to identify local plants. He began to create a small herbarium of his own and even drew analyses of the flowers and fruits on his sheets.

In 1850 the family moved once more to the Rock River Valley in Illinois (Bebb walking the 400 miles with his brother-in-law as they herded their cattle) and here he was able to explore the plants of the vast prairies which surrounded their secluded home. As a child he worked on the farm and attended Beloit College in Wisconsin, meeting George Vasey in 1856 and developing a valuable botanical association. The following year he was married to Katherine Hancock and together they lived in various parts of Illinois, Bebb using this opportunity to study the plants of that state, and around this time he met the acquaintance of Asa Gray.

In 1861, his family business affected by the Civil War, Bebb and his young family moved to Washington where he got a job working in the Pension Office. Making the most of city life he joined the Naturalists Club and developed a wide correspondence with botanists around the country.

Bebb's first wife died in 1865 leaving him with three children. Two years later he married Anna E. Carpenter who went on to bear him another four sons and two daughters and they settled back in Illinois in order to run the family farm after the death of his father. It was here that Bebb began to study the genus Salix and from about 1874 cultivated different varieties of willows on his estate. Many were from his travels in the local area, but he also received thousands of cuttings of European plants from Sir Joseph Hooker at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, England. Later he began to publish regular notes on the Salices in The Botanical Gazette and as time went on Bebb became a leading authority on the group in North America, contributing treatments to many important regional floras. He developed an extensive willow herbarium and, after moving with his large family to Rockford, Illinois in 1879, began to publish the first fascicle of a Salix exsiccatae (1880-1881). By the time of his death Bebb's herbarium also contained some 50,000 non-willow specimens.

Never quite recovering from a severe attack of pleurisy in 1885 he started spending his summers at a lake-side retreat in southern Wisconsin and took up the study of conchology very enthusiastically. During the early 1890s he spent many months in Georgia, Florida and California to try and alleviate his developing tuberculosis, but soon after publishing his final work ("Notes on some arborescent willows") in 1895 he died at home. The genus Bebbia, an Aster from southern California, was named after him by E.L. Greene in 1885 and on the year of Bebb's death C.S. Sargent named Salix bebbiana in his honour.

Sources:
W. Deane, 1896, "Michael Schuck Bebb", The Botanical Gazette, 21(2): 53-66
S.B. Parish, 1896, "Biographical Sketch of M.S. Bebb", Erythea, 4(2): 29-31.