Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (Dodo Press)

Ian Maclaren, pseudonym of Rev. John Watson, (1850- 1907) was a Scottish author and theologian. In 1874 he entered the ministry of the Free Church of Scotland and became assistant minister of Edinburgh Barclay Church. Subsequently he was minister at Logiealmond in Perthshire and at Glasgow, and in 1880 he became minister of Sefton Park Presbyterian Church, Liverpool, from which he retired in 1905. In 1896 he was Lyman Beecher lecturer at Yale University, and in 1900 he was moderator of the synod of the English Presbyterian Church. While travelling in the United States he died at Mount Pleasant, Iowa. His first sketches of rural Scottish life, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894), achieved extraordinary popularity and were followed by other successful books, The Days of Auld Lang Syne (1895), Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers (1896), and Afterwards and Other Stories (1898). Under his own name Watson published several volumes of sermons, among them being The Upper Room (1895), The Mind of the Master (1896) and The Potter's Wheel (1897).