[2] His formative years were spent on the family farm in Hamilton, Ohio, where his interest in horticultural subjects took root amidst "the pleasure grounds, vegetable and fruit gardens" and "well stocked greenhouse".
Applying this new found knowledge to the trees, shrubs and herbs around him, Bebb began work collecting and preparing specimens for his famous herbarium of later years.
After declining a second term in office, Governor Bebb withdrew from public life and moved his family to his newly acquired estate "Fountaindale" in Winnebago County, Illinois.
Instead of travelling with the family, the-then 17 year old Michael Bebb assisted his brother-in-law in driving a herd of short horn cattle four hundred miles into the state of Illinois.
[7] During his time attending Beloit College in Wisconsin, he became acquainted with Dr. George Vasey, after a chance encounter at a local state fair.
As well as Vasey, Bebb also corresponded with a number of other noted botanists over the years including Dr.Asa Gray, William M. Canby and Henry Nicholas Bolander.
In 1880, the leading Swedish authority on Salices, Nils J. Anderson died, leaving Michael Schuck Bebb as the eminent botanist on the genus Salix.
Bebbii was created by Prof. L. H. Bailey and in 1895, Salix Bebbiana published by Prof. C. S. Sargent in Garden and Forest, with the inscription to Bebb as "the learned, industrious and distinguished salicologist of the United States to whom, more than to any one else of this generation we owe our knowledge of American willows.