Landscapes

         Growing up and moving into adulthood, I experienced a variety of landscapes, first near my home and then later during college, and still later working as a botanist. They influenced me greatly.  They affected the directions of my scientific research, particularly when living in tropical Asia, and they affected my perceptions of nature and human culture over the decades.   

         I grew up in the small town of Ephrata, on the dry eastern side of Washington State and five miles from the mouth of the Grand Coulee.  Most of the eastern side of the state was covered by a series of layers of basalt, and those near my home were scoured by Pleistocene glaciation into a series of deep canyons, we called coulees.  Many of them held lakes, from depressions scoured by the glacial advance, and the canyons were as much as 1,000’ deep.  The vegetation was adapted to the dry and hot summers, essentially that of a high latitude desert.  I didn’t learn the plants very well, but my friends and I hiked into the surrounding hills, rode our bikes in the county roads up the side coulees, and swam in the lakes in the Grand Coulee.  It was a largely treeless landscape but was full of life during the spring months.

           At times, we drove into the mountains to the west, and I attended a summer YMCA camp at Lake Wenatchee in the Cascade mountains.  There I experienced the diverse coniferous forests at different elevations, strongly influenced by the greenness of it in contrast to the dry deserts of my hometown.  Later, as a teenager, accompanied by my high school friends, I hiked deep into the mountains for days of backpacking and camping. We usually camped at high lakes, still in the montane forests and within day hikes of alpine territory.  It was all exalting, but my strongest memories are of the hikes through the more lush and shady forests at lower elevation.  This continued during my college years at PLU (Pacific Lutheran University), perhaps culminated by a summer course in ecology at Holden Village taught by an inspiring college professor, Jens Knudsen.  PLU was south of Tacoma, a short distance from Mount Rainer National Park and the Olympic Peninsula.  These experiences helped point me towards further studies in biology, particularly botany. 

         Midway through my college years, I took a year off. I worked at a Weyerhaeuser mill in Longview, on the Columbia, saving money for an extended trip to New Zealand and the South Pacific. New Zealand was an extension of my explorations of landscapes in the northwest, with the differences of the fine canopies of southern beech forests, particularly on the South Island, and grading into the alpine zones on adjacent mountains.  On my return, I visited islands in the South Pacific, Society Islands, Fiji, and Hawaii (Oahu) in particular.  This was my first experience of tropical vegetation and landscapes.  It stimulated my appetite for more tropical explorations.   

After finishing college, I moved back east for graduate and post-doctoral Research. I lived in New Jersey four years and explored the eastern deciduous forests up into New England. Then I lived in Ohio for a couple of years. There I further explored those eastern forests and travelled down to the Great Smokies.  These were very different landscapes which I grew to appreciate, particularly with color changes during the autumn. Until that time, my preference for landscapes was with as little as human impact as possible. I was influenced by the writings published by the Sierra Club and the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.  In the east, I began to appreciate landscapes with a small amount of human influence, as a small farm in a forested landscape.  More of that change came later.  Carol and I were married in a small remnant of undisturbed eastern deciduous forest on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio: the Gahanna Woods. This was also a time when I experienced some of the California landscapes, especially the redwood forests and Trinity Alps in the north.

Early 1973 we moved to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the heart of the Asian tropics.  This began my intellectual and esthetic/emotional relationships with the tropical rainforests of that region, what today we call its mixed dipterocarp forests (MDF). We explored them virtually every week, via walks near our home in a rural village on the city’s outskirts and some longer overnight trips with orang asli guides.  A notable destination for two long trips was Mount Kinabalu. The complexity of these forests was, at times, overwhelming. Two results came from these experiences.  First, the features of the vegetation and individual plants of these forests formed the intellectual basis of the research I conducted up to 40 years afterwards. Secondly, I no longer appreciated only landscapes that were untouched by human activity but began to see those influences in forested and cultivated landscapes, many of which were centuries old. This was particularly the case in travels throughout Southeast Asia.

After four years in Malaysia and the region, we slowly travelled back to the United States. Notable during that 8 months of travel was our stay in the outer Himalayan range in Himachal Pradesh of India, in temperate forests leading up to tree line and mountains.  We also travelled across north Africa and into southern Spain, also varied and beautiful landscapes. We lived for a year in southern France, adding to my appreciation for its mosaic of cultivated and forested landscapes, with ancient stone villages. We revisited friends and landscapes in Montpellier and surrounding areas in 2015.  

In the United States, we settled in Warwick, in the south of New York State.  This was farmland amidst eastern deciduous forest and low mountains.  In 1980, we moved to Miami, Florida, where we lived for 36 years.  There were the nearby Everglades, which we visited frequently and their own beauty.  We also occasionally went away for a time, two separate years in the tropical deciduous forests of west India, and I conducted research in tropical rainforests in Central America, Malaysia and west Africa.  My early interests in changes of leaf color in tropical rainforest trees sparked research in autumn coloration in the eastern deciduous forests, spending two summer-autumn-winter transitions at Harvard Forest, in central Massachusetts.

While living in Miami, there were extended travel opportunities.  This included over two years living in rural India, experiencing landscapes with a long history of human habitation and use; an extended trip in tropical southern China: Xishuangbanna; numerous trips for research in Costa Rica and Panama (Central America), and a month of research studying rainforest canopies in Gabon. It was interesting to compare the tropical forests of Asia, Africa (Gabon) and various forests in Latin America.   

After retirement from Florida International University, we moved to the small town of Crestone, Colorado.  Crestone sits at 8,000’ at the base of the eastern slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Range.  We have grown to love the regenerated coniferous forests of the steep valleys of the range as well as the vast space of the San Luis Valley just to our west.  We continue to explore the forests and mountains around the valley, Particularly the San Juan mountains. We also continue to travel, including a visit to the amazing landscapes of southwest England (Somereset) and Ireland.   

I keep strong memories of the landscapes of these places, and they influence my approaches to photography and papermaking.