A must-have for naturalists and plant lovers in the Pacific Northwest
Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest is a comprehensive field guide to commonly found woody plants in the region. It features introductory chapters on the native landscape and plant entries that detail the family, scientific and common name, flowering seasons, and size. This must-have guide is for hikers, nature lovers, plant geeks, and anyone who wants to know more about the many plants of the Pacific Northwest.
• Includes photographs and descriptions of 568 species of woody plants
• Covers Oregon, Washington, northern California, and British Columbia
• Introductory chapters discuss the ecoregions, habitats, and microhabitats of the Pacific Northwest
• User-friendly organization by leaf type As a part of the Timber Press Field Guide book series, Trees and Shrubs of the Pacific Northwest is the must-have book for accurate identification of regional flora.
Mark Turner is a professional photographer who has been photographing gardens and native plant environments in the Pacific Northwest for over 25 years. He brings a strong sense of photographic design, attention to detail, and curiosity about both native and garden plants to his work.
Ellen Kuhlmann is a professional botanist with extensive experience with Northwest flora. She has a background in fire ecology, rare plant research, and plant community ecology. She worked for the U.S. Forest Service for many years, and for six years was the project manager for Seeds of Success, Washington Rare Plant Care and Conservation (Rare Care), a program sponsored by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Ellen lives in Bellingham, WA. Preface
Anyone who has spent time outdoors in the Pacific Northwest has likely marveled at a giant old-growth Douglas-fir and cursed a thicket of devil's club. Alpine explorers may have been surprised to stumble upon dwarf willows no taller than the toe of their boot.
Trees and shrubs are almost everywhere in the Northwest. Maybe we take them for granted. We know that we once did, lumping understory shrubs into one homogenous "boring shrub layer" while searching for wildflowers or barreling up a trail in pursuit of an alpine summit. But the reality is that there is a great deal of diversity among our trees and shrubs, thanks in large part to the wide range of growing conditions in the Northwest. A few species, like Douglas-fir, western serviceberry, chokecherry, and common snowberry, are found in almost every county or regional district. Others, like our two rockmats, are very narrow endemics found in only a few places. The Klamath-Siskiyou Range is home to more conifer species than almost any other similar-size chunk of geography in the world.
When we began the journey that resulted in this book, we knew there were a lot of trees and shrubs to cover. Some-particularly those of the North Cascades, where we live-were familiar friends to revisit on each hike. Others, like the willows, had a vague familiarity but were often passed over because they were challenging to learn. Neither of us started on this book knowing everything we would discover along the way.
It stands to reason that our largest trees grow where the most rain falls each season. It takes a lot of water to produce a coast redwood, Sitka spruce, western redcedar, or Douglas-fir. Go east of the mountains to the Columbia Plateau or the Great Basin and you'll find a landscape dominated by sagebrush, bitterbrush, rabbitbrush, and other small shrubs. In this arid part of the Northwest, what passes for old growth may be barely shoulder high.
Chaparral only touches the Northwest, with its northernmost examples just crossing the border from California into Oregon. It's a dense, nearly impenetrable shrub environment with many oaks, manzanitas, and ceanothus that were new to both of us.
We joked at the outset of writing
