The Trees of North America: Across the Continent With a Camera
Photographs by Susan McDougall

       Born in Seattle, by training a mathematician and programmer, and now retired from a career with Boeing, her passion for trees and natural history took root when she returned to the Northwest in the 1970s. She has a special relationship with Mount Rainier - "The Mountain" - and has hiked most of its trails, studying the trees and forest ecology, publishing a book entitled The Trees of Mount Rainier. In 2014, Susan began a project to photograph every plant species native to Mount Rainier National Park. Of the nearly 750 natives, she has, by the end of the 2016 season, photographed more than 600. Her photographs are available on the Wildflowersearch app for iPhone/iPad and Android and on her website, www.rainierinbloom.com.
     Susan's love of trees, gardens, and photography led to a cross-country journey to photograph and write about arboretums: her book, Trees Live Here: the Arboretums of America is the first devoted to these very special public gardens. That project, plus extensive travels around the United States and Canada, camera in hand, have yielded a bounty of photographs of North American trees.

On Mount Fremont, with Mount Rainier as a backdrop. Near here, she photographed Whitebark Pine (Pinus albicaulis).