Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Connecting curious minds with uncommon, undeniably Northwest reads

Not Just Trees

The Legacy of a Douglas-fir Forest

Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds

$16.95

This gracefully written story—revealed through a meticulous sixty-year study of the flora and fauna in a small parcel of the majestic Oregon Coast Range forest that is selectively logged and finally clear-cut—reveals all that is lost when ancient stands of trees are destroyed.

“Once in a while you encounter a book so special, so steeped in love and integrity that—regardless of the subject—it’s impossible not to be drawn in. Not Just Trees is that sort of book.”—January Magazine

Photographs / maps / glossary / bibliography / index / 360 pages (1999)

Clear
SKU: 978-0-87422-170-1 Categories: , , Tags: ,

Description

The word “unique” is overused. But in the case of Not Just Trees, that description is accurate.

Not Just Trees is the gracefully written story of life in an ancient Oregon Coast Range forest. Covering a span of more than sixty years, it is the tale of the mighty Douglas-firs and cedars and hemlocks that once grew there. But an ancient forest is more than just trees, and this book is also about the lives of great and small creatures and plants, of slugs and worms, spiders and bugs, butterflies and birds, lichens and mosses.

Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds began studying a small parcel of ancient forest in western Oregon while an undergraduate student at Linfield College. After receiving her doctorate she returned to Linfield to teach biology for more than thirty years and again study her beloved forest on Saddleback Mountain, recording its life through logging in the 1940s and clearcutting in the 1980s. This type of in-depth study, over so many years, has never been undertaken on a single western forest before, nor is it likely to ever be repeated.

Not Just Trees tells about the amazing variety of life in the forest. It is also the story of a tenacious woman, an ecologist who studied Oregon flora and fauna before there were guidebooks, at a time when precious few even knew what the word “ecology” meant.

Photographs / maps / glossary / bibliography / index / 360 pages (1999)

Recognition

“Once in a while you encounter a book so special, so steeped in love and integrity that—regardless of the subject—it’s impossible not to be drawn in. Not Just Trees is that sort of book.”—Linda L. Richards, January Magazine

“In this one book, Jane Claire Dirks-Edmunds weaves together stories about her personal development as a scientist, about the ecology of a forest, and about changes in a landscape of Douglas-fir forests…Reading this book was a special pleasure for me.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

Not Just Trees conveys Dirks-Edmunds’s enthusiasm [for research and teaching in forests] in a most readable and enjoyable manner.”—Oregon Historical Quarterly

Additional information

Weight 1.31 oz
Dimensions 9 x 6 in
Format

Paperback