Beginning in my own backyard, I focused on the ever changing, diverse and rich botanical environment of the coastal temperate rain forest of my home in the San Juan Islands. This botanical environment is particularly interesting as this archipelago sits in a rain shadow created by the Olympic mountain range, allowing many ecosystems to coexist within the region, from shorelines, to cliff balds, to dense forest to such arid areas that prickly pear cactus can survive! For a botanist this is heaven! To quote a well-known botanist and resident of the area, “the father of taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, once described botanists as those given to exclamations of wonder.” Watching the seasons change monthly in the San Juan Islands is a treasure. Spring begins much earlier than most would assume. In February, plants begin to push their way up into the ever increasing light. Various families of plants follow the sun as it increases in length of day and strength of warmth until late fall...when the fecundity of the year carpets the floor of the forest in leaves from deciduous trees and the diverse, rich world of fungi! The sun moves away from the north of the planet and a blanket of winter returns, briefly before the cycle begins again. The NW Coast from SE Alaska to the mouth of the Columbia River all host an extremely diverse and wildly varied group of plants from the tiniest lichen to massive Sitka spruce trees.