Although I was born in Los Angeles in 1942 my parents had moved there as part of the war effort, working in aircraft plants and raising poinsettias in greenhouses for the soldiers my family soon moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where my dad got into the grocery business.
When my family and I toed our way through the Boundary Waters of the northern reaches of Minnesota, my brother and I found a stand of pitcher plants growing out of a moldering mat of reeds and moss, and because of this book, I had the theory of ecological succession right in the front of my brain.