- HIKING TRAILS AND WILDFLOWERS by Keith and Barbro McCree -

Keith McCree

I was born in 1927 in Christchurch, New Zealand. My great grandfather Edward Macaree was a Londoner who brought his wife Sarah and their family out to Christchurch in 1877. In New Zealand the family used the name McCree. My grandfather was Charles McCree and my father was Jeff McCree.

I was born with a problem-solving brain, and began dabbling in science at an early age. I was educated at St.Albans school and Christchurch Boys' High School, and received the B. Sc. and M. Sc. degrees in physics from the old Canterbury University College, the Alma Mater of 'The Father of the Atom', Ernest Rutherford. It is now an arts center.

Like most other New Zealanders, I learned to play the piano as a child. I became a proficient amateur pianist and organist. I played the flute in my father's chamber music group, in which he played the clarinet, my grandfather played the saxophone, and friends played an eclectic selection of other instruments. Later in life I enjoyed learning to play the viola. Now I play an electronic piano that simulates the sound of a concert grand (also harpsichord, organ and 11 other instruments).

By the time I reached 21 I was bored with life in my home town. I got a job as a research physicist for the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (D.S.I.R.) in Lower Hutt, near Wellington, and was sent to Taupo to join a team doing geophysical exploration of New Zealand's hot springs, research which laid the groundwork for geothermal power production in the area.

In 1955 I traveled to London to continue my education with W.D. Wright in the Biology Department of Imperial College, studying the physiological basis of color vision. I received the Ph. D. in 1958. My research was on the role that eye movements play in color vision. The practical implication of my research is that if you stare too hard at a traffic signal, you may lose your ability to tell what color it is.

During my stay in London I met Barbro on a student hiking trip to Salzburg, Austria, and we were married in her home town in Sweden.

Back in New Zealand, I began my studies of the physiological basis for photosynthesis and respiration in plants, in collaboration with J.H. Troughton.

At age 40 I found myself dissatisfied with professional life in New Zealand, and emigrated to the United States. I took a post-doctoral position with R.S. Loomis and W.A. Williams in the Agronomy and Range Science Department (now Plant Sciences Department) at the University of California at Davis. I developed an equation for the rate of respiration of the clover plants that Troughton and I had studied, and presented it at a conference in Trebon, Czechoslovakia in 1969. This paper has often been quoted in the literature on respiration in plants.

In 1968 I found a permanent position at Texas A&M University in College Station, as Associate Professor in the Biology Department, and later as Professor of Crop Physiology in the Soil and Crop Sciences Department. There I studied how plants respond to different wavelengths of photosynthetically active radiation (P.A.R.). I developed a new system for measuring P.A.R. for ecological studies. My research showed that lights that appear brightest to humans are not necessarily the best ones for growing plants under controlled conditions.

Continuing my research on photosynthesis and respiration, I showed that, on a whole-plant basis over 24 hours, respiratory losses are much greater than had previously been thought, as much as 50% of daytime photosynthetic gains. The practical implication is that plants and forests may not be such good 'sinks' as they appear, for the carbon dioxide that humans pour into the atmosphere.

I built these ideas into new computer simulation models of the carbon balances of plants, with emphasis on agricultural production under dry conditions. I put the models on to one of the first Macintosh computers and used them in my graduate-level course 'Principles of Crop Physics'. My software package 'Exploring Crop Physics' used simulation models to demonstrate the effects of environmental factors such as solar radiation, air temperature, humidity and soil water supply on rates of photosynthesis, respiration and transpiration. The models calculated the energy balance, carbon balance, and water balance of a leaf, a plant or a field crop.

To make it easy for the students to run my computer simulation models, I gave the models a hypertext interface. Hypertext is a term that was coined in the 1960s to describe a system that allows the user to enter and retrieve information in any order, not just the fixed order specified by the computer programmer. I used the original hypertext system HyperCard, which was published by Apple Computer and included with every Macintosh computer. Hypertext systems and their links have now become familiar to users of the World Wide Web, but in the 1980s this was a novel concept.

I spent a couple of years in the Washington D.C. area in the late 1970s, working as program manager for Renewable Resources in the National Science Foundation.

In 1989 I decided to retire, after 40 years of scientific research in New Zealand, London, California and Texas. I have put online a summary of my career, a list of my scientific papers, and copies of two key papers, one on respiration and the other on light measurements.

Barbro and I moved to Oakridge, Oregon where we could enjoy our lifetime hobbies, in my case hiking and photography, in a climate that was more like New Zealand's. I have fond memories of excursions to Arthur's Pass in trains drawn by steam locomotives, in the days before the Pass was readily accessible by road.

Using my knowledge of computer programming, I put my experiences on the trails around our home in Oakridge into a HyperCard stack, running on a Macintosh SE. I later linked the trail data to a stack on the local wildflowers. Upgrading to a Macintosh Quadra enabled me to include my color slides of trails and wildflowers, and to put the whole project on a CD-ROM. In 1996 I started this Web site so that we could share our experiences with trail and wildflower lovers around the world. By 2004 we had completed a flower list for each of the 90 trails in the Oakridge area.

In 1997 I bought one of the first digital cameras, a Kodak DC120. In 2001 I upgraded to a Nikon Coolpix 880, which has a higher resolution and many new features. I discovered that digital cameras are ideal for making quick photographs for the Web. I can put my photographs on to our Web site the same day I take them.

In 2000 I moved up to a PowerMac G4 computer, primarily so that I could surf the Web with the latest browser software, but also so that I could enjoy computer simulations of things that I used to do in my youth, such as play golf and fly airplanes. My digital photos looked great on my Apple Studio Display, a high-resolution digital LCD monitor. What a joy it is to work with a perfectly stable computer that does everything it is asked to do without ever complaining

After I turned 80, I found that I could no longer hike the trails of the Oakridge area, so Barbro and I retired again, this time to urban life in Eugene, Oregon.

Photograph by Marion McCree (1993)

Barbro McCree

I was born Barbro Persson in Göteborg, Sweden, in 1935. After four years of elementary schooling I attended a girls' school in Majorna, Göteborg, for six years, and then Högre Allmänna Läroverket in Majorna for three years. I passed "studentexamen" in 1955. After a one-year course at Göteborg's Business Institute, I worked as a secretary in charge of foreign correspondence at an engineering firm before marrying Keith and moving to London.

There I worked in the office of an engineering company that made tabulating machines, before accompanying Keith to his home country and becoming a homemaker. Our two children, John and Alan, were born in New Zealand. They are both research engineers. John works in Michigan, and Alan in Massachusetts. We have four grandchildren, two in each state.

In the 1970s I started to collect material about John Peter Sjolander, a Texas pioneer poet born in Sweden, and my book about him was published in 1987. I also did technical translations for a translation firm in Austin, Texas.

Genealogy is one of my hobbies. The family tree software I use (Reunion) makes it easy to bring together the results of research by relatives in Sweden and New Zealand. I especially like to fit ancestors into the times and places in which they lived, and to find out how the history of their country affected their lives.

As a teenager I fell in love with the mountains of Sweden and Norway, and planned to improve my German on a student hiking trip in the Austrian Alps, where, ironically, English was the main language spoken among the students. I enjoyed our trips to the mountains of New Zealand, the Sierras, the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades over the years. Studying wild flowers is a lifelong hobby : the book of drawings that my father used, C.A.M. Lindman's 'Bilder ur Nordens Flora' ('Pictures from Scandinavia's Flora') is now available online as part of Project Runeberg. I was happy to encounter the Linnaea borealis (Twinflower) of my childhood in the forests of the Oregon Cascades.

Hank (1991 - 2005)

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Digital watercolors by Keith McCree