Colleen Crowlie

Colleen Crowlie is a plant-loving photographer who felt lucky to have project that taught her more about the plants she was photographing. Writing this book focused her attention on names and plant traits and the landscape, which has been energizing and enriching.

She has walked the hills of Bisbee since 1980 when she came to be a librarian at the Cochise County Library. One of her first projects was writing and directing a Southwest Libraries grant for collecting oral histories of Bisbee in the 1920s. This lead to a love of historic photos and that's why they are included for every stairway.

As an Anthropology student at California State University in Chico, Colleen was disturbed to learn that the average American child can recognize less than 10 plants while Rainforest children know over 200 plants. She believes American kids could easily learn plant names if they were introduced to them in Plant Walk Fieldtrips and wrote Step by Step: Beautiful Bisbee ~ Plants to encourage schools to try Plant Walks in Bisbee.