My name is Jamie and I love trees. During the long days of COVID-19 I became interested in learning how to identify the trees in my neighborhood, a hobby that has since ballooned into quite a magnificent waster of my time. I love taking pictures of trees and then heading home to attempt to identify them using a few great botany books. I know! I know! There are apps that can identify trees and plants! But where is the joy in that!? For me, the joy comes from discovering that I can deduce the specific species of tree that I have discovered using my own observations.
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Usually, I can figure out what tree I have found by scouring the aforementioned books. If I’m still not sure, an online image search or video might help. However, I have often found that online pictures are too small for me to pick out the final clarifying detail, leaving me with a tiny seed of doubt about my final identification. If you are like me, this tiny seed of doubt keeps you from definitively adding a species to your “life list” of personally experienced trees. And this, clearly, is a huge societal problem that has led me to dedicate even more of my precious time constructing CloseUpTreeID.com.

 

Beyond a place to showcase and catalogue my favorite nature photography (all the pictures on this site were taken by me), I want this website to serve as an interactive resource for amateur nature lovers who want to learn more about plant identification and classification. I also hope that my close-up images (clearly labeled and searchable by easily observable characteristics) will help would-be-tree-identifiers feel a little more confident about their final conclusions. Lastly, I hope that visitors can use this site...however they want to use this site. Please enjoy!