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Rita Leistner admits to having nightmares about planting trees. For almost 10 years she worked as a tree planter in the forests of British Columbia, and now she’s the creative force behind Forest for the Trees, a photo book and documentary about the intrepid souls who take on this arduous, relentless, and ultimately rewarding job. In the opening lines of her film she explains how those bad dreams have recurred every six months or so for the last 20 years, “… so it’s obviously something that has never left me.”
In Canada, logging companies hire professional tree planters to place seedlings in the ground by hand. It’s a seasonal job—physically demanding and over rough terrain. Leistner has found that most people can’t appreciate just how demanding it is. In fact, she credits her time planting trees as preparing her for being a photographer in conflict zones. “Someone at my