Her parents, Linda Gates and Peter B. Dirks traveled in 1924 to Puget Sound, Washington State, finally settling in the Umpqua Valley of Oregon.
[6] Dirks-Edmunds traveled to study other biotic communities: the Sonoran Desert, in 1967 and later in 1972, and a brief sojourn to Lake Atitlan[7] and Guatemala's tropical forest.
They studied the numerous organisms in the soil of the Douglas-fir and Hemlock community, with Dirks-Edmunds remaining at the site after Macnab retired from field research.
[9] Her doctoral thesis, "A Comparison of the Biotic Communities of the Cedar-Hemlock and Oak-Hickory Associations," was published in Ecological Monographs for July, 1947.
Not Just Trees was published in 1999 and is an important text for the Northwest because it allows a glimpse into an ecological community of Saddleback mountain that no longer exists as a mature forest.