About the author & illustrator

When Leigh Guest was in 6th grade, her elementary school teacher taught art lessons on various famous artists. When her class learned about Henri Matisse, Leigh discovered a world of illustrating that she fell in love with: making pictures out of paper cutouts. Each illustration in her books is cut by hand from card stock paper using an Xacto precision knife. This process is tedious, sometimes taking several days for each picture, but she loves watching the characters come to life layer after layer. When she moved to the Florida Keys in 2018, one of the first things she noticed while driving the Overseas Highway was the peculiar tree growing out of the Old Seven Mile Bridge. She started asking people about this tree and learned it had a name... Fred. Local Keys residents, Tom and Linda, shared a story about how they had lost everything in Hurricane Irma. After the evacuations had been lifted, Tom and Linda returned to the Lower Keys with heavy hearts because they knew their homes had been destroyed. While driving across the Seven Mile Bridge, Tom thought that there was no way Fred could have survived. As he continued his southwest drive, he noticed a small silhouette in the distance, and to his amazement, it was Fred. They passed Fred overcome with joy knowing one thing... if Fred could survive, so could they. Leigh was deeply touched by this story and slowly turned it into her first children's tale, personifying an Australian pine tree into an iconic local hero. Her story unfolds using rhythmic rhymes to paint images as playful as her illustrations. She currently lives in Montana with her husband and three children.