At the entrance of his garden, the four-year-old boy had thrust two willow twigs into the ground to make an arch. Now, a month later, his arch had sprouted leaves.
His name was Richard St. Barbe Baker. He was born on October 9, 1889 in the south of Hampshire, England, in a country home on a sunny hill.
At the age of five, he went exploring in a deep forest of pines and ferns. He later described this experience:
…I seemed to have entered the fairyland of my dreams… I had entered the temple of the woods. I sank to the ground in a state of ecstasy; everything was intensely vivid… The overpowering beauty of it all entered my very being …my heart brimmed over with a sense of unspeakable thankfulness which has followed me through the years...
In the pastoral countryside of England where he grew up,
woods and wild hedgerows have grown between the fields for hundreds of years. Here his father, who was also a minister, had a tree nursery.
While Richard was still a young boy he helped grow thousands of seedlings and learned how to graft pear and apple trees.
"The Firs," the St. Barbe Baker family home,
West End, near Southampton, England
He became a beekeeper when he was twelve years old. By the time he was sixteen he had sixteen beehives. His best hive yielded 240 lbs. of honey in a single season.
In 1909, while still in his teens, Richard voyaged across the ocean to homestead in Canada. In Saskatchewan, he befriended the local Cree Indians, absorbed their lore, and learned nature survival skills. He also studied the ways of the beavers that built their dams near his tent camp.
True to a promise he had made to his parents to continue his schooling, he enrolled as one of the first hundred students in the new University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. To help support himself he wrote articles for the local newspaper.
He worked in a lumber camp near the town of Prince Albert and was disturbed to witness trees being harvested in an irresponsible and wasteful manner. It was then that he decided to one day become a forester.
He was also a “bronco-buster,” a tamer of wild horses. In Alberta, he was challenged to ride a black mustang from Montana that was considered too wild to tame and twice had escaped over a high fence. Richard rode him twenty-five miles the same day and had the horse given to him.
During his rides across the Canadian prairie he observed a troubling sight. Soil was being blown away from the farms. As much as an inch of soil a year was being lost.
He wanted to do something to help. He knew trees were the answer. Trees would break the blasts of the prairie winds, help hold the rainfall, shade and mulch the soil, and draw up water from deep in the ground.
He went to work at the university’s tree farm to determine which kinds of trees would be the best for the job. He imagined a future when the prairies of Canada would be protected by shelterbelts of millions of trees. This vision began to materialize during his lifetime.
Between 1916 and 1963 the Sutherland Forest Nursery Station of Saskatoon distributed 147 million trees. In one time span of less than thirty years, approximately sixteen hundred miles of field shelterbelts were planted on the Canadian prairies. Nonetheless, even today much tree planting remains to be done there.
After three and a half years in Canada, Richard returned to England and entered Cambridge University.
He was a twenty-four-year-old divinity student there when World War I erupted in the summer of 1914. Richard enlisted in the British army and served as a cavalry trainer in Ireland and then as an artillery officer and a sniper at the front lines in France.
During the war his thigh was broken in an accident with the horse he was riding. Later in the war he was wounded so badly from an artillery shelling that he was almost given up for dead. After recovering from these injuries, he was in charge of transporting horses – eighteen thousand of them in fifty-eight trips – across the English Channel to France. Twice his boats were sunk by underwater mines.
A third serious injury occurred later on land from an aerial bombing near the battlefront. As a result of this he was released from duty in the war with the rank of Captain.
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