I think I have fallen in love. Fortunately, since the object of my affections died in 1982, my domestic felicity is not threatened. His name is Richard St Barbe Baker, and he was a forester.
On our trip to Wimpole Hall we found a second-hand bookshop tucked away in the corner of the stableyard of retailing opportunities. It had a gardening section, which included some quite good titles I already had, but my eye fell upon a small, green, cloth-bound book, lacking a dust jacket, with the title 'I planted trees' by Richard St Barbe Baker. The name rang a vague sort of bell, and the subject sounded promising, so I picked it up and leafed through it. The original publication date was 1944, and it seemed that the author had worked in the forestry industry in Africa before the war. Stories about colonial service tend not to be mentioned very much nowadays, presumably because we are so ashamed of the fact that we were colonialists, but they are often fascinating. At three quid it looked worth a try.
A dozen pages in later in the day I was hooked, and kept insisting on reading bits of it in our hotel room to the Systems Administrator, who was trying to follow the cricket. Richard St Barbe Baker was a visionary, a man fifty years ahead of his time, an entrepreneur, and a hero. He was born in Hampshire in 1889, the son of a forester, and grew up on a tree nursery learning a lot about silviculture as a child. At the age of 12 he bacame interested in beekeeping, and a while afterwards acquired his first hive, paid for from the proceeds of apple trees he had grafted himself. He made all his own equipment, and by the time he was sixteen had fourteen hives, the best of which yielded 240 pounds of honey in a season.
In 1910 he left for Canada, where he homesteaded in Saskatchewan. A mustang that had taken a standing jump over a six foot corral and stayed on the run for two days was given to him by the rancher who originally caught it after he managed to saddle it and climb back on to the saddle each time it threw him, until it let him ride it (shades of Alexander and Bucephalus). He broke sod and lumberjacked, which set him on the path of thinking that current land-use and forestry practices were wasteful and wrong, and came home in 1913, just in time for the Great War (bargaining his way into a first-class state room at a second-class fare for the crossing). He volunteered as soon as war was declared, and survived to the end of it, despite being 'smashed up' twice in France, and fracturing his thigh in Ireland during the rebellion (a fact he mentions as a throwaway comment on page 37). After the war he went to Cambridge to study forestry, where to supplement his small war pension, which was his only income, he set up a business with a local coachbuilder buying up war-surplus materials and making and selling touring caravans.
After Cambridge he went out to Kenya, where he worked identifying species that could be of commercial value, and more importantly enlisting the local Africans to help propagate tree species which were diminishing in the wild. Through careful observation and thought he worked out how to break seed dormancy, and with his local helpers, whom he called Men of the Trees, set up tree nurseries. He was aware that Africa had suffered deforestation over centuries as a result of past and present agricultural practices. The following paragraph on page 55 convinced me that he was a visionary genius, bearing in mind that these are the conclusions of a young man in his thirties, reached in the 1920s.
Everybody knows that trees, apart from their direct economic value, exert a beneficial influence, affecting climate, agriculture and even the very existence of man. This can be clearly demonstrated in Africa where vast areas are drying up, and which become depopulated as the direct result of forest destruction, and if once trees are cleared over extensive areas, it is difficult, if not impossible, to replace them in a way that they will reach their former stature. It should be remembered that forests are necessary to serve the country's supply and control the run off from the hills, thus regulating waterfalls for power, maintaining irrigation and the flow of springs, ensuring a higher level in the rivers in the dry season and preventing floods which deposit large quantities of barren soil in the valleys and ruin them for agriculture. Forests are needed to increase the humidity of the atmosphere and so promote the growth of crops. In Africa experiments have shown that forests increase rainfall by twenty-eight per cent.
These sound like lessons we are learning and re-learning today, and Richard St Barbe Baker set them all out clearly in a book published during the last war, based on experiences two decades previously.
His work led to the formation of The International Tree Foundation, which exists to promote reforestation and economic growth in developing countries, working with local people. Its patron is Prince Charles. A couple of their fund raising leaflets have dropped out of other things recently, and I'm afraid they are not very good, as they don't really explain what the charity is or what it does. I had a confusing one with a case study of somebody called Fatima keeping bees under a tree, so maybe that came with a beekeeping magazine, which was destined for the recycling until I started reading I planted trees and rescued it for a second look. Their website makes more sense, you will find it at http://internationaltreefoundation.org/
Richard St Barbe Baker seems to inspire huge affection and a cult following, and there is a website devoted to him too, at http://www.manofthetrees.org/ He did great and amazing work. I just hope the story about the wild horse was true, given that it does sound so much like Alexander the Great.
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