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In April 1917 a young Canadian soldier named Leslie Miller walked through a devastated forest on Vimy Ridge. At the base of a shattered French oak he discovered a few acorns.
Miller had already been wounded twice in the battles of World War I and he considered his future rather uncertain to say the least. He determined to do something for the future anyway. He stuffed the acorns into his overcoat pocket, and when he got a chance he sent them back home to rural Ontario with the request they be planted on some property he owned there - just in case he didn't come back.
And so it was done. Happily Les Miller did survive the War and when he got back in 1919 he found 9 oak saplings firmly rooted and growing tall.
Mr. Miller devoted the rest of his life to the care and feeding of those oaks. After his death in 1979 the property - by now part of suburban Toronto - became the site of a Baptist church. But the towering oaks were left undisturbed.
By 2014 Les Miller's mighty oaks were struggling a bit. They had suffered in an ice storm the previous winter so they were not producing a lot of acorns - and the hungry squirrels in the neighborhood seemed intent on getting every one. So a bunch of arborists from Hamilton have clipped some healthy branches from the oaks and intend to graft them onto some newly acquired French oak stocks.
The plan is to have around 300 oak "cousins" growing strong by 2017. At that point the Canadian government will arrange to have them flown back to France and planted on Vimy Ridge - at the exact spot where Leslie Miller discovered the acorns a century ago.
It'll be the first oak forest on Vimy Ridge since before 1914.
Somehow I think Mr. Miller would be heartily pleased.
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Originally Posted by CamB
