Imagine buying a house and finding the garden bare: cracked mud, no grass, no trees. Would you spend the rest of your life fixing it, tree by tree, for people you will never meet? That is exactly what one man did in Vermont in 1869, and the forest he planted is still standing more than 150 years later. His name was Frederick Billings, and the estate was Mount Tom. According to a forest condition monitoring report published by the Northeast Temperate Network of the National Park Service, the 550-acre tract of forest land that he revived is considered the oldest continuously and professionally managed forest in the U.S.
A hillside stripped bare
