In 1968, a brawling, shaggy, redheaded, hard-partying 18-year-old named David Milarch (pronounced Mill-ark) graduated from a Detroitarea high school and took off on a road trip with a friend. They cruised along in a ’61 Oldsmobile station wagon, sleeping in the car at night or on the ground nearby. Destination: San Francisco. But Milarch, unlike his buddy, harbored a deeper longing than crashing parties. “Cities didn’t interest me so much,” he says. “I wanted to see the redwood forests.”
The son and grandson of nurserymen, Milarch grew up working on his father’s shade tree farm, where ash, maple, oak, birch, and locust trees were cultivated. From age seven, he was in the fields every day after school and every weekend—weeding, hoeing, digging, and planting. He considered his dad a slave…