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When asked his profession, Franklin D. Roosevelt – attorney, state legislator, governor of New York, assistant secretary of the Navy, and president of the United states – would respond, “I am a tree grower.”

As a young boy in the Hudson River Valley, he studied birds and in his early teens was considered one of the valley’s foremost ornithologists, however, visiting the World’s Columbia Exhibition in 1893, the young Roosevelt was attracted to the exhibit of trees native to New York state. From that time on he studied and practiced the arts of planting and transplanting, pruning, watering and spacing trees.

Although Hyde Park in the Hudson River Valley was his beloved home, FDR wrote, “Nature is not so kind here. Winters are hard, summers sometimes too hot, sometimes too cold, the lot of a farmer or gardener is always a gamble and yet I like the change of seasons. I would miss having a landscape never covered by snow. The coming of spring seems to be more wonderful because of the extremes that lie before and beyond it.” Reading those words brings one closer to understanding Roosevelt’s love for the American West and perhaps his obvious joy in not only visiting Montana time and again but also his determination to help it’s citizens.