Copemish Roots
David Milarch grew up on his family's shade tree nursery in Copemish, a small town in northwestern Michigan. He worked the land for decades, growing and selling trees in the family tradition. By his own account, he was no environmentalist and no scientist. He was a working-class tree farmer with dirt under his nails.
In 1991, a severe illness brought a near-death experience. He came back with a single conviction: the world's largest, oldest trees were dying, and their genetics had to be saved.
The Champion Tree Problem
Milarch dug into the record of champion trees, the largest living specimens of each species catalogued by American Forests. The numbers alarmed him. Two-thousand-year-old coast redwoods were dying of drought. Ancient American elms were falling to Dutch elm disease. White oaks that predated European settlement were being bulldozed for subdivisions.
When a champion fell, its genetics fell with it. The specific traits that let it outlive and outgrow every other tree of its kind vanished into the soil.
He decided to clone them before they were gone. In 1994, he and his sons founded what became the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, a nonprofit built around one task: banking the DNA of the world's most exceptional trees.
Cloning the Giants
Cloning ancient trees is not the same as propagating nursery stock. Tissue from thousand-year-old branches rarely roots. Cuttings sulk and die. Milarch's team adjusted hormone treatments, growing media, light, and timing for each species, failing for years before techniques stuck.
The breakthroughs came in the redwood groves. Archangel collected cuttings from California's tallest specimens and, in some cases, took genetic material from redwood stumps that had been felled a century earlier but still held living root tissue. They propagated coast redwoods, giant sequoias, American elms, white oaks, and eastern hemlocks, then planted the clones in suitable habitats around the country.
The premise is plain. Trees that lived a thousand years carry disease resistance, drought tolerance, and structural resilience worth preserving. A single coast redwood sequesters hundreds of tons of carbon over its lifetime. Milarch argues that planting groves of superior genetic stock is one of the cheapest carbon strategies humans have.
The Man Who Planted Trees
In 2012, journalist Jim Robbins published The Man Who Planted Trees, tracing Milarch's path from struggling nurseryman to leader of a global cloning effort. The book pulled his work into wider view and surfaced a quiet paradox: the planet's largest, oldest living organisms get a fraction of the attention given to endangered animals.
Archangel has since planted cloned ancient trees in several countries, built living archives of champion genetics, and partnered with universities to study the genomes behind exceptional growth.
Legacy
Milarch remains an outsider in the environmental world. He holds no science degree. His motives come from personal conviction as much as peer-reviewed research. But the trees he and his team cloned are real, rooted, and pulling carbon out of the sky.
His contribution does not live in policy or protest. It lives in a single cutting pressed into soil, carrying the genetic memory of a tree that stood for a thousand years.