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My First Naturalist Teacher

by Morris Flewwelling

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We are the product of our environment, and our lives are shaped greatly by our parents and significant members of the community. Hilda Buckman Crook was a mentor who had a profound influence on my life. When I was 10 years old’ she was the first published author I knew and she had what seemed to be a huge library. The collection focused on her two great passions, art and natural history and I had full access to that wonderful trove.

Hilda was a woman ahead of her time. Her entrepreneurial sense, her lifelong penchant for learning and discovery, and her vocal concern for the environment were all quite out of the ordinary for a farm woman in the Alberta of 1950. Hilda was born in England in 1893, the eighth and youngest child of Dr and Mrs. Sydney Buckman. Her father and Grandfather Buckman were both distinguished invertebrate palaeontologists. She grew up in a modestly privileged and academic Edwardian household. Hilda showed an early aptitude for art and natural history and she was given a third-floor room for her museum cum studio. After grammar school she attended Oxford where she studied Art for two years.

Hilda’s grandfather and parents, with the patronage and support of Viscountess Lady Harberton, were active advocates of the ideals of the Rational Dress League. The League was formed in 1890 to encourage women to replace corseted bodices and long skirts with blouses and knickerbockers. The garb became known as “rational dress” and Hilda’s mother became captain of the Western Rational Dress Club. The Buckmans clearly were in the vanguard of social reform.

In 1914 Hilda sailed to Canada with her brother George, to join her sister Isabel and another brother Ron on a homestead near Ricinus, Alberta. Within a year she ventured alone to Molewood, Saskatchewan, where she worked as a farm domestic. She returned to England for a visit, and finally in 1924 came back to Alberta. For the next two decades Hilda turned her entrepreneurial to such pursuits as store clerk, threshing cook, housekeeper, dressmaker and writer. Her most successful venture was creating unique Canadian souvenirs from birchbark, deerskin, and pine cones to market in Banff, Jasper and cities in Alberta and British Columbia. Her products became the hallmark souvenirs of their day. All the while she painted and gathered sketches, watercolours and information for a book on Alberta wildflowers and edible plants. Although she lived in High River, Rocky Mountain House, Victoria, Olds, and Edmonton, her heart remained with her homestead near Ricinus.

In 1939, at the age of 46, she married Fred Crook, sold her homestead, and moved to a farm near the narrows of Buffalo Lake, southwest of Mirror. It was at the Crook farm that I spent idyllic childhood times. The place was a virtual menagerie with peacocks, guinea hens and all manner of exotic fowl, the usual farm animals, and a huge breeding stock of carp and goldfish. Each summer 400-500 baby fish were produced and each winter the huge adults were housed in the heated stock tank – a rare rural spectacle!

Every day I spent at the farm included a trip to the lake, the bog or the woods. Hilda taught me hoe to identify birds and plant families, how to observe detail, how to use a botanical key and how to identify fungi and mushrooms. We observed and studied. Anything new or unfamiliar was taken home for research in the library. We gathered edibles and came home to rare and exotic feasts. Hilda sought adventure in every place. She was ready to try new ways of preparing food and was a student of alternative medicine.

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