There is a kind of logic that I should glimpse this gentleman visionary in that other place of visions, Findhorn. That a recluse living in a tumbledown keeper’s cottage in a wood knew this man as a bit of a father, a bit of a brother, a bit of a friend, and above all as a teacher. In the seventies, I searched the catacombs of Hay-on-Wye for cheap copies of St. Barbe Baker’s Books – I Planted Trees; The Brotherhood of The Trees; The Redwoods and others. Always I glimpsed the paradox of this strange man, quintessentially English yet looking at the world not as an Englishman, someone thinking about trees for the sake of the planet. A private person yet a consummate showman if it could put another tree into the ground; a friend of aristocrats (often notable foresters) yet someone who dreamed of living in a caravan community in a wood; the forester with degrees from Cambridge University and a blood brother with African chiefs. I could not pigeonhole this man; even his closest friends did not know he was a member of the Bahai faith. While contemporaries embarked on doomed peanut schemes in Tanzania, he urged people to plant trees to halt the spread of the Sahara. He liked to be called ‘Sahara’ Baker. A man, definitely, before his time.

I was on familiar ground in the insect garden of Bruce Burdass, off a lane and down a track near the Wiltshire village of Compton Bassett. An unlikely place for this urbane pilot who once owned 500 acres in Kent. I never sought for an explanation or got one. He had been a friend of Richard St. Barbe Baker for thirty years, at 40, the youngest council member for The Men of the Trees, the organisation founded by his mentor with the Kikuyu tribes in Kenya in 1922. That helped to change the traditional attitude of planting trees as God’s work, to the work of warriors, comradeship against the desert. Bruce recalled for me the tall, meticulous man in dress and manners (but never showy) he first met at Penshurst when St. Barbe Baker had politely announced that he was vegetarian, refusing the leg of lamb. ‘He had walked twice around the Sahara when I met him. And later I walked a thousand miles with him in ten African countries bringing seeds and knowledge to the tribal peoples. In 1974, as a birthday treat, I flew St. Barbe Baker over the plantations which he had personally planted by Mt. Kenya.’

He was a man who considered he had a purpose, said Bruce, yet at 70 felt his plea for reafforestation, particularly, in the Sahel, were not not being listened to. His treatment of the African as equals in the 1930’s, his lack of interest in bureaucracy and the codebook of rules against new ideas did not endear him to the colonial administration. ‘There was no tittle tattle in him, or any falseness, just factual. He could see through people. A lot tried but you couldn’t fool him, yet with a genuine audience he could talk about trees for hours… Some people found him intense.’ St. Barbe Baker often used his London home as a bolt-hole, arriving on his doorstep with rucksack or suitcase and sleeping bag. He travelled all over the world with his tree message, largely at his own expense, Bruce emphasises. His training as an ex-army officer extended into his civilian life. (Once he had been a cavalry officer and in his youth retraced Cobbet’s ride in Hampshire). Up at 5.30. writing for three hours before breakfast of nuts and berries. ‘He was very hard-working and deeply conscious that if he could only get his views across he could save millions of lives.’

He thought about trees in big numbers. Bruce remembers sitting on a verandah at Tree-Tops, a reserve near Nairobi, listening to the bush at 3am. They watched a beetle the size of a plate crawl to the waterhole, then two torchlights appeared and a jungle owl swooped down and grabbed it. Crunch! ‘It’s larger than life,’ I said. ‘That’s what I wanted you to see,’ said St Barbe Baker. ‘It’s the scale that matters.’ He pictured the world as a new tennis ball and the fluffy bits are trees. When they wear out the ball spins faster and the earth’s natural equilibrium is endangered. ‘He didn’t see the world as an Englishman. He didn’t consider himself to be any particular nationality. He was a citizen of the world. He was a loner though he never considered himself to be out on the edge. He felt he was the one in step. I think time has proved him right.’

I’m proud that I met him once even though I never spoke to him. In 1976 I saw his face in a candle-lit meditation, alive, alert and serene. He was 87-years-old. He told a visitor at breakfast that he was always intoxicated by the love at Findhorn. He is buried under a tree in Canada.

Peter Please