Stubborn, fearless and provocative, my friend Sam Popham, who has died aged 99 of skin cancer, was an original. Known in his adoptive home of Sri Lanka as Gasmahaththi – “the man of the trees” – or “the hermit of Dambulla”, Sam, a self-taught pioneer, devoted 50 years of his life to restoring the country’s ravaged dry zone jungle. He won the Lanka conservation award in 1992 and international acclaim from scientists including the TV botanist David Bellamy.
Today, Sam’s work would probably be rebranded as “rewilding”, but back in the 1960s, what became known as the “Popham principle” – “plant nothing; water nothing. Let nature have its way” – was considered an outlandish concept. The Dambulla scrubland he bought in 1963 as a mango plantation had been seriously degraded by shifting agriculture, or chena, but Sam and his workers fought back against the invasive weeds, giving space, light and attention to the native hardwood saplings that began to emerge spontaneously from the dusty soil and thrive. Where others had failed, Sam succeeded, creating the Popham Arboretum: a rare and celebrated fragment of rich, indigenous forest.
