A lecture by Peter Popham journalist and author.
Tuesday 10th March 2026, 7:30pm in St Anne’s Parish Hall, Kew Green. TW9 3AA.
How an old-fashioned Englishman in Sri Lanka brought a tropical forest back from the dead - by weeding.
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Sam Popham, the son of an Anglican vicar, was happy to call himself a 'dendrolater' - a worshipper of trees. 'The groves,' he wrote, 'were God's first temples...In the silence of the forest one can recognise a higher, unseen power that has control of one's destiny and is entitled to one's obedience, reverence and worship.'
But all over Sri Lanka, where he worked as a tea planter, the forests were disappearing, replaced by 'a wild disorderly undergrowth of thorn-scrub.' In 1963 he purchased a 7.5 acre patch of scrub and set about reviving the forest. He discovered that the best way to do this was not by planting but weeding - because the seeds of these mighty hardwoods were still in the soil. All they required was nursing back to life.
Today the Popham Arboretum has become, as Sam desired, an oasis of trees where visitors from across the world experience the cool, calming serenity, the strengthening, purifying, healing and inspiring magnetism of the mature forest.
Sam distilled a lifetime’s love and study of trees into his book DAMBULLA – a Sanctuary of Tropical Trees, published in 1993 with the support of Kew Gardens and its first Director of Conservation, Grenville Lucas. Now friends of the arboretum have published a beautiful new edition which will be on sale in Kew Gardens shop from February, priced £8.99. Peter will also have copies on sale after his talk.
Peter Popham, journalist and author, first met his distant relative Sam in Sri Lanka while Peter was The Independent’s South Asia correspondent. They remained close friends until Sam's death in 2022 aged 99.
