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.
Born Francis Home Popham in Portsmouth, Hampshire, Sam attended Eton college where his father, the Rev Edgar “Jack” Popham, had been chaplain before moving to Boxgrove, West Sussex. Here, Sam’s love of nature flourished among the fields, woods and hedgerows. While reading history at Cambridge in 1941, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves, ultimately serving in a minesweeper flotilla that cleared the way for the D-day landings. Demobbed in what was then Ceylon, he worked as a teacher in Egypt and Sussex before returning to the island in 1952.
His arboretum so impressed Sri Lanka’s national research institute that it took over the site in 1993, with Sam continuing as manager until his retirement in 2003. Entrusting his precious trees to his assistant, Jayantha Amarasinghe, Sam returned to West Sussex and later Surrey, from where he stayed actively involved with the arboretum until his death.
Sam nurtured generations of his workers’ families alongside his beloved trees, plants and animals. For many years, he even coexisted with a family of pythons who lived outside his simple stone house at the entrance to his land. Today, his arboretum draws eco-tourists and scientists from across the globe: a fitting legacy for this man of the trees.
He is survived by a nephew, Philip.
