Richard St. Barbe Baker, forester, campaigner and mystic, was one of the twentieth century's outstanding environmentalists. Towards the end of his long life (1889–1982) he concluded that, having had thirty books published about trees, he should write one about people. Tall Timber is that book, published at his widow Catriona's request. It has been edited by Barrie Oldfield, who was for seventeen years President of the Western Australian branch of Men of the Trees, the organisation Baker founded in Kenya in 1922. Baker's method of composition was characterised by a randomness that artists in the Dada movement would have savoured: six names chosen arbitrarily each day from a list of around 170, and written on slips of paper of which one would be pulled out of his hat. The resulting collection has no discernible structure and is sometimes repetitive. It is also the only book I have come across whose even-numbered pages are on the right-hand side.

More seriously, for the historian, there is the problem of how accurate Baker's memory was. ‘Remarkable but not infallible’, is Oldfield's neat summation, and after the section on General Smuts he comments laconically: ‘Readers may find the Author's recollection to be at variance with historical fact’. Oldfield also discerns a degree of vanity in some of Baker's reminiscences. But along with that vanity can be seen the energy, knowledge, unstinting commitment and love of nature which made Baker so inspiring. Here was a man for whom the earth's green mantle was the key not just to fertile soil and pure water, but to social stability and world peace. To preserve and extend the world's forests and woodland was a means by which the supposed enmity of science and religion could be overcome, with scientific knowledge put to the service of healing, rather than conquering, God's creation. Baker at one time trained for the Christian ministry, but for most of his life adhered to the Baha'i faith. In him, the mystic and the practical man coexisted harmoniously. His experiences during the 1920s as a forester in Africa alerted him to the dire consequences of the West's exploitation of natural resources, and he encouraged tree planting and soil reclamation across the world. He influenced F. D. Roosevelt's establishment of the Conservation Corps, undertook a survey of desertification in North Africa, and issued the ecological New Earth Charter in 1949, more than twenty years before The Ecologist's Blueprint for Survival.

Inevitably, there is much in this collection which smacks of name-dropping: we meet Field-Marshal Allenby, John Diefenbaker, Gandhi, Kenyatta, Lloyd George, Ramsay MacDonald, Nehru, a Pope, Bernard Shaw and various royals. But Baker also pays tribute to many lesser known figures: Cambridge forestry scientists, clergymen, nurses, vegetarians, fellow-veterans of the First World War, and ecologically-minded landowners. He clearly delighted in human, as well as sylvan, variety. Baker was a Soil Association founder member, and some familiar ‘organic’ personalities feature, including Eve Balfour and Lord Portsmouth. The book also provides further evidence of the organic movement's strong esoteric strain. Baker was one of the most appealing of the organic pioneers, and his spirit lived on in the work of Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai (1940–2011), founder of the women's Green Belt Movement. Tall Timber conveys Baker's zest and his prodigious work for peace. It is, however, a kaleidoscope with many fragments of information but no clear pattern. One hopes that it might inspire some ambitious environmental historian to research a full, chronological account of Baker's life, since the urgency of his message increases with each acre of the world's forests that is felled.