After fifty years of planting trees, Peepal Baba has arrived at a set of conclusions that sound almost backwards: nature doesn't need saving, careers kill passion, and for an environmentalist, a grandmother can matter more than a policy paper, and the most important tree in the world may be the one already standing.

Ask him a simple question, and his answer will leave you rethinking what conservation is, what restoration means, and why saving a tree is not always the same thing as planting one.

I ask him: if you had to choose between saving a 500-year-old tree and planting one lakh new saplings, what would you do?

He shifts in his seat, excited, as though he has been waiting years for someone to ask this question. Yet his answer comes in the form of another question, one that cuts to the heart of why protesters wrap their arms around trees and what an ancient tree can mean in a world obsessed with replacement.

“It is like asking: would you save your father, or go and give birth to 500 more children?” he says. “I would save my father. That 500-year-old tree is a mother tree. It produces millions of seeds. You are talking about one lakh saplings — that one tree may already be giving birth to 10 lakh trees.”

It is the kind of answer that creates the rare feeling of intellectual vertigo, the sense that familiar ground is shifting beneath your feet.

‘I confess: I have hardly made a dent. But I tried’

Swami Prem Parivartan — known to the world as ‘Peepal Baba’ — has spent 50 years doing something that very few people in India have done with such relentless consistency: planting trees, tending them, watching them grow, and then letting nature do the rest. 

His organisation, Give Me Trees Trust, has restored vegetation across 2,70,000 hectares spanning 226 districts. The numbers are staggering. The philosophy behind them is even more interesting.

His new memoir, Ghosts on Peepal Trees(Ebury Press, Penguin Random House India), published this year, is the book it took him over a decade to write — and a road accident in November 2024 to finally finish. In the Author's Note, he is characteristically unsparing about the scale of what he has achieved and what it means. 

“After working on the ground for nearly five decades, restoring vegetation across 2,70,000 hectares, planting twenty-five million trees and as many shrubs,” he writes, “I confess: I have hardly made a dent. But I tried. That is what matters.”

It is an extraordinary sentence from an extraordinary man. And when I sit down with him one morning — the conversation unhurried, ranging freely across five decades of experience — what strikes me most is not the scale of what he has done, but the modesty of how he thinks about doing it.

The boy who planted trees to avoid homework

The beginning, as Peepal Baba tells it, had nothing heroic about it. In those days, there was no mission statement, and the concept of climate anxiety was not yet an Instagram-approved term to describe what our ancestors already knew. His first introduction to environmentalism was a grandmother, a bicycle, and a child's natural tendency to find ways to escape the afternoon homework.

He was born in Chandigarh in 1966, the son of an army doctor who would rise to the rank of Brigadier. His early childhood was a series of postings — Dalhousie, Kolkata, Dehradun, then Pune. In Ghosts on Peepal Trees, he describes the smell of conifers entering his lungs before language did, and a childhood spent in the generous, sprawling bungalows of army cantonments, where the land itself was a kind of........

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