Wendy Campbell-Purdie (1925 – 1985) was a New Zealand tree-planter who worked with a British timber firm in Corsica.
[1] In Hampshire, England, she called upon the tree expert Richard St. Barbe Baker in 1960, and learned about his idea that green wall agriculture could tame the desert.
After Algerian Independence, Campbell-Purdie travelled to Algeria, where she was given a 100 hectare plot which had once been a French military dump covered in sheet metal and which received much of the town's waste water.
[3] Campbell-Purdie formed the Bou Saada Trust to raise funds to support her "war against the Sahara."
Her successes inspired the Algerian government to plant a 12-meter-wide wall of trees from border-to-border across that country.