Sir Dietrich Brandis (31 March 1824 – 28 May 1907) was a German-British botanist and forestry academic and administrator, who worked with the British Imperial Forestry Service in colonial India for nearly 30 years. He joined the British civil service in Burma in 1856, shortly afterwards became head of the British forestry administration in all of Burma, and served as Inspector General of Forests in India from 1864 to 1883. He returned to Europe in 1883, dividing his time between Bonn and Greater London. In retirement he dedicated himself to scholarly work, resulting in the book Indian Trees (1906), his magnum opus. Brandis is considered the father of tropical forestry and has also been described as the father of scientific forestry. In addition to his work in India, he also had a significant influence on forest management in the United States. Early life, education and family A member of the patrician Brandis family, Dietrich Brandis was born in Bonn, Germany, and was the son of the prominent philosopher Christian August Brandis, who was tutor to the young King Otho of Greece and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn. His grandfather Joachim Dietrich Brandis was personal physician to Queen Marie of Denmark and Norway and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. He studied at the universities of Copenhagen Biology, Göttingen Botany and Bonn Biology major and minor Geography and Antiquites, and in 1849, he took up a post as a lecturer in botany at Bonn. His interest in forest management was initially from a botanical perspective. In 1854, he married Rachel Marshman, a daughter of the Indian scholar and missionary Joshua Marshman and a sister of the wife of General Havelock. His brother-in-law Havelock was a friend of Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General of India, and it was this connection that brought him to Burma and eventually India. His first wife died in India in 1862, and during a two-year sabbatical in Europe from 1865 to 1867, he met and married Katharina Hassie, eighteen years his junior. She moved to India with him and the couple had six children, some of whom did not reach adulthood. Dietrich Brandis was the father of supreme court justice Bernhard Brandis and the grandfather of the microbiologist Henning Brandis. Forestry administrator in British India Among other natural resources, the British government in India was interested in the use of