Mark Nicholson is an ecologist who has worked in 17 African countries. He is the Director of a small Kenyan NGO, Plants for Life International, based 25 km north of Nairobi at Brackenhurst Botanic Garden in Tigoni. He has been collecting East African plants for 20 years and has a collection of over 600 tree and shrub species, half of all the woody plant species of Kenya. He has a Ph.D. in Veterinary Physiology from Cambridge University UK.