Leslie Hugh Ractliffe

Hugh was born on 26 April 1943 in Coventry, in the middle of the war, the second of three children: Alan was his elder brother, Cathy came nine years later. A calm, dreamy, cheerful boy, he loved tennis and fast cars, and went on to study zoology. He did his doctorate in Granada, in Franco's Spain, and it was there, at twenty-one, in the countryside, that an old man asked him why he was doing what he was doing. He did not have a very good answer, and the question stayed with him.

A post-doctoral post followed at Cornell, in Ithaca, New York, where he met his first wife, Lynn, and where one day, beside the great research building, a single dandelion stopped him in his tracks and opened him to the depth and wisdom of the living world. In a bookshop in Ithaca he found a volume of lectures by Rudolf Steiner that began "dear friends", and felt he was being spoken to. Anthroposophy became his spiritual home for the rest of his life.

With Lynn he went to Emerson College in England, where their daughter Meghan was born. After they parted he spent a year as a potter in the monastery at Montserrat, climbing each morning to watch the sun rise over the distant Mediterranean. It was there, on a walk at sunset, that Leslie became Hugh. Back at Emerson he cooked for seven years, two hundred meals a day, and then found the work that would hold him for forty years: the garden. First in a Camphill community at Kimberton, Pennsylvania, then in a market garden with trainees, one of whom was Wende. He taught plant observation in Honolulu, married Wende there at fifty, and in 1993, thanks to Vivien, now a long-time family friend in the Allier, the family came to the Allier and the Foyer Michael, where Emma and then Francesca were born.

For some thirty years Hugh taught plant observation and gardening at the Foyer Michael and was the heart and soul of its garden, which fed the students and was, for him, a place of research into how the forces of the cosmos live in plants. He cooked, played ping-pong, loved Bach, hot sauce, a good shower and a view. He never stopped searching. He died peacefully in the early hours of Thursday 8 October 2026, in the hospital at Moulins, with Emma and James beside him.