Big Tree Estate Washed Sc. 15+

Big Tree Estate sits in the town of Big Tree, a place whose name drifted over time from the British-coined “Fig Tree.” Thankfully, the farm does have its own namesake tree—once especially large, but now, as often happens with such harbingers of legend, reduced to story and fragment after coming down some decades ago. In its place stands a modest offshoot, around which brothers Paul and Gabriel Wabuge have planted nearly 30 acres of coffee.

The farm itself was purchased by their father in 1970 from a British family that had already established some coffee plantings, but gradually the area leaned harder into maize and wheat as coffee prices fell, and Big Tree followed suit. When Paul and Gabriel returned to Kitale in 2019 to take over from their father—a former Kenyan ambassador to the U.S. during the Reagan administration—they had coffee on the mind. Paul, a doctor by profession, had spent time in Murang’a in the Central Highlands, where seeing coffee taken seriously kindled a curiosity about what might still be possible back home. Bilha, the brothers’ childhood nanny, became the farm manager, and has been central to that rebuilding from the start.

Since then, the Wabuges have added roughly a block of coffee each year. Each one is prepared meticulously, with generous spacing, deep planting holes, and heavy manure applications from the outset. Most of the farm is planted with Batian, but Big Tree has also taken a serious step into SL28, enough that by 2026 it had an exportable harvest—one of the first places to do so in the West.