Taken from her new illustrated book Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back – An Illustrated Guide, illustrated by Angela Harding, Isabella Tree explains why it’s so important to let nature do its own thing after letting the land on her and husband Charlie Burrell’s estate run wild.
WORDS: TAKEN FROM WILDING BY ISABELLA TREE, ILLUSTRATED BY ANGELA HARDING. IMAGES: CHARLIE BURRELL & JOANNE CRAWFORD. ILLUSTRATIONS: ANGELA HARDING.
When my husband Charlie and I began an experiment to rewild our 3,500 acres of land at Knepp in West Sussex in the southeast of England over 20 years ago, we had no idea how exciting it would be. Knepp is now home to some of the rarest and most beautiful creatures in the UK, including nightingales, kingfishers, turtle doves and peregrine falcons, hazel dormice and harvest mice, scarce chaser dragonflies and purple emperor butterflies. The sheer abundance of life is staggering, too. When you walk out into the scrubland on an early spring morning the sound of birdsong is so loud it feels like it’s vibrating in your lungs.
Most astonishing of all is how fast our land has changed. Where once there were tightly clipped hedgerows, barbed wire fences, ditches and ploughed fields devoid of life, we now have ponds and bogs, groves of trees and thickets of thorny shrubs, and patches of natural wood pasture. It’s easy to get lost. Winding through it all, are trails made by our herds of free-roaming animals. It looks wild and full of adventure.
Wildlife has been amazingly quick to find this rich new habitat. Virtually all the wonderful creatures that have made Knepp their home have found us on their own: a type of dung beetle, for example, that hasn’t been seen in Sussex for 50 years, and a butterfly – the large tortoiseshell – that was thought to be extinct in the UK. How they find us is a mystery but it’s one of the most hopeful messages of rewilding. Provide space for them, and they will come.
In a world where wildlife is rapidly disappearing, this is extremely heartening. Across the planet, a million species of plants and animals are in danger of extinction, threatened by human activities such as farming, heavy industry, roads and railways, and the building of towns and cities. When we think of damage to nature it’s easy to focus on the cutting down of trees in the Amazon rainforest, or wildfires in the Mediterranean, or areas of Africa that are turning into desert – the headlines that hit the news. But we fo
