When your last name is Tree, you’re either going to become a logger or a hugger.

Thankfully for Britain, Isabella Tree preferred hugs.

But it didn’t start out that way.

In the 80s she got together with Charlie Burrell just before he took over Knepp Castle Estate, 3500 acres of intensive agriculture and dairy farming south of London.

They plugged away at it for seventeen years before the combination of poor soil, price fluctuations, debt, and irrational European subsidies all got a bit much. As Isabella writes in Wilding—published in 2018,

“Quite when we realised the farm was doomed to fail is hard to pinpoint now, almost two decades on.”

Wilding is the story of what happened after the doom descended.

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From the year 2000 on, Isabella and Charlie slowly let piece by piece of Knepp’s 3500 acres return to nature. Those three words: return to nature, disguise an epic battle with farmers, neighbors, government, funding agencies, and even conservationists themselves.

Their gateway drug was letting the first 350 acres go, seeding them with native wildflowers. Even this seemingly simple task was hard work; it took three years for these flowers to outcompete residual seed from the previous 55 years’ intensive agriculture.

I was shocked to read that wildflower meadows are barely a thing in the UK any more.

“Since the 1930s, 97 per cent of the UK’s wildflower meadows—7.5 million acres—have been lost, mostly ploughed up for arable, fast-growing agricultural grass and forestry.”

Indeed, the UK trying to feed itself during and after World War II, compounded by farming lobbies and then European agriculture subsidies that totally fucked up the link between what was needed and what was actually grown, has led to a countryside that is—to my great surprise—not very “natural” at all.

Did you know that England has only 944 square kilometers of land conserved for nature? That’s less than 1% of its surface. France has 30 times that. The introductory chapter of Wilding is full of harrowing statistics like these, and the no-Einstein-required consequence is that biodiversity has nosedived, with numerous bird species heading towards extinction, bees too, and insects (what insects?!) plummeting in numbers.

So yeah, it turns out that the British countryside has become about as biodiverse as a bucket of Roundup. This was a real surprise to me, given how “lovely” the British countryside looks, superficially at least.

It was the intense hum of insects in those first 350 acres in the summer of 2002 that told Isabella and Charlie they were on to something.

“Most conspicuous of all was the ambient noise: the low-level surround-sound thrumming of insects—something we hadn’t even known we’d been missing. We walked knee-deep through ox-eye daisies, bird’s-foot trefoil, ragged robin, knapweed, red clover, lady’s bedstraw, crested dog’s tail and sweet vernal grass, kicking up clouds of butterflies—common blues, meadow browns, ringlets, marbled whites, small and Essex skippers—and grasshoppers, hoverflies and all sorts of bumblebees.”

Yes, I must warn you, the book is chock-a-block with plants, flowers, fungi, insects and animals that I have not heard of and wouldn’t recognise in a police line-up if you paid me. But really, I’m truly glad that they all exist and are thriving at Knepp. Really!

So. Many. Living. Things. Here’s that bird’s-foot trefoil by the way:

They then brought in fallow deer to graze the 350 acres, which also meant plenty of rutting at those horny times of the year, bringing a bit of headbanging to the land.

Next, a trip to Holland to meet revolutionary Dutch ecologist Frans Vera pushed the whole adventure into turbodrive.

I’ll spare you the details but basically this dude discovered that introducing big grazing animals into a landscape not dominated by closed-canopy forest is a bit like feeding Red Bull to a three year old.

Biodiversity goes nuts.

He turned 15 000 acres of land reclaimed from a freshwater lake into a kind of Serengeti. In the Netherlands, for goodness’ sake!

“Meandering herds of grazing animals: stocky, primeval-looking Konik ponies the height of a zebra with black legs and faces and mouse-grey coats, foals at foot; dark-coated Heck cattle with the sharp, curving horns of oxen; great gatherings of red deer. Through the binoculars we could see, on a raised mound, a knot of furry red fox cubs scrabbling over each other in excitement as their parent, brazen as a jackal, returned to the den with a goose in its jaws.”

The prevailing theory until Frans Vera showed up was that if you left land like this to regenerate, it would eventually turn into closed-canopy forest, as “Europe used to be”.

However, with the arrival of geese and then grazing animals and all the natural processes they kick-started—like soil regeneration and accidental habitat creation for other species, forest growth could simply not take over on the Dutch land, so everything but forest flourished, from fungi to insects, butterflies to flowers, plants to shrubs, and mice to primeval ponies!

He realised he was on to something.

Some conservationists and ecologists have still not recovered from the shock he set rolling, and today, the “obvious fact” that Europe used to be covered in closed-canopy forest is now not quite so “obvious”.

“This idea—that grazing animals could prevent spontaneous forest succession and generate more complex and biodiverse habitats instead—was heretical.“

Isabella and Ted have run with Frans’ ideas and not stopped for breath since, despite a god-almighty battle with the powers that be—including many nature lovers—that continues even today.

Like the famous reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone park where one change led to a cascade of biodiversity and ecological wins, their work at Knepp has been revelation upon revelation. You let nature do whatever the hell it wants, and miracles literally happen. Nature rediscovers itself.

Their neighbors, on the other hand, have taken the rewilding of Knepp—with all its “un-beautiful” scrub and thistle, anthills and flood plains, shallow ponds and unmanicured hedgerows—as an assault both on who they are (farmers here to save the country from starvation!) and on what England is “supposed” to look like, which is kind of like this:

Very pretty.

And basically dead, ecologically speaking.

Knepp, on the other hand, looks more like this:

A bit of everything is growing, fighting for life, insane biodiversity with owls, bees, butterflies, fungi, worms, bats, birds, deer and wild pigs (wild boar have not been allowed, yet.).

A decision on whether they can bring back beavers is expected this year.

While we’re on the subject of what the English countryside is “supposed to look like”, Isabella tells a great story about how different age groups reacted to an early tour through the property.

“We were familiar with the usual reaction from our own generation, the forty-to-sixty-somethings. Children of the agricultural revolution were aghast at what we were doing. The twenty-somethings were often more responsive. For them the idea of national food security, of digging for victory, was an anxiety from a bygone era.”

However, it was the really old folk that delivered the surprise.

“Those in their eighties could remember the agricultural depression between the wars, where marginal land across the country had been abandoned…to scrub. To them, clumps of dog rose and hawthorn, thickets of hazel and sallow—even swathes of ragwort—were not offensive at all. The landscape recalled them, instead, to their childhood ramblings in a countryside heaving with insects and birds… To some, it was positively beautiful… ‘This is how the country always used to look!’ ”

This is brilliant stuff. Who would have known our concept of what the English countryside is meant to look like is due to historical laziness and short-sightedness more than anything else? There’s nothing permanent in the slightest about how English countryside looks today!

I loved this book. It’s a modern take on Rachel Carson’s epic, Silent Spring, from the 60s, a celebration of nature as it could be.

The sheer interconnectedness of life—if you give it a chance—really does blow you away.

Wilding also makes you realise how little we have learned since Silent Spring was published. You almost come out of it thinking that humans really should be banned from exploiting half the planet for a decade or two, probably longer. Encouragingly, parts of Europe are already doing rewilding at a larger scale, bringing back things like bison and wolves—to the joy of sheep farmers everywhere.

The book can be a bit plodding from time to time, it’s not quite as poetic as Silent Spring. You almost feel the struggle to write it was up there with the struggle to make Knepp a success. But there’s so much joy, discovery, and illumination in the book, I breezed through it in a couple of days, daydreaming of what it would be like to have 3500 acres to play with.

Also, I learned that beavers are cool as fuck. I hope they get the green light to bring them in this year.

Today, Knepp “survives” on environmental grants, actual safari visits (just like in Africa!), and accommodation in rustic cabins, tree houses, and yurts in hidden parts of the property. Listen to the birds and insect in this tree house video, it’s insane! They also cull the cattle, pigs, and deer grazing the land and sell the meat as top-shelf organic.

All of their safaris, sleepovers, and sales have currently ground to a halt due to the coronavirus. I hope they can get it all up and running again soon. It truly is a magical place, and I can’t wait to visit and go on a safari!

See you soon, keep safe, stay at home, and dream of a better world.