Letting a farm go wild

The Knepp estate in West Sussex had been farmed intensively for decades. By the late 1990s, the soil was exhausted, the business was losing money, and the wildlife had largely gone. Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a decision that felt almost irresponsible at the time: they stopped farming and let the land do what it wanted.

Published in 2018, Wilding is the record of what followed. Knepp introduced free-roaming herds of Old English longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs, and fallow and red deer — proxies for the large herbivores that once shaped British landscapes. Within a few years, species that had not been recorded in the area for generations began to return.

Tree describes purple emperor butterflies appearing in numbers that astonished entomologists, turtle doves breeding where they had not been seen for decades, peregrine falcons nesting, and nightingales singing in the new scrub. None of this was planted or managed in the conventional sense; it simply arrived when the pressure was removed.

The book is also a practical account of the obstacles: neighbours' complaints about ragwort blowing onto their land, bureaucratic resistance from farming subsidy systems designed for productive agriculture, the difficulty of explaining to visitors that the 'mess' of thorny scrub is in fact thriving habitat.

Wilding became a touchstone for the rewilding movement in Britain, not because Knepp is typical — few landowners can simply stop farming — but because it offers concrete, documented evidence of what ecological recovery can look like when it is genuinely allowed to happen.