Tickets were in short supply for a talk at St John’s College yesterday, but cold driving rain, and the fact that people get lost traversing St John’s site meant that I was able to squeeze in. Wilding, Isabella Tree’s recent book, is an uplifting account of how she and her husband “wilded” their farm in Kent, the Knepp estate. Many people have been entranced by this story, and hearing about it first hand from Isabella left me with an enhanced sense of hope for our futures.
After years of conventional farming, Isabella and Charlie finally stopped trying to extract a profit from their land, and, withdrawing their machines and chemicals, they relaxed and let nature step back in. They took out all the fences across the land, blocked up the ditches and stood back and watched the land heal itself, and the species come back - insects, birds, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals. On advice from a Dutch expert, they fenced the outer perimeter and introduced large herbivores - longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, and tamworth pigs. These three complement one another in the way they graze, and between them they challenge the vegetation and keep opening up new opportunities for fresh growth and diversity of species and habitats.
Over remarkably few years, by letting nature lead, the farm was transformed from the typical barren landscape we are sadly so used to in the British countryside, to an astonishingly rich British wilderness, which is not only seeing rare species literally fly and hop in every day, but is now profitable.
My very next action when I got home was to book myself a camping spot and safari at Knepp - for when the weather warms up a bit.