Longlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize for Nature Writing

‘A passionately personal, robustly argued and uplifting publication . Among the landmark ecological books from the decade.’ Sunday Situations ‘Books of the Year’

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding task in Western Sussex, using free-roaming grazing animals to produce new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account from the ecology of our countryside, about Wilding: The Come back of Character to a British Farm Wilding is certainly, most importantly, an inspiring tale of hope.

Forced to simply accept that intensive farming for the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell produced a spectacular jump of faith: they made a decision to stage back and let nature take over. Because of the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer – proxies of the huge pets that once roamed Britain – the 3,500 acre task has seen extraordinary increases in animals numbers and diversity in small over a decade.

Extremely rare species, including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies, are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of various other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has turned into a functioning ecosystem once again, heaving with existence – all by itself.

Personal and inspirational, Wilding can be an amazing account of the wonder and strength of nature, when it is given as very much freedom as it can be.