- Source: Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm
Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm is a 2018 non-fiction book on nature conservation by Isabella Tree. It has won the 2018 Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award and the 2023 ZSL Silver Medal.
Book
= Synopsis
=In Wilding, Isabella Tree makes the case for the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3,500-acre (1,400-hectare) wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, the ancestral home of her husband, Sir Charles Burrell. Tree describes how the estate, farmed conventionally on poor land with heavy soil, started to fail, and they decided to stop farming. Inspired by experts such as Ted Green, they began to consider the value of the soil and ancient trees like Knepp's veteran oaks. They found that subsidies were available, with constraints, for land not in production, and the land began to return to wood pasture with the growth of scrub. They introduced fallow deer, English Longhorn cattle, and Tamworth pigs to various parts of the estate; each species turned out to feed differently, and to have important, even keystone species effects on the land. Many species of butterfly, dragonfly, and bat returned. Once common birds that had become rare in Britain like nightingales and turtle doves came to breed. Exmoor ponies were added, further diversifying the habitats. Plants and insects flourished, including some like ragwort that were deprecated by landowners. The artificially straightened river Adur was re-engineered to allow it to meander and flood, bringing wading birds like green sandpipers and lapwings back to the farm. The pasture-fed beef turned out to be a valuable and nutritious commodity, while the rewilded estate started to make money from tourists and wildlife watchers.
= Publication
=Wilding was published by Pan Macmillan in hardback in 2018, and by Picador in paperback the same year. The book is illustrated with a sketch map in the front matter, and 30 colour photographs and one graph in two groups of illustrations in the text.
Awards
In 2018, Wilding won the Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award, and was listed as one of the top ten science books by Smithsonian magazine. In 2019 it was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. The book won the 2023 Zoological Society of London Silver Medal.
Reception
The architect Annalie Riches, in the RIBA Journal, wrote that Wilding is a "call to arms" on "rethinking our relationship with the natural world". She described the decision to stop farming as brave, and the book as optimistic. She recommended architects to read the book, noting that they always plant trees or shrubs to improve the sites of new buildings, but had never thought of this as "very urgent". David Sexton, writing in the Evening Standard, called the book an "engrossing account" of what Tree and Burrell "have attempted on their estate".
Alison Parfitt, reviewing the book for the ECOS journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists, writes that it is "full of surprises". One is that scrub is a rich habitat; another that people react negatively to scrub, and that the chapter "Creating a Mess" on those reactions was "instructive if not entertaining", complete with a poem on the shame of a "plague" of ragwort. Parfitt concludes that the book, with its photographs of a Paleolithic Lascaux cave painting and a matching photograph of an Exmoor pony at Knepp, served as "an affirmation of spirit, wilding spirit".
References
Sources
Tree, Isabella (2018a). Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm. Pan Macmillan. ISBN 978-1509805105.
Tree, Isabella (2018b). Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm. Picador. ISBN 978-1509805105.