WILDING by Isabella Tree

For the increasing number of us living in urban environments, with the growing sprawl of concrete structures punctuated by smaller and smaller areas of natural green, the idea of nature and countryside continues to exert a powerful fascination. There is something about being surrounded not by straight lines and angles but by a myriad of curves and kinks, not by shades of grey but by innumerable tones of green, brown, yellow and orange, that shift and change depending on the unpredictable and unfathomable shifts in weather, temperature and season. For many English, the ideal of nature is described nostalgically; bushy green hedgerows filled with birdlife and brambles loaded with blackberries; towering oaks standing majestically in yellowed fields of waving wheat; or cool woodlands where light filters through innumerable branches to dapple on the ferny ground or the babbling brook below, and where bluebells riot in profusion in the Spring and falling leaves create a fiery spectacle in the Autumn. These are the childhood evocations of Tolkein and CS Lewis, the halcyon descriptions of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and the love songs of those many, many writers who have idealised our green and pleasant land.

And yet, the ideal is also a fallacy. Walking out into ‘nature’ it is rare to find yourself in the landscapes of these descriptions. Those bushy hedgerows are the last remnants of undergrowth remaining from the inexorable ploughing under of the land during World War II, when feeding Britain was of the utmost importance. That oak standing in a field is the sole survivor of a wood, surrounded by land that has been exhausted by over-farming and poisoned by increasing amounts of fertilisers.  The cool woodlands are just as likely to be filled with encroaching pine and fir trees, escapees from quick-growing, regimented timber and wood pulp plantations, that cover the ground thickly with their acidic needles, stifling undergrowth and creating natural cathedrals where little else grows.

Our preconceptions about the ideal versus the reality of nature is one of the fascinating and thought-provoking topics that WILDING sheds light on. Essentially a record of the rewilding experiment carried out over the last 20 years at Knepp in West Sussex, it is a fascinating record of what happens when a substantial area of land, agriculturally over-used and with varying conditions of geography and soil condition, is allowed to rest and evolve with minimal outside interference. Strangely enough, despite one’s interest and delight in reading about and understanding some of the reasons behind the return of Purple Emperor butterflies, turtle doves, nightingales, beavers or rare varieties of orchid, this is actually the least interesting aspect of the book.

It is the deeper questions that are significantly more thought-provoking, as they introduce the reader to entirely new concepts and perspectives in how we think about nature.  Rewilding an area could be, to the uninitiated, as simple as standing back and letting nature take its course. But should there be any interference and, if so, of what sort? Do you encourage rewilding based on the landscape as it is now, or as it was before we started manipulating it? Is that 10 years ago? 100? Or 10,000? Going right back to the beginning, so to speak, means understanding how the land may have originally functioned in the temperate climate of South-East England. That in turn means understanding and ensuring space and opportunity for the necessary various levels of flora and fauna; from flesh-eating insects to herbivorous megafauna; from landscape-changers such as beavers to soil-changers like ants or worm varieties; from scrub to flood-plains to woodland. And it means accepting that species of flora and fauna may act entirely differently than we expect when given the opportunity to carve out their own niche.

Another interesting perspective is questioning our concept of what ‘nature’ looks like, and understanding how and why our idealised, halcyon vision differs so much from the messy, unregulated reality.  This is described well in the opening chapters, where the first few years of Knepp’s wilding project produced an almost entirely negative reception by those in close proximity. Despite explanations by Knapp’s owners, there was widespread condemnation from surrounding neighbours of how the land, husbanded and manipulated according to human requirements for centuries, was being neglected and abandoned. They were horrified at how ugly the landscape had become and how weeds and other undesirables were allowed to proliferate. They wrote letters (and poems) of complaint to local and national newspapers and organisations and lobbied DEFRA, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, to shut the project down. At root was their rejection of Knepp’s concept of nature. For people living on and working the land for generations, whose lives consisted of battling exactly the ‘weeds’ allowed to proliferate at Knepp and for whom nature was the Victorian ideal of land parcelled neatly into productive, crop-bearing fields, waterways tidily channelled through canals and embankments and drained by massive underground drainage systems, and carefully coppiced stands of trees, watching ‘unproductive’ scrubland proliferating wildly, dead trees being allowed to rot naturally and meadows flooding in severe rainfall, all on their own doorsteps, was wildly shocking. It took a decade for perceptions to change, as the benefits of the experiment became clear (such as minimal flooding, even in years of significant rainfall, due to the revived water meadows soaking up and releasing slowly the excess water) and as the estate slowly conformed to the some of the idealised ideas of the ‘natural’ countryside, with an abundance of new flora or the return of quintessentially ‘British’ wildlife such as butterflies, nightingales or owls.

But the changing nature of the estate also presents another challenge to our idea of nature; Knepp is continually evolving and if left to itself its landscape and flora will evolve from parkland to meadow, scrubland to woodland, water meadow to marsh. However, constant change in our landscape is not what we have grown to expect. Areas labelled as outstanding natural beauty should generally remain that - beautiful.  Regulated sites of specific scientific or natural interest (a designation that Knapp is desperately keen not to attract) actively attempt to maintain the exact environment for the particular flora or fauna of interest, regardless of whether that area would naturally evolve or what other species may be forced out. We like our nature in stasis. And that is not natural.

Though Knepp is now lauded as a benchmark project which can, as the environment becomes the defining topic of our time, attract attention and funding more easily, its inception in 2001 with the decision to sell the dairy herds and stop farming the arable land was only possible due to a shift in governmental funding of subsidies around food production and land usage. Funding inevitably comes with targets and metrics for measuring defined success which are used to decide whether the project has been valuable and a success. However, Knepp’s wilding project was specifically designed not to have designated goals and for which no defined ‘value’ could be given. How then is its success measured? How is it able to continue its work and attract the funding and governmental permissions needed? These questions mirror a global conversation about the intrinsic value of natural environments worldwide, for which economic and financial metrics play only a small part in their overall value. Attempting to place something undefined and unmeasurable within a system where economic and financial benchmarks are, until recently, the only metrics we use to define importance, is a frustrating experience which Knepp’s wilding project demonstrates beautifully on a small scale.

Ultimately, for a book written by someone living the wilding dream, this is a remarkably balanced attempt to understand the pros and cons of letting nature take its course with minimal interference, in an environment increasingly over-utilised by humans. As you would expect, the author writes positively and with great persuasion about the benefits of returning some land to a more natural state (the concept of areas of ‘pop-up’ rewilding, proposed by a former director of Nature England, is particularly interesting). However, she balances this by acknowledging the current realities of land-usage, climate and population and ultimately makes an extremely persuasive argument for re-examining the relationship between nature and the man-made world.

Knepp is open to visitors and can be visited all year round, either walking the designated footpaths or visiting the more remote areas with guides. Visit their website to see more.