The numbers of Britain’s most endangered species have more than halved since the Seventies and the abundance of all wildlife has fallen dramatically.’Ī visit in 1999 by tree expert Ted Green was pivotal. Ninety-seven per cent of our wildflower meadows have been lost since the war.

Eighty per cent of Britain’s lowland heathland has been lost since 1800. ‘Up to 90 per cent of wetland has disappeared in England alone since the Industrial Revolution. ‘Changes in land use and, in particular, intensive farming have altered the landscape beyond anything our great-grandparents would recognise,’ Isabella writes in her introduction to the book. Losing more money each year, the couple faced the uncomfortable truth that this regime of intensive farming was unsustainable and they began desperately to seek alternatives. On inhospitable Sussex clay soil, arable and dairy farming at Knepp had always been a struggle, the depleted land coerced into yielding its crops by fertilisers and weed killers. Documenting the story in her book Wilding*, Isabella recounts how, in 2000, they sold their farm machinery and began the process of allowing their arable fields to revert to nature. Twenty years later, their rewilding project on the 3,500-acre Knepp estate is a huge success story – a pioneering project that has inspired dozens of similar enterprises around the UK.

In February 2002, Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree sent a letter to Defra declaring their intent ‘to establish a biodiverse wilderness area in the Low Weald of Sussex’. Conservationist and writer Isabella Tree, with rescue dog Milo, at Knepp Castle Estate in West Grinstead Jooney Woodward

Wilding isabella