Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell spent years trying to make their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex economically viable. The soil was heavy clay, the yields were poor, and the debt was mounting. In 2001, they made a radical decision: stop farming. Let the land go. Twenty years later, Knepp has become one of the most important nature recovery sites in England — and this book is the extraordinary account of what happened.
What Happens When You Stop
The decision to rewild Knepp was not ideological at first — it was economic desperation. Tree and Burrell introduced free-roaming cattle, pigs, ponies, and deer as proxies for the large herbivores that historically shaped lowland English landscapes, and then largely left the land alone. What grew back — the scrub, the thorns, the willow carr, the ungrazed meadows — was unplanned, unglamorous, and ecologically extraordinary.
Within a decade, Knepp had the largest breeding population of nightingales in Sussex, the highest density of purple emperor butterflies in Britain, breeding storks (the first in England for 600 years), and populations of species that had been locally or nationally absent for decades. The pattern confirmed what rewilding advocates had argued: the species are there, waiting; they need only the habitat.
The Ecological Argument
Tree is scrupulous about the science. Each returning species is traced to its specific habitat requirement — what scrub structure does a nightingale need, what dung does an oak eggar moth require, what gradient of disturbance does a purple emperor butterfly need to complete its life cycle. The detail is not pedantic; it demonstrates that restoration is not mysterious, that species recover when conditions are right, and that the conditions are achievable if we are willing to accept a different aesthetic of landscape.
Nature is not something that needs to be maintained. It needs to be released. Given half a chance, it will do everything it needs to do. Our job is to get out of the way.
— Isabella Tree, Wilding
6 Key Ideas From This Book
The most subversive argument in the book: the scrubby, thorny, unmanaged vegetation that grew at Knepp — dismissed by many ecologists as transitional and undesirable — turned out to be the most biodiverse habitat on the estate. Our aesthetic preference for open grassland has been ecologically disastrous.
Free-roaming cattle, pigs, and ponies create the mosaic of disturbed and undisturbed, grazed and ungrazed, open and scrubby habitats that most British wildlife evolved alongside. Without them, the land tends toward uniformity — either intensive grassland or closed woodland, neither of which supports high biodiversity.
Knepp's income from wildlife tourism, meat from free-roaming herds, glamping, and ecosystem service payments now exceeds what the farm earned from conventional agriculture. The economic case for rewilding marginal farmland is robust.
The chapter on invertebrates and dung is revelatory: the entire dung beetle fauna — dozens of species — requires the unmedicated dung of free-roaming herbivores. The routine use of ivermectin in conventional livestock farming has silently devastated dung beetle populations across Britain.
Each generation inherits a landscape more depleted than the last and considers it normal. Tree draws on the concept of "shifting baseline syndrome" to explain why we cannot see how much has been lost — we have no experience of what a full English landscape looks like.
The final section of the book addresses the political question of food security. Tree argues that rewilding marginal, low-productivity farmland — a significant proportion of British agricultural land — would have minimal impact on food production while delivering enormous ecological benefits.
Any Weaknesses?
The book is specific to the conditions of lowland southern England — the heavy clay soils, the particular fauna, the economic context. Its prescriptions don’t translate directly to upland Britain, continental Europe, or other climates without significant adaptation.
Some ecologists have questioned whether the Knepp model, which relies on the specific combination of large herbivores and extensive land holding, is scalable to the national level without significant land reform. Tree acknowledges this briefly but doesn’t fully engage with the political economy of land ownership that makes rewilding difficult to replicate at scale.
Farmers, landowners, and conservationists in Britain and similar temperate European landscapes who want to understand what rewilding actually looks like over two decades of practice.
Feral by George Monbiot for the political and theoretical framework that Knepp embodies, and A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold for the philosophical foundation of land restoration.
Property developers and planning authorities. The ecosystem service values documented at Knepp — flood mitigation, carbon sequestration, water quality — have direct implications for how land use decisions should be valued in planning processes.
Some chapters on invertebrate ecology are very detailed. Readers without a natural history background may find them dense, but the accumulated portrait of what a full ecosystem looks like makes the detail worthwhile.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Wilding worth reading?
Wilding is the most practically grounded and most hopeful book about nature recovery available in English. It does what the best environmental writing does: replaces despair with a detailed, evidence-based vision of what could be. The Knepp experiment shows that recovery is possible, fast, and economically viable. We need more of it.
Who should read Wilding?
Farmers, landowners, and conservationists in Britain and similar temperate European landscapes who want to understand what rewilding actually looks like over two decades of practice.
What is Wilding about in one sentence?
Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell spent years trying to make their 3,500-acre farm in West Sussex economically viable.
The Verdict
*Wilding* is the most practically grounded and most hopeful book about nature recovery available in English. It does what the best environmental writing does: replaces despair with a detailed, evidence-based vision of what could be. The Knepp experiment shows that recovery is possible, fast, and economically viable. We need more of it.
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