The synopsis for the book made it sound like the book was going to dwell much more on the economic difficulties the Knepp estate faced in pursuing their rewilding project. That deterred me from reading the book for some time. Happily, the focuses far more on the evolution of the estate: the plants, insects, birds, and animals that are benefiting from the unmanaged approach to land ownership. This slim book provides a quick and painless education to a number of important ecological points. ( )

for myself

Must-read for any nature enthusiasts or those looking for solutions to the current worldwide problems. Slightly wordy at times but well structured and researched; an exemplary chronicle of how to improve our modern world. ( )

Interesting and a bit inspirational. But it can also be long-winded, and especially in the second half Tree uncritically presents a lot of poorly supported research. I did appreciate, though, her emphasis on the importance of habitats that are transitional, in time and in space; and on the fauna can affect ecological succession.

> Could grazing animals prevent the succession of trees on dry land, just as the geese had done in the marsh? And if we left the grazing animals to their own devices, as we had with the geese, might they, too, generate something even more interesting and more valuable in terms of biodiversity?

> Climax vegetation theory, originally propounded by the American botanist and author of Plant Succession , Frederic Clements, in 1916, and subsequently further developed by the English botanist Sir Arthur Tansley, author of The British Islands and Their Vegetation (1939), among others, throws up a further powerful psychological barrier for conservationists devising strategies for nature management. Closed-canopy forest is demonstrably species-poor compared with managed habitats like meadows, pasture, heaths and traditional farmland. ‘What it looks like, if you subscribe to the closed-canopy story,’ says Frans, ‘is that, in Europe – before we embarked on the destructive practices of modern industrial farming – man actually improved biodiversity because traditional farming and forestry practices like haymaking, pollarding and coppicing clearly sustain a much broader spectrum of habitats for wildlife than closed-canopy woodland.

> the old Sussex dialect has over thirty words for mud. There’s clodgy for a muddy field path after heavy rain; gawm – sticky, foul-smelling mud; gubber – black mud of rotting organic matter; ike – a muddy mess; pug – sticky yellow Wealdon clay; slab – the thickest type of mud; sleech – mud or river sediment used for manure; slob or slub – thick mud; slough – a muddy hole; slurry – diluted mud, saturated with so much water that it cannot drain; smeery – wet and sticky surface mud; stoach – to trample ground to mud, like cattle; stodge – thick, puddingy mud; stug – watery mud; and swank – a bog.

> Our footsteps often feel heavy. Rewilding Knepp has changed the way we look at the world and much of it is depressing. When we go for a walk with friends elsewhere in the countryside – the same walks we used to enjoy without thinking in the past – chances are what we notice most is the silence and the stillness. As the landscape flashes by on a train or motorway, we now know what isn’t there. Compared with Knepp, most of Britain seems like a desert. It brings an aching sadness, a sense of loss and frustration articulated best by the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold almost a century ago: ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’

> With the grazing animals no longer taking avermectins – the powerful wormers and parasiticides with which most domestic horses and all livestock on non-organic farms are habitually dosed – we were seeing cowpats and horse dung unlike anything we had seen outside Africa, latticed with the holes of dung beetles. For Charlie this became something of a fixation, taking him back to the bug obsessions of his childhood in Africa and Australia. He would lie next to a pile of fresh Exmoor dung and count the minutes (the record was three) that it would take for the dung beetles to arrive. Summoned by the smell and zeroing in like attack helicopters, the beetles fold their wings and plop straight into the dung. If a crust has already formed, they bounce off and then have to scamper back into it, burying themselves headfirst in nourishing excrement. Before long the kitchen counter was forested with glass vials containing all the species Charlie could find, to be dispatched to Professor Paul Buckland at Bournemouth University for identification. Triumphantly, after a summer of fecal rummaging, he had identified twenty-three species of dung beetle from a single cowpat.

> The does milling under the oak trees focus wisely on the business of loading up calories in preparation for winter. The bucks, on the other hand, will enter winter half-starved and exhausted. The weakest will die.

> The aurochs was hunted to extinction; the last died in Poland in 1627.

> All three subspecies of the European bison were hunted to extinction in the wild: Bison bonasus hungarorum from the Balkans died out in the mid-1800s, the last wild Bison bonasus bonasus was shot in Bialowieza forest on the Poland–Belarus border in 1921, and the last Bison bonasus caucasicus was shot, appropriately enough, in the north-west Caucasus in 1927. The European bison that survive today are descendants of a dozen animals held in zoos across the Continent. ( )

This is one of those books where the content overcomes the writing. The writing isn’t bad by any means, but it definitely lacks the spark of personality. Either Isabella Tree lacks anything resembling charisma, or she was holding herself back. I choose to believe the latter, because I believe anyone willing to embrace the project she and her husband embarked on has to be inherently likeable and not a little bit charismatic.

In spite of what was often bland writing, the book is a brilliant record of the amazing achievements Tree and her husband managed on what was poorly producing farmland that was losing money. By allowing it to revert back to its natural state, with as little human interference as possible, they accomplished so much on so many fronts. The wildlife recovery, the flood mitigation, the general health of the land itself – all of it happening at speeds that make me optimistic that humanity hasn’t completely destroyed our planet just yet. Lest I got too optimistic though, Tree’s documentation of the uphill battle they had to fight with government agencies who nominally existed to protect the environment put me right back into my proper, cynical, place.

Wilding is a thoroughly well researched, excellently laid out recounting of one couple’s determined efforts to restore their patch of British soil to what it was meant to be, and all the excellent rewards that came with it. The writing may be less than enthralling but the content more than makes up for any missing sparkle or wit. If you’re interested in the natural state of things, this is definitely worth the time and effort. ( )