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’. This book is 384 pages of a personal memoir and a nature memoir - it's hopeful, inspirational, and above all, doable.Conservationist and writer Isabella Tree, with rescue dog Milo, at Knepp Castle Estate in West Grinstead Jooney Woodward The beauty of a functioning ecosystem is that it sustains and encourages life all by itself.

Knepp became home to turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, and lesser spotted woodpeckers.

In a little over a decade, wildlife and plant diversity returned. They removed the infrastructure of traditional farming like drains and fencing. The animal activity turns out to be the key to kickstarting diversity in flora and fauna. To mimic the large animals that roamed Britain in the wild, they introduced free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs, and deer and let nature dictate the outcome on 3,500 acres. After recognizing that intensive farming on heavy clay was economically unsustainable, they decided to step back and let nature take over. Isabelle and her husband Charlie bought the estate in the 1980s from Charlie's grandparents.

In this book, Isabella (whose last name - Tree - is perfect for a book on nature) guides us through the result of a massive rewilding project in West Sussex known as the Knepp ('Nep') experiment because it took place on the Knepp Estate. This book came out in 2019, and the subtitle is The Return of Nature to a British Farm.

Isabella tree farm