It deserves to be a growing and increasingly important part of the mix and I hope and believe that this book can help that to happen. I’m a fan of rewilding (you’ll be able to check that out when my forthcoming book, Reflections, is published in less than two months time (see below)) but I don’t see rewilding as the one and only answer and way forward for wildlife conservation. This book explains those principles well and I’m not sure you will find that done in many other places, and not nearly as well as it is here. However, the thinking behind recreating natural processes, or restoring the ecology, is a valuable guiding principle for landowners at all scales. In fact, I wouldn’t draw that line at all, there is surely more of a continuum in existence here and treating it as a dichotomy is possibly unhelpful. I enjoyed being told to allow anthills and molehills to form – some chance! I found the line between wildlife-friendly gardens and rewilded gardens to be drawn in a different place from where I would draw it – is the Ivy growing all over the roof of our shed really rewilding because I thought it was simply wildlife-friendly (and lazy) gardening. These are interesting too, but few of us have gardens large enough really to recreate natural processes so we are at, appropriately enough, the conservation gardening end of things. The last two chapters are on what you can do in your garden and adding wildlife to towns and cities. It’s an excellent read even if you aren’t planning to rewild your thousands of hectares. Not surprisingly, given the brilliance of Isabella’s earlier book about Knepp, Wilding (reviewed here, and this blog’s book of the year in 2018), the book is clearly and enthusiastically written. Also, and importantly, the book provides plenty of enthusiasm which may well carry you through to giving it a go if you are trembling on the brink. This, and much more information on woodland and hedge management and watercourses, will be like gold dust to anyone contemplating a rewilding project of their own, and there is an increasing number of such people and sites. There is masses of very practical information here on stocking rates on different soil types, with different mixtures of herbivores and on different sizes of estate. Knepp is a fantastic wildlife success story with rewilded habitats producing impressive wildlife dividends such as Turtle Doves, Purple Emperors and Nightingales.Īnd so if you want to do ‘a Knepp’ then this book is the manual for doing it on your own land ‘whether it’s thousands of hectares with the potential for free-roaming herbivores, or just a few hectares where you’ll be mimicking natural processes yourself’ as they say. The authors are, of course, the very best people in the UK to write such a book as they have ‘done it’ themselves at their estate of Knepp in Sussex. This is the bible for rewilders, and a solid tome it is too.

Wilding by isabella tree review