BACK TO THE WILD!
What happens if you take prime farmland, ban pesticides, let native cattle and wild ponies roam free – then sit back and allow Nature to take over? Isabella did, and the results were breathtaking (even if the neighbours got jolly grumpy)
With breathtaking speed, thickets of 3ft-high thistles were advancing over the ground, engulfing acre after acre. it was like the Day Of the triffids. Every day, as my husband Charlie and i walked over what had once been arable fields on our family farm, we could barely believe what we were seeing.
Not for nothing is this creeping weed known as the ‘cursed thistle’ — it sends out deep tap-roots and, as any gardener knows, it’s almost impossible to dig out. in our case, however, using weedkiller was out of the question.
Several years into a pioneering project to ‘rewild’ the land, we were no longer willing to use the pesticides, fungicides and artificial fertilisers that had once seemed so essential. Giving up intensive farming on our 3,500 acres had been a difficult, but unavoidable, decision; on desperately poor soil — heavy clay — we rarely made a profit and had worked up an eye-watering overdraft.
inspired by a rewilding experiment in holland, we’d sold our dairy herds and farm machinery, stepped back and allowed nature to take the driving seat — the first project of its kind in Britain.
this didn’t go down well with many of our neighbours, who complained that it was an immoral waste of land, an eyesore full of weeds and brambles. And now the great thistle invasion seemed to be proving them right.
had we been hopelessly naive? Was this the end of our vision to establish a patch of self-wilded nature, a messy, rambunctious, mini-wilderness in the heart of West Sussex?
Just when all seemed lost, out of a clear blue sky came a very different invasion. that warm, clear Sunday morning in May 2009, we woke to see painted lady butterflies streaming past our bedroom window at the rate of one a minute.
Outside, thousands upon thousands of them had descended on the swathes of creeping thistle to lay their eggs. As we approached, our dogs ran into the prickly cover, sending up puffs of orange and brown wings like autumn leaves.
We walked for half an hour that morning, parting curtains of butterflies. A few weeks later, spiky black caterpillars were swarming over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents.
the whole area took on the appearance of a chaotic army encampment.
By autumn, the caterpillars had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown away, leaving our thistle fields in tatters. the following year, our 60 acres of creeping thistle had vanished entirely.
Not only had Nature solved the thistle problem, but thanks to sitting on our hands, we’d been given a ringside seat at one of its greatest spectacles.
KNEPP Castle Estate is just 45 miles from Central London, though you wouldn’t know it. thorny scrub — hawthorn, blackthorn, dog rose and bramble — has punched through fields that, only a few years earlier, were blanketed with maize and barley.
Miles of hedgerows, previously cut back every autumn — thereby depriving birds of winter berries — have exploded into the welcoming earth, billowing out like a dowager liberated from her stays.
the first thing that strikes visitors is the noise: the low-level surround- sound thrumming of insects. then the countless different bird songs: the very air, it seems, is being recolonised with the sounds of the past.
We walk knee- deep through ox- eye daisies, bird’s-foot trefoil, ragged robin, knapweed, red clover, lady’s bedstraw, crested dog’s tail and sweet vernal grass, kicking up grasshoppers, hoverflies and all sorts of bumblebees.
On a good July day, i can count ten species of butterfly — we have 34 altogether, including the rare purple emperor — without moving from my desk. At night, Knepp hosts an incredible 441 different species of moth.
Meanwhile, more and more endangered species turn up every year — such as turtle doves, which are on the brink of extinction, and nightingales, whose numbers fell by 91 per cent between 1967 and 2007.
Cuckoos, spotted flycatchers, fieldfares, hobbies, woodlarks, skylarks, lapwings, house sparrows, lesser spotted woodpeckers, yellowhammers, woodcock, red kites, sparrowhawks, peregrine falcons, all five types of British owl, the first ravens at Knepp in the past 100 years — the list goes on and on.
the speed at which all these species — and many more — have appeared has astonished observers, particularly as our intensively farmed land was, biologically speaking, in dire condition in 2001, at the start of the project. the key to Knepp’s extraordinary success? it’s about surrendering all preconceptions, and simply observing what happens.
By contrast, conventional conservation tends to be about targets and control, and often involves micro-managing a habitat for the perceived benefit of several chosen species.
Originally, Charlie and i had embarked on this project — funded chiefly by conservation grants — out of an amateurish love for wildlife. (We supplement our income by renting out redundant farm buildings, selling organic meat and organising wildlife safaris.)
the rewilding of Knepp has turned out to be far richer than we ever dreamed and is producing a wealth of information new to science, often subverting what ecologists think they know about the natural world.
LEAVE a piece of land to nature for long enough, and it will eventually become a dense wood. Every farmer knows that.
in ancient times, before humans had any impact on the land, Britain was covered with closed- canopy forest. A squirrel could have run from John o’ Groats to Land’s End across the tops of trees.
Or so the prevailing theory goes. But it’s wrong for several reasons. One is that grazing animals — such as wild ox, horses and bison — were here long before the trees.
And if they’d had to live in dense forests, they would have quickly died off. Another is that Britain has had oak trees for millennia, and these require an open landscape. Fossils of beetles and snails, among other species, also indicate that the land was once largely wood pasture (trees dotted across fields) and thorny scrub.
So what stopped the trees from taking over? there’s only one possible answer: herbivores. Unfortunately, many of the big, grazing animals that once roamed Britain — such as the wild ox, the original wild horse and the truly wild boar — are now extinct. But we have modern equivalents and we decided to introduce some of these to Knepp: red and fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, tamworth pigs and old English longhorns.
WE’D chosen the longhorns because they retain enough of their wild ancestor’s genes to survive all year round outside.
But how would they really behave when they were allowed to run wild? in featureless fields, our old dairy herds had simply kept their heads down chewing the cud, but without fences to contain them the longhorns could give full expression to their innate desires and preferences.
they weaved among the trees, rubbing themselves against trunks and low- lying branches, raising their heads to strip off leaves and buds with their long,