When celebrated printmaker and illustrator Angela Harding was invited to record the pioneering rewilding experiment launched by Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell on the Knepp estate in West Sussex, she was captivated by the richness and diversity of the flora and fauna she discovered there.
The magnificent prints and watercolour illustrations she produced during those visits are now immortalised in a stunning new book which reimagines Isabella’s bestseller, Wilding, in a pictorial format for all ages. Not only does it tell the story of Knepp, but shows what happens when you take a piece of exhausted land and allow nature to work its miracles. Here, Angela and Isabella take up the story...
Angela Harding: Artist’s Note
My first visit to the Knepp wilding project was in the early spring of 2022. The trees were still bare branches, the fields bleached by winter winds, and the roaming long-horned cattle still wearing their thick winter coats.
But my first impression of Knepp was of a place packed with life. For 20 years, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree have been rewilding the land, letting nature take over, and the result is a very special place. Everywhere I looked I found something of beauty and interest that inspired my artwork.
I stayed in an extremely comfortable bothy set in the middle of a small wood. The bothy looked out over a pond that was fringed with rushes and water plants. It had many visitors, including red and fallow deer, wild Exmoor ponies and flocks of geese. I was able to draw and observe the wildlife without leaving my temporary home.
But when I did venture out, there was even more to see; the scale of the Knepp project is quite breathtaking. The estate fields have been transformed from traditional English farmland to a jungle of thickets and scrub, and this new habitat now provides homes to a diverse range of birds, mammals and insects.
I visited Knepp three times over the same year, so I was able to see the seasons change. Each time I visited, I saw something new. The artwork I have created was a direct response to being spellbound by this beautiful place. Many of the linocuts were made on site, drawing directly onto the lino and cutting it spontaneously as the images I saw were still fresh in my mind.
Knepp is a place of hope. It demonstrates the power of nature and that, with a little help, the natural world can gain a foothold once more. To hear nightingales singing against the background hum of the A24 is evidence of this. I have learned so much in the illustration work I have done for Wilding. But more than offering factual representations, I hope my artwork conveys something of the emotions I feel about the countryside and a love of nature that we can all share.
Isabella Tree: The Oak and the Jay
One of Knepp’s most spectacular oaks is around 500 years old – perhaps only halfway through its life. It probably began to grow during the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century, and would have lived through the English Civil War as a fine young tree in the mid-17th century.
Oaks need plenty of light to thrive. An acorn simply falling from the parent tree cannot grow in its shade. So, the oak has developed an extraordinary relationship with one particular, very colourful bird.
Jays collect acorns and carry them off into the open landscape where they bury them, to store and eat later. A single jay can carry six acorns at a time in its beak and down its gullet. Over a single autumn it can bury 7,500 acorns.
Of course, the jay can’t remember where it planted them all, so many of the acorns begin to grow into young saplings. Often, the places where jays bury acorns are near thorny shrubs, which protect the young oak sapling as it grows.
The Painted Lady explosion
One butterfly that has made a dramatic appearance at Knepp is the painted lady. This large orange-and-black butterfly migrates all the way from North Africa over several generations. During some years, known as boom years, there’s a population explosion, with more than 10 million butterflies descending, all at once, all over Britain.
At Knepp, in 2009, we had a problem we thought nothing could solve, and the painted ladies came to our rescue. A couple of years earlier, creeping thistle had begun to take over great swathes of the rewilding project. There were too
many for even the ponies and pigs to eat. Thistles have an important role in the environment, but many people consider them a pest and were calling for us to take action to get rid of them.
In the old farming days, we would have sprayed them with chemicals to kill them, but by then we knew how bad that would be for nature. We had no idea what to do. In swooped the painted ladies! Clouds of them, thousands together, like swirling autumn leaves.
Thistles are the favourite foodplant of their caterpillars. So, the ladies descended on the thistles to lay their eggs, and over the summer the caterpillars hatched and munched their way through all the plants. The following year, there were no thistles at all. It was our first lesson in leaving nature to sort things out itself.
Songbirds
Birdsong is one of the marvels of the natural world. Sixty years ago, the music of skylarks, yellowhammers, cuckoos, nightingales, turtle doves and countless other songbirds was the sound of summer. But the fields and skies have been falling silent.
Modern farming uses herbicides to kill native wildflowers (known unhelpfully as weeds) and pesticides to kill insects, leaving these birds with little to eat. The loss of 120,000 miles of hedgerows, almost all our wildflower meadows, scrubland and wetland, has left them with fewer places to shelter and nest.
There are now 73 million fewer birds in our skies than there were 50 years ago. Problems in other parts of the world along their migration routes don’t help. However, as Knepp rewilds, birds have returned in astonishing numbers. Early on a spring morning, the bird-song is so loud you can feel it vibrating in your lungs.
Making room for the river
One of the most important things we have done at Knepp is restore our stretch of the River Adur to its floodplain. A floodplain is a dynamic environment that floods when the water in the river is high, after heavy rain, and dries out in the summer when the river is low.
We filled in the canal and allowed the river to spill back into its old meanders – the winding course it used to take across the floodplain. We added logs and woody debris to the river and created shallow pools in the floodplain – all to slow the river down and provide wonderful habitat for insects, fish, aquatic plants and wading birds.
The floodplain now acts like a sponge again. It soaks up all the excess water when the river is flowing very fast. Allowing land to hold on to water in times of heavy rain protects farmland, roads and villages downstream from flooding, which can be devastating and expensive to repair.
The land releases water slowly and safely, which means it also holds water for longer, preventing the land from drying out in summer. Our floodplain changes from marshy wetland in winter to lush water meadow in summer. Today, Knepp’s restored waterways are always heaving with life. The dazzling blue flash of a kingfisher is now a common sight at Knepp.
Beavers
In the spring of 2022, we received permission to release a pair of beavers from Scotland into a six-acre enclosure at Knepp. We have called them Brooke and Banksy. It is so exciting to have beavers back in Sussex after an absence of 400 years.
Brooke and Banksy got straight to work. Within weeks, they had cut down or coppiced dozens of shrubs and small trees and built a lodge and several dams. From a tiny, trickling stream, they have created a pond nearly two acres
in size. In the sizzling drought of that summer, the beaver pen was a haven for wildlife, an emerald-green watery kingdom, filled with insects and birdsong.
We hope, soon, the government will allow these wonderful native animals to live free in the English countryside once again, transforming our rivers and wetlands, and creating habitat for wildlife wherever they go.
The Return of the White Storks
We realised that, if we were ever to have white storks breeding again in the UK, we needed to create an artificial colony that would encourage wild birds to nest here. So, we imported storks from Warsaw Zoo in Poland that had been injured in car accidents or had hit pylons and could no longer fly.
We put some of them in a large open-air pen at Knepp, where they were safe
from predators such as mink and foxes, and our friends at Cotswold Wildlife Park took the others to breed from. Within two months of our white storks being in a pen at Knepp, we had wild birds flying over to check them out.
Every year, we release young white storks, bred from the Polish birds at Cotswold Wildlife Park, into our pen. And in 2020, one of these free-flying juveniles and a wild bird from Europe built a nest together in the top of one of our oak trees. They were the first white storks to successfully breed in the wild in the UK for 600 years.
In 2021, another pair nested on our chimney. And in 2023, we had 11 nests and 26 chicks. The storks are well on their way to becoming a feature of the English landscape once again.
• Wilding: How To Bring Wildlife Back – An Illustrated Guide, written by Isabella Tree and illustrated by Angela Harding, is out now in hardback (Macmillan, £20).
Adapted by Angela Wintle
