Wilding named Book of the Month

Wilding, Isabella Tree’s bestselling nature book, has been named Waterstones’ Non-Fiction Book of the Month for April. The book will be promoted as the lead non-fiction paperback at over 280 Waterstones stores around the UK.

Isabella has been touring the country since the hardback of Wilding was published in 2018, and has been transfixing readers and audiences with her story of the transformation of Knepp Estate from a struggling arable farm into one of Europe’s largest rewilding projects. The paperback edition of Wilding was released in March 2019.

‘A poignant, practical and moving story of how to fix our broken land, this should be conservation’s salvation; this should be its future; this is a new hope.’

CHRIS PACKHAM

The Knepp experiment

In Wilding, Isabella Tree tells the story of the ‘Knepp experiment’, a pioneering rewilding project in West Sussex that uses free-roaming grazing animals to create new habitats for wildlife. Part gripping memoir, part fascinating account of the ecology of our countryside, Wilding is, above all, an inspiring story of hope.

Forced to accept that intensive farming on the heavy clay of their land at Knepp was economically unsustainable, Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell made a spectacular leap of faith: they decided to step back and let nature take over.

Thanks to the introduction of free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs and deer – proxies of the large animals that once roamed Britain – the 3,500-acre project has seen extraordinary increases in wildlife numbers and diversity in little over a decade.

A blueprint for conservation

Extremely rare species – including turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, lesser spotted woodpeckers and purple emperor butterflies – are now breeding at Knepp, and populations of other species are rocketing. The Burrells’ degraded agricultural land has become a functioning ecosystem again, heaving with life – all by itself.

Personal and inspirational, Wilding is an astonishing account of the beauty and strength of nature. With 175 five-star reviews on Amazon.co.uk and 35,000 copies sold, Wilding was the nature book of 2018 – and is now set to reach a whole new audience in paperback.

Isabella Tree is an award-winning author and travel writer, and manages the
Knepp Wildland Project with her husband Charlie. She is the author of several books, including The Living Goddess and The Bird Man.