Life lessons: Isabella Tree on what life so far has taught her

Writer and farmer Isabella Tree helped kickstart the rewilding revolution in Britain with the publication of her bestselling book 2018, Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm. She has been working with her husband, the conservationist Charlie Burrell, to rewild Knepp, their 3,500-acre estate in Sussex. A stunning range of wildlife now calls it home, including critically endangered nightingales and turtle doves. 

What’s your morning ritual? 

I get up at 6am, or even earlier in the spring, and the first thing I do is go out to walk the dog for 15 minutes. It usually involves some Exmoor ponies or some old English longhorn cattle, watching red kites or storks or ravens flying about, and it’s a lovely way to start the day. It’s getting that fix of wildlife and sense of nature before the day kicks in and turns digital. 

I feel optimistic about … 

The fact that, as we’ve seen at Knepp over the last 20 years, nature bounces back if you just let it. We’ve been rewilding our garden recently. We dumped 400 tonnes of crushed brick and concrete from the building site of the Wilding Kitchen, our new restaurant, on to the croquet lawn and created this amazing dry-conditions garden with more than 1,000 species of plant. In just a couple of years, biodiversity has increased by 33%. To be somewhere where you’re seeing nature rebounding in ways that have defied all the odds and all the predictions is a huge message of hope.  

What makes you angry? 

People ignoring what nature is trying to tell us and instead coming up with inventions to get carbon out of the atmosphere, or the clouds to make rain, or planting sitka spruce plantations in peatland and calling it carbon storage. The hubris of man – and it is often man.  

If I wasn’t a writer and conservationist, I’d have liked to become … 

A light aircraft pilot. In my teens and early 20s I was in love with pilots like Beryl Markham and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I’d have to have been born 100 years earlier, but I loved that sense of adventure and freedom: crossing continents, landing on airstrips on a sixpence in the middle of nowhere. I did try and get my pilot’s licence but I was so bad at navigation that it never happened. 

The habit that has served me best in life is … 

Catnapping. I can put my head down for 10 minutes anywhere – in an airport, on a desk in a library, in a layby in my car, outside on the grass – and feel a million dollars when I wake up.  

Seeing nature rebounding in ways that have defied all the odds and all the predictions is a huge message of hope

What brings you joy?  

Wilderness where people are insignificant, where wildlife just ignores you, where you feel that the ecosystem is functioning and full of life. That really makes the heart soar. 

When things get tough I … 

Meditate with an app called Headspace. Being able to just breathe and stop and take stock is massively helpful. 

The book I wish everyone would read … 

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. She wrote it in 1962, about the environmental harm caused by pesticides, but it’s never been more relevant. We got rid of DDT, but it’s a new generation of pesticides we’re facing now that are 10 times worse, so we haven’t learned anything.  

The big thing I’ve changed my mind about in life … 

Is learning to live with nature in a state of what we used to call mess. I grew up on the picture postcard version of our British landscapes with neat fields, canalised rivers and isolated pockets of woodland, and thought that was beautiful. Now I know that it can’t be beautiful if it’s not functioning.  

The thing that motivates me most of all … 

The hope that someone might actually think differently having read something I’ve written. People get in touch to tell me how Wilding has affected them and I’m hoping that my new book will speak to children in that same way. Perhaps it will get them to think about nature differently, to look at the outside world more holistically, to notice living things. 

My parents taught me …  

To be brave and to have integrity. The best thing that any parents can ever teach you is to love and know that you’re loved. They both did that beautifully. 

I’d like to tell my younger self … 

You can do it, no need to be shy. I wasted a lot of time being shy, so I’d like to try to give her a bit more self-confidence. 

What makes you laugh? 

My sister, my children and my dog all make me laugh, but I don’t get my husband’s sense of humour. I’ve been with him since I was 18 and I’m now nearly 60 and I still can’t get his jokes: they always take me by surprise.

Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back – An Illustrated Guide by Isabella Tree and illustrated by Angela Harding is published by Pan Macmillan

Main image: Anthony Cullen