This book is 384 pages of a personal memoir and a nature memoir - it's hopeful, inspirational, and above all, doable. The beauty of a functioning ecosystem is that it sustains and encourages life all by itself. Knepp became home to turtle doves, nightingales, peregrine falcons, and lesser spotted woodpeckers. In a little over a decade, wildlife and plant diversity returned. Isabelle and her husband Charlie bought the estate in the 1980s from Charlie's grandparents. They removed the infrastructure of traditional farming like drains and fencing. In this book, Isabella (whose last name - Tree - is perfect for a book on nature) guides us through the result of a massive rewilding project in West Sussex known as the Knepp ('Nep') experiment because it took place on the Knepp Estate.

The animal activity turns out to be the key to kickstarting diversity in flora and fauna. To mimic the large animals that roamed Britain in the wild, they introduced free-roaming cattle, ponies, pigs, and deer and let nature dictate the outcome on 3,500 acres. After recognizing that intensive farming on heavy clay was economically unsustainable, they decided to step back and let nature take over. In this book, Isabella (whose last name - Tree - is perfect for a book on nature) guides us through the result of a massive rewilding project in West Sussex known as the Knepp ('Nep') experiment because it took place on the Knepp Estate. This book came out in 2019, and the subtitle is The Return of Nature to a British Farm.

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