Her husband, Charlie Burrell, once found 23 different species of beetle on a single pat. While I stumble and slide around, at one point slipping headlong into a deep mud clot, she ambles about with the poise of a mountain goat, stopping to inspect a cowpat in search of dung beetles.
She pulls a long tailored coat over her boyish jumper, shirt and jeans - her “uniform”, she says - above wellington boots. Isabella is tall, with sparkly blue eyes, scrubbed skin, low-maintenance short brown hair and a youthful, smil-ey face. This, she tells me, is the sort of scrubby-looking landscape we should be celebrating if we have any hope of reviving the numbers of the trees, birds, butterflies, bats, worms, beetles, hedgehogs and other creatures that are at risk because of over-farming and climate change. It’s far from the romanticised vision of our green and pleasant land.Īll around us on Knepp Castle Estate are mounds of dense dog rose, outcrops of prickly hawthorn and blackthorn, unruly brambles and, underfoot, sticky clumps of coarse grass and a whole cornucopia of cowpats, anthills, neat rabbit droppings and swirls of worm casts, which Isabella deliciously describes in her 2018 bestselling book, Wil ding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, as “tiny pyramids of worm excrement like squiggles of piped chestnut puree”. We are in search of English longhorn cattle, deer, white storks and Tamworth pigs (which will prove very elusive). We have zero tolerance for it in our landscape, but this is where you get unbelievable volumes of feeding birds - and birdsong.” Isabella Tree is standing in a messy scrap of landscape a 20-minute taxi ride south of Horsham in West Sussex.
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