The first to hatch in England in several hundred years, this exemplifies the hope that this project has given. For now it does keep going and in 2020, some years after Isabella wrote the book, wild stork chicks were welcomed on the estate. Funding issues created stress and an uncertainty as to the direction and scope of the project as well as for how long it may be able to continue. The local community was not, at first, supportive of the experiment. I was fascinated to learn the mycorrhizal fungi provide a network that enables trees to ‘speak’ to each other. Rare plants and fungi have proliferated too bringing greater understanding of the interdependence between subterranean mycorrhizal fungi and the more obvious above ground plants. The hope is sparked by the return of many rare species such as turtle doves, a multitude of earthworms, dung beetles, bats and butterflies, including mass sightings of the Purple Emperor. This is punctuated with the successes of introducing various animals, including fallow and red deer, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and longhorn cattle. Isabella takes us with her as the endless negotiations with government departments, NGOs and charities take hold and which are largely responsible for the despair. These all continued to lose money and eventually, at the beginning of the millennium, the long journey into wilding the Knepp Estate began. They continued to farm using ever more intensive methods and diversification. Isabella and her husband inherit the estate in the late 1980s as a working, but money losing, farm. It was also requisitioned in the second World War and underwent widespread scrub clearance and ploughing. Isabella writes about the wilding of the Knepp Estate, located in Surrey and which has been farmed by generations of Isabella’s husband’s family. I was pulled from hope to despair at the turn of a page.
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