Her husband inherited a brown.
Yes, Knepp Castle, a 1,400-hectare estate dedicated to intensive agriculture and dairy farming. It sounds wonderful, but it was a lot of exhausted land with 1.7 million in debt.
And what did they do?
My husband, Charles Burrell, is an agricultural engineer, and since the land was no good we sold the cows, the machinery, paid off the debts and reforested.
That is?
It is a form of ecological restoration in which one must stand aside, let nature take the reins.
They must have done something to Knepp, which is now a paradise.
We stopped plowing and using agricultural chemicals, restored natural water circuits and then introduced animals.
What kind of animals?
Wild herds that grazed in European fields before human impact, such as horses, bison, beavers…, key animals to recover those fertile habitats.
And how did it go?
In just two years grass and wildflowers started to grow, the insects returned and with them the birds, the grounds were filled with butterflies and crickets and we introduced a herd of deer and another herd of ponies.
Now they boast biodiversity.
Reforesting Knepp has been a constant surprise: unexpected effects that change everything we thought we knew about the behavior of our native species.
Is Knepp an auspicious place?
Not at all: we are in the south-east of England, under the air routes of Gatwick Airport and surrounded by roads in a chemical-soaked land.
And the animals are back?
When you stop interfering with the land, and you encourage it by leaving horses and other species free, the rest come back on their own, like the nettle butterfly, which had disappeared from Britain, or the nightingales, which have been in decline for 70 years, and the storks, disappeared 800 years ago.
It must rain a lot.
You could stick your arm up to your shoulder in the cracks of the dry earth. Wild herbivores are key, the bacteria and micro-organisms in their droppings start the recovery of the soil, which once recovered retains moisture and nutrients.
Explained by you it seems easy.
Species are much more plastic than we thought: at home we find nightingales living in thorn hedges that don’t belong, or peregrine falcons nesting in trees instead of cliffs.
A model to copy?
In Europe there is a problem of land abandonment that leads us to thick forests, which are very harmful to wildlife. If the natural aquifers are restored, they will be filled with life immediately.
And life calls life.
Yes, you have to restart those natural processes and then you step to the side. At first we received very angry letters from our neighbors because they saw a chaotic landscape, full of weeds, an affront to their aesthetic sensibility.
Pesticides leave everything very aseptic.
But as the nightingales, the doves, the peregrine falcons reappeared… the criticism faded.
What have you learned in these 20 years?
That nature has all the answers, it recovers very quickly if we let it, and this is a very hopeful message.
And now he wants to create a 10,000 hectare corridor to the coast?
We need to connect with other nature hotspots so that the animals can move. The campaign was launched a few weeks ago and landowners committed to removing pesticides from their land, individuals who make their gardens available and also landowners have already been registered.
Can something similar be done on a small plot of land?
Yes, the smaller the area to reforest, the more intervention will need to be done to create a mosaic of habitats that maximize diversity, your home garden can be key if you know how.
Today in Knepp they organize safaris.
People are amazed by the abundance of life and the rarity of species. At the crack of dawn, the chirping of the birds is so loud that it vibrates inside your chest.
How nice.
People realize how empty the rest of the landscape is and that inspires them to do something about it, and I think that’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to Knepp.
See how life is born from waste land.
We have butterfly safaris, the largest population in the whole of the UK, nightingales at dusk, bats, hundreds of small predators… Life is everywhere.
