By Sandra Hall
WILDING ★★★½
(PG) 75 minutes
Isabella Tree and her husband, Charlie Burrell, were deep in debt when they stopped farming 25 years ago.
Wilding sees a couple allow their land to be taken over by nature.
Their soil, which was never very fertile, had been further degraded by pesticides, fertiliser and all the other chemicals they had been using to coax their crops to grow. Seeing no future for the farm, they sold their dairy herds and agricultural machinery, paid their debts, and let nature take its course.
It was not an easy decision. To give Burrell his full title, he is Sir Charles Burrell, 10th Baronet of Knepp, a West Sussex estate that has been in his family since 1787. Selling the land and moving on from his ancestral home, a castellated mansion alongside the medieval ruins of Knepp Castle, was unthinkable.
But he and Isabella were up for an experiment. They were both environmentalists, painfully aware of the many species of birds and mammals heading for extinction in Britain, and they wanted to see if anything would change if the land were allowed to return to its natural state.
Tree has written a book about this transformation and she guides us through David Allen’s documentary with her account of the couple’s experiences as the land gradually changes its shape and its character.
Several good news stories emerge over the course of Wilding.
The couple’s most radical decision is prompted by a meeting with Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, who bucks conventional wisdom with his belief that the landscape can be enhanced by permitting large animals to roam free. It’s too late for Charlie and Isabella to find an aurochs, it has been extinct for centuries. But they bring in the next best thing – old English longhorn cattle, together with Exmoor ponies and, as a substitute for wild boar, Tamworth pigs. All are left to forage for themselves and dig up the ground as they please.
There are some early disasters. At a gathering on the estate, one of the ponies raids the catering tent and disrupts a polo game. And later, at a meeting with the local farmers, rewilding is criticised as a potential threat to farmland. Nor do the farmers like the messy appearance of a landscape left to its own devices, and they fear the dangers posed by the spread of invasive plants.
The film never really gets to grips with these protests – especially the one about invasive species, which becomes more urgent when a variety of creeping thistle shows up on Knepp. Charlie is about to give in and attack it with herbicide when nature supplies a solution of its own – the arrival of a kaleidoscope of migratory butterflies. A rare species known as Painted Ladies, they lay their eggs in the thistle and their caterpillars make a meal of the leaves.
And as time goes on, other good news stories emerge. Earthworms enrich the soil dug up by the animals. The nightingale returns, along with the harvest mouse and the turtle dove, one of the most endangered birds in the country. The pigs, which eat acorns, spread the seed and young oak trees sprout. And white storks, last seen breeding in Britain 600 years ago, proliferate after a pair is brought to Knepp.
In the final scenes, the camera takes to the air to show us an England far removed from William Blake’s “green and pleasant land”. It’s neither symmetrical nor serene. The animals are forming paths through a topography which is wild, majestic and eerily beautiful.
Wilding is in cinemas from today.
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