20 November 2024
Director: David Allen
UK
2023
75 min
At Knepp Castle in Sussex, conservation pioneers Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell abandoned industrial farming practices and allowed nature to ‘rewild’ their 3,500-acre estate with remarkable results. Based on Tree’s bestselling book of the same name, Emmy-award winning nature documentarian David Allen’s Wilding is a charming and hopeful story of ecological regeneration. When they inherited the estate in the 1980s, Tree
and Burrell attempted to modernise the farm but it proved unsustainable. In a leap of faith, they let nature take back the land, surrendering contemporary preconceptions about landscape, agriculture and the husbandry traditional for historic estates. The scheme was the first of its kind in Britain and one of the most significant in Europe. A beacon of hope for British wildlife, Knepp is now home to thriving flora and fauna of all kinds. Tree and Burrell have evolved into dedicated conservationists, knowledgeable about the catastrophic loss of biodiversity in Britain yet also hopeful that work like theirs can reverse the decline.