Wilding: How to Bring Wildlife Back – an illustrated guide
Isabella Tree, illustrated by Angela Harding
- Explains rewilding process
- Promotes nature conservation
- Offers practical rewilding tips
Wilding is a beautiful and colourful reimagining for a younger audience of Tree’s bestselling book Wilding, published in 2018. It tells the story of a remarkable rewilding experiment at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, which is now home to some amazing and rare creatures such as peregrine falcons, nightingales and purple emperor butterflies.
The author explains how, by allowing nature to work its miracles, you can bring back to life an exhausted area of intensively farmed land. Rewilding can help to reverse the decline of natural habitats and the disappearance of important animal and plant species. Instead of clipped hedgerows, barbed wire fences and ploughed fields, rewilding restores rivers, ponds and wetlands, allows plants to reseed themselves and creates the conditions for animals to thrive.
Tree’s text is accompanied throughout the book by Angela Harding’s exquisite and captivating full-colour illustrations as well as by photographs.
The book has separate chapters on animal and plant species such as Longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies, painted lady butterflies and white storks. In 2020, Knepp had the first brood of white stork chicks to be born in Britain in the wild in over 600 years.
The book also includes practical advice about rewilding, and how this can be done in a garden, a school or a community allotment. It’s a handy source of dos and don’ts. A glossary and list of organizations and books provide a handy resource section. The addition of an index would have been helpful.
Wilding provides optimism and hope for nature. It makes a beautiful gift book but, more importantly, it is a call to action aimed at a younger audience at a time when around one million species of animals and plants globally are facing extinction.
Wilding has been shortlisted for The Wainwright Prize for Nature and Conservation Writing for Children.
Published by Macmillan Children’s Books (2024, 96 pages)
You can buy this book via our BookKind affiliate link
