The Knepp Wilding Podcast

Bug Life Garden

Compared to other insects, bees are pretty hopeless pollinators. Flies, on the other hand, can pollinate plants and kill your aphids.  Join Isabella Tree as she finds out what gets Erica McAlister, Principal Curator at the Natural History Museum and bug-crazy fly afficionada, really excited about the hidden life in wilder gardens. And pick up some simple tips to encourage the best pollinators, predators, soil fertilisers and decomposers in your garden. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125281/fan_mail/new] Find out more about Knepp on our website [https://knepp.co.uk/] and why not follow us on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/kneppwilding]?

Graze Expectations – how Knepp’s animals capture carbon

For many people, rewilding is a one-trick pony – it’s great for restoring nature and wildlife, but does it do anything for climate change? In this episode, Isabella asks her daughter Nancy Burrell about her doctorate research at Knepp and the astonishing findings that are changing how rewilding is valued as a mechanism for storing carbon. Join them as they wander through the scrubland at Knepp, visiting the sites where Nancy and her team excavated 270 trees, roots and all, to measure how much carbon they contained – a massive undertaking, producing the biggest dataset ever used for this kind of research. The browsing of our animals on hawthorn, blackthorn, dogrose, sallow and oak saplings, Nancy found, stimulates the growth of roots underground, as well as regrowth aboveground – storing 4x more carbon than was previously thought. This has huge implications for how projects that aim to capture carbon are funded in the future. Should we planting trees – the default mechanism currently used to fight climate change which, however, does not produce good results for wildlife and is often environmentally destructive? Or should we be encouraging the natural regeneration of trees and shrubs, with animals to browse them – rewilding projects, essentially – which captures huge amounts of carbon and provides wonderful habitat for wildlife at the same time? Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125281/fan_mail/new] Find out more about Knepp on our website [https://knepp.co.uk/] and why not follow us on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/kneppwilding]?

Look Who’s Storking Too!

Isabella Tree catches up with two of the White Stork Project volunteers, Tim Morgan and Rosemary Dewan, as they prepare food for the non-flying storks in the pen at Knepp. It’s a freezing day with slashing rain, typical of the weather the unflinching volunteers have had to face almost every day this winter. The project relies on around 25 stork-feeding and 30 stork-monitoring volunteers – out in the wildlands of Knepp come rain or shine. Their purpose – to help establish and observe the first breeding white stork colony in Britain for over 600 years. Begun in 2016 and with 25 nests at Knepp to date, the stork reintroduction is proving an astonishing success. With Tim in charge of data crunching, the project - partnered by Cotswold Wildlife Park, Wadhurst Estate and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation - is uncovering new insights into stork behaviour. This year is already throwing up surprises, with the unfolding drama of the pair of storks who have reliably brought up chicks under the eye of the live webcam for the past three years. The male, Bartek, has forsaken his partner Ania and hooked up with a new mate, busting the myth that storks make faithful, lifelong pairs. With the webcam now live on the White Stork Project website, tens of thousands of viewers around the world will be able to watch the mating, egg-laying, chick-rearing and fledging of this year’s storks. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125281/fan_mail/new] Find out more about Knepp on our website [https://knepp.co.uk/] and why not follow us on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/kneppwilding]?

Talking Trees

Isabella’s guest is Harriet Rix, the Indiana Jones of tree science. She’s chased down rare trees in some of the remotest, wildest places in the world, and in the UK she’s worked for DEFRA, researching tree diseases and strategies for trees in cities. Her latest book The Genius of Trees explains how trees have influenced, even controlled, life on our planet. Wandering through the ancient oaks and young saplings of Knepp’s scrubland, Harriet opens up a perspective of millions of years of tree evolution. Far from being static and vulnerable, as we tend to think of them, trees are resilient survivors, agents of their own destiny – and quite possibly ours. Harriet explains the secrets of genetic diversity and how, by encouraging natural regeneration as we do at Knepp, we can help trees adapt to climate change and resist disease. She shares extraordinary insights, including that the English oak, our country’s pride and joy, is originally American. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125281/fan_mail/new] Find out more about Knepp on our website [https://knepp.co.uk/] and why not follow us on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/kneppwilding]?

Is England Beaver Ready?

Not according to Mark Elliot, beaver expert and Isabella Tree’s latest podcast guest. Licensed beaver pens – designed by Government as the first stage to wider release over three years ago – are beginning to fail. Beavers, including those installed in a six-acre pen at Knepp, have begun burrowing out of their watery prisons. As Isabella leads Mark through the incredible new wetlands created by Knepp’s AWOL beavers, he describes the importance of beavers in flood defence, neutralising water pollution, storing carbon and restoring biodiversity. But with the Government reluctant to come up with a workable Beaver Management Plan, some farmers and land managers are nervous about the prospect of these furry water engineers turning up on their land. Meanwhile, frustrated by government inaction, ‘beaver bombers’ have been illegally releasing beavers into rivers up and down the country. The beavers are already colonising England after an absence of over 400 years – but can we learn to live with them again? Where will the funding for troubleshooting beaver-human conflicts come from? Mark shares his experience leading the landmark River Otter trial and gives some fascinating insights into how communities – including farmers – can find solutions and enjoy a world where these incredible creatures once again live free. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach [https://www.thepodcastcoach.co.uk/]. Send us a message or leave a comment [https://www.buzzsprout.com/1125281/fan_mail/new] Find out more about Knepp on our website [https://knepp.co.uk/] and why not follow us on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/kneppwilding]?