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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jun/06/semen-flasks-farming-couple-rewilding-knepp-isabella-tree>
"Take a stroll through the classic English countryside of West Sussex, and
you’ll notice things becoming strange just beyond the village of Dial Post.
Here, a patchwork of tidy fields bordered by neat hedgerows becomes a
bamboozling maze of flowery glades and thickets of hawthorn, blackthorn and
sallow. Rabbits dart between billowing brambles, watched by a fallow deer
sporting furry new antlers. Stranger than the unexpectedly abundant plants and
mammals is the cacophony of birdsong – the common melodies of thrushes, robins
and blackcaps but also songs virtually extinguished across Britain: cuckoos,
nightingales and turtle doves. Oddest of all is a clacking noise that sounds
like two hollow sticks being banged together.
“Isn’t it a great sound?” says Isabella Tree, landowner, author and now star of
a new film,
Wilding. “Storks have these pouches that make the sound echo and
travel even further.” And there, in an enormous hammock of sticks at the top of
an ancient oak, stand a pair of bill-clacking storks looking proudly over a
tiny chick.
The transformation of Knepp from a conventional 3,500-acre farm into a place
thrumming with wildlife in barely two decades is told by
Wilding, as part of
a growing filmic fascination – Soilywood? Ploughcore? – with environmentally
minded farming. It follows the success of
Clarkson’s Farm on the small screen
and
Six Inches of Soil. The latter was a particularly improbable documentary
to show in cinemas across the country, but
Wilding’s cinematic release is
less surprising because it has already been a popular book, written by Tree,
which has sold more than 300,000 copies in Britain and been translated into
multiple languages. Her tale is captivating because it is true, heartening and
unforeseen, especially because it begins with failure."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
