Thread by @wtgowers

A few months ago I made a slightly mad decision to buy a field. Here's a picture of the sort of vegetation it contained in December. I did it because I've been interested in the idea of rewilding ever since @GeorgeMonbiot planted it in my mind. 1/

I became more interested after reading the book Wilding by @isabella_tree, about the incredible things that happened in the estate of Knepp Castle when it was largely left to its own devices. Here she is talking about it. 2/

The field became mine yesterday, and now I have to decide what to do with it. The default is nothing at all, but I am quite keen to plant appropriate trees round the boundary. By "appropriate" I mean typical hedging trees like hawthorns, but with a view to letting them grow ...3/

rather than turning them into a neat hedge.

I'm aware that it won't be a proper rewilding project -- it's far too small for that -- and I'm certainly not regarding it as a carbon offset, even if, as I hope, it will sequester a certain amount of carbon. 4/

Perhaps the most realistic aim for it is to help preserve biodiversity. Happy to listen to suggestions for how best to achieve that.

Part of it is boggy, which might be ecologically interesting, though wetlands also contribute quite a bit to methane emissions. 5/

I'm genuinely unsure what to do about that, if anything.

As the picture makes clear, it doesn't seem to have been cultivated for a little while, so I had a small head start on the rewilding process. 6/

I wouldn't have embarked on this project had it not been for the following website, which has a lot of tips and made the whole process seem a lot less scary. 7/

godneymarshes.com/2019/06/19/18-…

I had hoped to have started on the planting by now, but the coronavirus delayed things. So it will probably be the autumn by the time I get round to it. 8/8