This article was first published in the Financial
Times.
I am lucky enough to be raising my family in south Somerset,
where a once great wild wood pasture named Selwood is reawakening,
inkblot-like, spreading outwards from a place called Brewham. Here,
barbed wire fencing has been removed, field drains pulled up,
ditches filled in, streams rewiggled, ghost ponds resurrected, and
water eddies and pools naturally through the land. Pockets of crab
apple, dog rose, hawthorn, blackthorn and bramble are popping up
through the fields, whose arbitrary shapes are now dissolving into
the landscape. In the warmer months, the ground is awash with
wildflowers, whose colour composition shape-shifts endlessly as the
summer goes on. During the winter months, finches, thrushes and
starlings form mixed flocks which hop noisily from one patch of
thistles and dock to the next. By night, moths abound, and by day,
butterflies, dragonflies and other flying insects keep up a
constant hum
