A writer’s personal experience with land she owns:
Despite doing everything they could to modernize, Tree and her husband Charles Burrell realized that they could no longer make a living as farmers. As they looked out at their exhausted farm, laboriously fortified from sticky Sussex clay, they discerned that they needed to pause…
As an experiment, she and Burrell decided not only to let their land lie fallow, but to strategically steward it toward a deeper, more layered wildness, introducing species and practices that might nourish its soil. Some of this was simply allowing the old oaks on the land to die, or drop limbs, allowing dead things to rot where they fell. Some of it was reintroducing deer and Exmoor ponies (they resemble cave paintings at Lascaux) to aerate and nourish the grasses. Some of it was simply not planting at all, and watching waves of bracken succeed each other, each copse making a niche for some new animal…
Within two decades their formerly exhausted dairy farm has become a haven for species otherwise in decline across Europe and the world. The cuckoo, the skylark, the raven — creatures of deep lore and literary imagination — have begun to live in their woods and fields again.
– The book that gave me hope at harvest time