Isabella Tree

Last updated

Isabella Tree
Born1964 (age 5960)
Education University of London
Occupation(s)Conservationist, writer
Spouse Charles Burrell
Children2
Mother Lady Anne Tree
Relatives Edward Cavendish (grandfather)
Mary Gascoyne-Cecil (grandmother)
Ronald Tree (grandfather)
Nancy Lancaster (grandmother)
Website isabellatree.com

Isabella Tree, Lady Burrell (born 1964) is a British author and conservationist. She is author of the Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award-winning book Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm that describes the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3,500-acre (1,400-hectare) wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, the ancestral home of her husband, Sir Charles Burrell, a landowner and conservationist.

Contents

Early life

Tree attended Millfield School. [1] She was adopted by an aristocratic British family as a baby. She read Classics, following the advice of author Iris Murdoch and went the University of London. [2]

Career

From 1993 to 1995, Tree was, a travel correspondent at the Evening Standard . [3] In 1999 she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writers' Awards for a feature on Nepal's Kumaris, or "Living Goddesses" "High and Mighty" for the Sunday Times. [4] As of 2022 she writes for The Guardian and National Geographic Magazine.[ citation needed ]

Personal life

She married Sir Charles Burrell and lives at Knepp Castle in West Sussex. Her father was the son of Ronald Tree and a member of a well connected Anglo-American family active in politics and public life on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Her mother was Lady Anne Tree, youngest daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. She has two children, one of whom is called Nancy and researches rewilding at Oxford University.[ citation needed ]

Books

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Somerleyton Hall</span> Grade II* listed house in Suffolk, United Kingdom

Somerleyton Hall is a country house and 5,000-acre (2,000 ha) estate near Somerleyton and Lowestoft in Suffolk, England owned and lived in by Hugh Crossley, 4th Baron Somerleyton, originally designed by John Thomas. The hall is Grade II* listed on the National Heritage List for England, and its landscaped park and formal gardens are also Grade II* listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The formal gardens cover 12 acres (4.9 ha). Inspired by Knepp Wildland, Somerleyton is rewilding 1,000 acres (400 ha) of the estate to which he has introduced free-roaming cattle, large black pigs and Exmoor ponies.

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer and Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Benjamin James Goldsmith is an English financier and environmentalist. The son of financier James Goldsmith and Lady Annabel Goldsmith he is founder and CEO of London-listed investment firm Menhaden, which focuses on the theme of energy and resource efficiency.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knepp Castle</span> Castle ruin in West Sussex, England

The medieval Knepp Castle is to the west of the village of West Grinstead, West Sussex, England near the River Adur and the A24.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rewilding</span> Restoring of wilderness environments

Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration aimed at increasing biodiversity and restoring natural processes. It differs from other forms of ecological restoration in that rewilding aspires to reduce human influence on ecosystems. It is also distinct from other forms of restoration in that, while it places emphasis on recovering geographically specific sets of ecological interactions and functions that would have maintained ecosystems prior to human influence, rewilding is open to novel or emerging ecosystems which encompass new species and new interactions.

Sir Charles Raymond Burrell, 10th Baronet is an English landowner, conservationist and founder of the Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale lowland rewilding project in England, which was created in the early 2000s when he stopped conventional farming on 3,500 acres (1,400 ha) of land surrounding the ancestral family home at Knepp Castle in West Sussex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Lewis-Stempel</span>

John Lewis-Stempel is an English farmer, writer, and Sunday Times Top 5 best selling author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Taylor (environmentalist)</span> British environmentalist (born 1948)

Peter Taylor is a UK environmentalist, public activist on issues ranging from nuclear safety, ocean pollution, biodiversity strategies, renewable energy and climate change. He is the author of five books: Beyond Conservation: A Wildland Strategy (2005), Shiva's Rainbow, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory (2009), Questions of Resilience: Development Aid in a Changing Climate (2010), and Rewilding: ECOS Writings on Wildland and Conservation Values (2011).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rewilding Britain</span> British charitable environmental organization

Rewilding Britain is an organisation founded in 2015 that aims to promote the rewilding of Great Britain. It is a registered charity in England, Wales and Scotland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alastair Driver</span> English conservationist, rewilder and explorer

Alastair James Driver FCIEEM is an English ecologist, conservationist and rewilding specialist. He is an Honorary Professor of Applied Environmental Management at the University of Exeter. He was the National Conservation Manager for the Environment Agency and was appointed as Director of Rewilding Britain in 2017. He is the creator and voluntary warden of Ali's Pond Local Nature Reserve in Sonning, Berks, which carries his name.

<i>Feral</i> (book) 2013 book by George Monbiot

Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding is a 2013 book by the British activist George Monbiot. In it, Monbiot discusses rewilding, particularly in the United Kingdom. It was first published by Allen Lane, a hardback imprint of the Penguin Group. The book received positive critical reviews, and won several awards. It inspired the founding of Rewilding Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raynor Winn</span> British writer and long-distance walker

Raynor Winn is a British long-distance walker and writer. Her first book, The Salt Path, was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2018.

Ted Green MBE is a British academic, scientist, campaigner and arboriculturist. He has been working in a career bridging forestry and conservation for over 50 years, founding the Ancient Tree Forum in 1993. He is described as "Britain's foremost ancient tree expert". He won the Royal Forestry Society's (RFS) Gold Medal for Distinguished Services to Forestry in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knepp Wildland</span> English rewilding project

Knepp Wildland is the first major lowland rewilding project in England. It comprises 1,400 hectares of former arable and dairy farmland in the grounds of Knepp Castle, in West Sussex.

Guy Shrubsole is a British researcher, writer and campaigner. He wrote Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back, and, most recently, The Lost Rainforests of Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frans Vera</span> Dutch biologist and conservationist

Dr Frans Vera is a Dutch biologist and conservationist. He has played a key part in devising the current ecological strategy for the Netherlands. He has hypothesised that Western European primeval forests at the end of the Pleistocene epoch did not consist only of "closed-canopy" high-forest conditions, but also included pastures combined with forests, a hypothesis variously addressed as the Vera hypothesis or the wood-pasture hypothesis.

Jim Crumley is a Scottish journalist, a former newspaper editor and regular columnist for the Dundee Courier and The Scots Magazine. He is also the author of more than 40 books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscapes of Scotland, many of them making the case for species reintroductions, or ‘rewilding’. His Seasons series, a quartet of books exploring the wildlife and landscapes and how climate change is affecting our environment across the four seasons, is highly acclaimed. The Nature of Autumn was longlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize 2017 and shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society and White Horse Bookshop Literary Prize 2017. The Nature of Spring was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week. The Nature of Summer, published in 2020, was shortlisted for the 2021 Highland Book Prize. His most recent book, Lakeland Wild, is his first to focus entirely on an English landscape.

Lee Schofield is a British naturalist and nature writer. He wrote Wild Fell: Fighting for Nature on a Lake District Hill Farm, which describes his work as site manager for the RSPB at Haweswater in the Lake District National Park.

Nicola Chester is a British nature writer. She is a regular columnist in The Guardian and in the RSPB's magazine, and has written a memoir On Gallows Down.

Wilding is a 2023 British documentary film directed by David Allen, about Charlie Burrell, Isabella Tree and their rewilding project Knepp Wildland in West Sussex. The film is based on Tree's 2018 book of the same name—a memoir and an account of the ecology of the countryside.

References

  1. "Notable Alumni". Millfield School . Retrieved 26 October 2022.
  2. Blanchard, Tamsin. "Isabella Tree". thegentlewoman.co.uk. Retrieved 25 October 2023.
  3. "Isabella Tree". rolfpotts.com. November 2003. Retrieved 26 January 2020.
  4. "Biography". isabellatree.com. Retrieved 16 September 2016.
  5. "Prestigious awards honour stars of conservation science | ZSL".
  6. "Wilding". Wainwright Prize.
  7. "Richar Jefferies Society & White Horse Bookshop Literature Prize 2018".
  8. "Ten Best Science Books 2018". Smithsonian.
  9. 1 2 "Want to meet some wild, adventurous and inspiring women?". Chipping Norton Literature Festival.
  10. Frances Mayes; Jason Wilson (2002). The Best American Travel Writing 2002. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp. 347–. ISBN   0-618-11880-2.
  11. "CIEEM Medal Winners 2020 – John Hopkins & Isabella Tree | CIEEM". September 2020. Retrieved 13 August 2021.
  12. "Royal Geographical Society – 2021 Awards". www.rgs.org. Retrieved 13 August 2021.