When we had plenty of space to play about with ideas (240 acres in the neglected centre of France) I went in for a spot of rewilding. I’m not sure the term existed in the 1970s, but the reality did wherever you lost control – in this case of what is known in France as ‘friche’. The dictionary translates it as ‘wasteland’, ‘fallow land’ or ‘wilderness’; in other words land that is surplus to requirements and that nobody bothers with. It is where you find out the true natural destiny of the land. In those years on our neglected farm we learned a lot.
To learn more I tried a number of experiments. I fenced off an acre or two of low-level friche; recently abandoned, I supposed, either from use producing small poles or from grazing. It didn’t take long for plenty of seedling trees to emerge from the inevitable pioneering brambles, which have the virtue of protecting them in their infancy. The saplings were almost all either hornbeam or oak. Left to grow, I reckon the eventual woodland would have been eighty or ninety per cent hornbeam.
Rewilding, then, strictly left to its own devices, will in the long run give us back the woodland that once covered the country. Plus, no doubt, an interesting selection of presumptuous exotics.
