Artist delights in beautiful ‘mess’ and dead trees of England’s rewilding sites

‘You don’t often see a dead tree in a painting’: Rebecca Howard working on one of her canvases. Photograph: c/o Rebecca Howard

Rewilding areas do not usually conform to traditional notions of beauty in England’s green and pleasant land. Detractors may bewail the beaver-felled trees, untidy scrub, deadwood, weeds, mud and “mess”.

But a new exhibition highlights the aesthetic delights that can be discovered on rewilding sites where fungi grows on dying trees, water buffalo gather in new wetlands and brown-watered beaver pools flood once-desiccated fields.