When the Chelsea flower show bestowed its top award this year on a scruffy patch of wet woodland complete with beaver dam, pool and lodge, it was a symbolic moment. Rewilding may still excite or antagonise but here was a radically new way of managing land for nature being embraced by the mainstream – and by the British establishment.
Five years ago, European rewilders were bemused by Britain’s debate over whether beavers should be allowed back on to rivers. Today, hundreds, possibly thousands, of beavers are at large – and legal – across the country. Where one English landowner, the Knepp estate in Sussex, first trod the lonely path to abandon conventional farming for free-ranging herbivores and allowing more natural processes to unfurl, scores of landowners of all sizes are now following.
