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Large herbivorous mammals like the aurochs (the wild ox), tarpan (the original wild horse of Europe), wisent (the European bison), elk (known in North America as moose), European beaver and the omnivorous wild boar… aLL, according to fossil bone records, re-colonized the lowlands of Central and Western Europe along with red deer and roe deer about 2,000 years after the end of the last ice age – around 12,000 years ago. Trees, on the other hand – according to the pollen records – appear only between 9,000 and 1,500 years ago. So, oak, lime, ash, elm, field maple, beech and hornbeam – the key species of what is claimed to have been the primordial closed-canopy deciduous forest of Europe – arrived at least 3,000 years after the large herbivores. This is a very different picture to the one that has rooted in our mythology.

I’m reading WILDING: THE RETURN OF NATURE TO A BRITISH FARM by Isabella Tree, about the reclamation of Knepp Farm. Now, I live with an ordinary little patch of dirt on an ordinary compact British city street. And we’ve let the garden go to rack and ruin since the kid left home. So one of my summer projects has been reclaiming the garden. Which implies restoring order, right? A manicured and regimented space. Thing is, in these non-natural outdoor spaces, a wild garden isn’t so much “wild” as it is colonised and closed-off. The soil – which was never great to start with – is for shit, and the only things that thrive are Japanese knotweed, the holly trees, and a demented wisteria that seems to think it’s marching towards Poland.

The other month, the kid directed me to a website for a farm close to her that sells wild meat. It’s Knepp Farm. This book, which I bought for 99p in a sale last year and just decided to open on Monday, is written by one of the custodians of Knepp Farm. This is Knepp’s story.

Wild boar became extinct in England at least three hundred years ago but in recent years escapees and releases from wild-boar farms have re-established wild populations. A large population near the coast in East Sussex provides Rye’s annual Wild Boar Festival in October with ‘wild boargers’, ‘boargignon’ and other delicacies from the ‘last of the summer swine’.

Knepp, a vast estate, has been there for around a thousand years. In its latter decades, it was intensively farmed, even though it is as shitty a farmland soil as mine. So, with failure imminent, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell decided to try something else. They decided to wild the entire estate. All 3500 acres. That’s 1400 hectares. Five and a half square miles. A bigger space than Heathrow Airport. About the same size as the entirety of LAX. Not small.

It’s an absolutely fascinating read: funny, but focussed, not afraid of detailing stresses and reversals, cogent and careful in explaining their reasoning, discoveries and goals. There’s a lot of history in it, too, and longtime readers know I’m a history nerd.

And it is, frankly, an astonishing thing: taking five square miles of dirt and returning it to the wild. In full knowledge that “rewilding” isn’t possible, and conditions of eight thousand years ago can only be approximated. More of a future-wilding. Not what it was, but what it could become.

While (purple emperor butterflies) may favour a particular tree for their displays, the felling of a ‘master oak’ does not – as is commonly believed – result in the demise of a colony. At Knepp, the butterflies have plenty of oaks to choose from and they charge around the leeward branches of 400-year-old veterans grown out of ancient hedges, around giants on the edges of woods or fringing the green lane – always within yards of the sallow stands – in territories identified on Matthew’s purple emperor map as ‘Serial Offenders’ Institute’ and ‘Mindless Violence’, a short walk from ‘Bonked Senseless’.

The whole project is grounded in solid history and science but is wholly future-facing, and that appealed to me. And also taught me many things, and gave me a lot to think about. An unexpected pleasure of a read.

WILDING, Isabella Tree (link)

I noticed last month that I have a few different Sjon books in the pile. Apparently I started reading this and didn’t finish it. So I started again at the beginning.

Before embarking on his tales the mate had the habit of drawing a rotten chip of wood from his pocket and holding it to his right ear like a telephone receiver. He would listen to the chip for a minute or two, closing his eyes as if asleep, while under his eyelids his pupils quivered to and fro.

THE WHISPERING MUSE is a story about storytelling: about myth and legend, fish and culture.

To try and describe the affect, I’m going to be basic and crass and do an injustice to the work, but: tonally, it has the archness, historicity, unreliability and louche, slightly evil air of THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL. Completely unfair, but maybe you can see where I’m leading you here.

“I was thinking: could the voice you detect in the humming of the wood be your own voice? Like the poet who obstinately believes that he is writing about the world but is in reality only telling yet another story about himself?’ The idea was not entirely my own. My brother-in-law, the psychiatrist Dr Pázmány, had said something similar when the invisible people moved in with me during the winter of 1910–11.”

The extremely dubious narrator is the publisher and principal author of the journal Fisk Og Kultur, which presents a faintly Aryan argument that the Nordic race is the superior race because they eat lots of fish. The story revolves around the narrator, in his old age, being sent on a sea trip by his patron, a local shipping magnate – and the ship’s first mate, who, every night, tells in chapters a tale of Jason and the Argonauts. He tells this story after listening to a splinter of wood, which he insists is a piece of the Argo’s bow – and that he himself sailed on the Argo with Jason. The myth is the spine of the piece, weaving in and out of the man’s life and experiences on the boat. Myth rises like a tide and laps over events. Sometimes it washes away dissembling and reveals true character. The ending is unexpected and stunning. And funny. And, in the aftermath, unsettling. It’s a more complex book than it seems.

I’ve read Sjon before, but this book convinced me that I haven’t read enough.

THE WHISPERING MUSE, Sjon, trans. Victoria Cribb (learn more)