From the archive
22 Sep 2026
Rebecca Howard spent two years driving the length of Britain with her paints. She visited nine rewilding sites from the Rewilding Network - the RSPB saltmarsh on Lancashire's Ribble Estuary, an ancient temperate rainforest in Cornwall, an urban rewilding park in Derby - and made a painting of each. The result, an exhibition called A Year in the Wild, opened this September at Knepp in Sussex, with prints and cards sold to raise money for Rewilding Britain.
She came to it through frustration. A landscape painter for years, she kept noticing that everything she painted - seascapes, hillsides - had been groomed, trimmed or ploughed, and she wanted to see what the country looked like without that management. What held her on the sites was less the scenery than the people: small-scale rewilders putting land back together out of affection rather than profit, most of them unrecognised and unpaid.
The work itself is done on site, alongside the rewilders. At Moor Barton in Devon she joined Robin and Annie ringbarking larch that were crowding out the native woodland. The painting that came out of that visit shows a larch stump covered in porcelain fungi - the dead tree feeding the fungi, the fungi returning the nutrients to a wood that now has room to grow. A viewer can take it as a pretty study of mushrooms, or read the whole ecological transaction in it. Howard is happy either way.
The visit that shifted her thinking was to Derek Gow's farm at Coombeshead in Devon. His counter-intervention there is almost nothing: great piles of logs and sticks left as cover for reptiles and ground-nesting birds, dead branches left to rot where they fall. "Every creature needs a place to live," he told her. After this summer's drought she saw it herself: plants standing in dead leaves came through; plants on bare, tidy soil did not.
A log pile is the cheapest habitat going: stack fallen branches and sticks in an untroubled corner, an afternoon's work, and leave it for reptiles and ground-nesting birds. Then stop raking - leaves left on beds through summer kept plants alive in the drought where bare soil did not.
Rewilding Britain · Read the source