Rewilding areas do not usually conform to traditional notions of beauty in England\u2019s green and pleasant land. Detractors may bewail the beaver-felled trees, untidy scrub, deadwood, weeds, mud and \u201cmess\u201d.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The artist Rebecca Howard devoted two years to visiting rewilding projects across England<\/a> before spending a month painting each of nine large canvases that reveal what happens when people step back from intensive management of land and allow wild nature to take a leading role.<\/p>\n A beaver on the rewilded Knepp estate. Photograph: Charlie Burrell\/PA<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to create a positive exhibition that people could view and feel empowered to do something of their own, and not feel totally overwhelmed by the challenges we face with our climate and biodiversity crisis,\u201d said Howard. \u201cIf you walk into an art gallery you\u2019re faced with seascapes or bluebell woods but you don\u2019t often see a dead tree in a painting.\u201d<\/p>\n Cabilla Tor at Sunrise by Rebecca Howard. Photograph: Rob Percy\/Rebecca Howard<\/p>\n Howard, whose exhibition opens at rewilded Knepp, West Sussex, on 12 September, began by visiting Cabilla, a fragment of Cornish temperate rainforest which is being restored and extended<\/a> by the Thousand Year Trust<\/a> charity founded by Merlin Hanbury-Tenison.<\/p>\n Over the following months, Howard explored renowned rewilding sites including the pioneering Knepp estate<\/a>, which began the British rewilding movement, and the Devon farm<\/a> turned back to nature by the outspoken rewilder Derek Gow<\/a>, who has also overseen the reintroduction of beavers, storks and water voles to many sites across Britain.<\/p>\n But Howard was also invited into less widely known projects including, in Derby, the largest urban rewilding project in Britain<\/a>, and Broughton Sanctuary, a North Yorkshire estate owned by the same family for more than 900 years that is taking a land-healing turn in the 21st century.<\/p>\n At all the sites she ended up painting, Howard discovered new kinds of land management and beauty that challenge conventional notions and customs.<\/p>\n At Hamatethy Farm<\/a>, a rewilded hill farm in Cornwall, she found a huge beach tree that had most of its trunk chewed by resident beavers but was still standing. \u201cIt was a felled tree waiting to happen but there was something very beautiful about that stasis between a living and a dead tree,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know it\u2019s going to crash down at some point but it\u2019s going to provide so much habitat when it does and it\u2019s actually a beautiful object in the way it\u2019s been gnawed. It\u2019s exciting. I\u2019m definitely on the side of seeing beauty in new ways.\u201d<\/p>\n