From the Guardian · · 2m
The beauty of a half-chewed beech tree
Rebecca Howard spent two years painting England's rewilded land, dead trees, mud, beaver pools and all.
In brief
Rebecca Howard spent two years painting England's rewilded land, dead trees, mud, beaver pools and all. Rewilded land looks like a mess because we were taught to see tidiness as beauty, not because it is failing. Originally reported by the Guardian.
Rewilding looks like a mess
Beaver-felled trees, scrub, deadwood, weeds and mud. None of it fits the English idea of a green and pleasant land, and critics say so loudly.
An exhibition argues back
A new show finds the appeal in fungus on dying trees, water buffalo in fresh wetlands and brown beaver pools flooding fields that used to be bone dry.
Two years, nine canvases
Rebecca Howard visited rewilding projects across England, then spent a month on each of nine big paintings showing what happens when people stop managing land.
No bluebell woods here
Howard wanted work that leaves people feeling able to act rather than flattened by the climate and biodiversity crisis. Galleries rarely hang a dying tree.
“If you walk into an art gallery you're faced with seascapes or bluebell woods but you don't often see a dead tree in a painting”
From Cornish rainforest to Derby
She started at Cabilla, a scrap of temperate rainforest in Cornwall, then took in Knepp, Derek Gow's Devon farm, Britain's biggest urban rewilding site in Derby, and Broughton Sanctuary.
A tree caught between lives
At Hamatethy Farm in Cornwall she found a huge beech with its trunk gnawed through by beavers, still upright. When it falls it becomes habitat for hundreds of species.
“It was a felled tree waiting to happen but there was something very beautiful about that stasis between a living and a dead tree”
Landowners kept saying yes
Private owners and charities alike walked her round with real excitement. Some were only five years in and already had lost species returning.
“They came back to me with enthusiasm and openness, there was no agenda”
Killing trees to make life
At Moor Barton in Devon she helped ring-bark non-native larch. It feels like destruction, but it makes deadwood and clears space for young oaks and birches.
“There was a sense of, 'What are we doing killing things?'”
Big enough to stand inside
Each canvas is 120cm by 70cm, sized to fill your field of vision. The show runs at Knepp until 18 October, then hopes to tour Britain.
“Rewilding needs to exist not only in our landscapes, but in our culture and imagination too”
What matters most
Rewilded land looks like a mess because we were taught to see tidiness as beauty, not because it is failing.
