3 tips to make your world beautifully wild | Isabella Tree

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: TED Talks Daily
Episode Title: 3 tips to make your world beautifully wild | Isabella Tree
Date: November 6, 2025
Speaker: Isabella Tree
Main Theme:
Isabella Tree explores the transformative power of rewilding—restoring land to its natural, uncultivated state—and explains how anyone, regardless of how much land they have, can foster biodiversity, combat climate change, and enrich their own lives by making their green spaces “beautifully wild.” Drawing from her experience revitalizing the NEP Estate in England, she offers three practical tips for personal and community rewilding.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rewilding Beyond the Wilderness

• Rewilding isn’t just for large, remote landscapes: (02:55)
  • Traditionally seen as vast-scale projects (e.g., reintroducing wolves and bison), rewilding can also happen “in your own backyard, in an urban park, anywhere there's a tiny patch of space.”
  • “And it can happen really fast. And that’s transformative not just for nature and the climate, but for ourselves.” – Isabella Tree ([03:10])

2. The NEP Estate Story: From Debt to Biodiversity

• Turning failure into opportunity:
  • Isabella and her husband inherited 3,500 acres of intensively farmed, unprofitable land in southeast England. After years of struggle and debt, they chose to “work with nature rather than battling against it.”
• Initial steps of rewilding: ([04:00])
  • Removed internal fences, destroyed Victorian drains to let water settle, allowing “thorny bushes” and trees to recolonize.
• Reintroducing free-roaming animals:
  • Examples: old English longhorn cattle (“for their extinct ancestor, the aurochs”), Exmoor ponies (for the tarpan), Tamworth pigs (for wild boar), deer, and eventually beavers.
• Remarkable transformation—biodiversity rebound:
  • “Everywhere these animals went, life surfaced in their wake… our land became a kaleidoscope of complex, shifting habitats.”
  • Species return: nightingales, turtledoves, bats, owls, dung beetles, butterflies.
  • Soil health restoration and carbon sequestration improved dramatically in just five years.
• Personal and financial turnaround: ([06:30])
  • While they lacked natural predators, controlling animal populations provided wild-range meat and wildlife tourism income, ultimately saving the estate.

3. Rewilding At Any Scale—including Your Garden

• Success at home inspires others:
  • “Soon we were receiving messages from people who had seen the magic of NEP, but wanted to know if they could rewild their back garden, their schoolyard, their urban park. Yes, you can.” – Isabella Tree ([08:02])
• Victorian walled garden case study:
  • Replacing a “high carbon, high maintenance, green desert” lawn with wildlife-friendly plants increased garden biodiversity 35% in three years.

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Isabella Tree’s Three Top Tips for Rewilding

1. The Earth is Not Flat ([10:00])

• Nature is uneven—there are mounds, pits, and bumps, all of which shape habitats by offering varied sun, shade, and moisture.
• Practical advice:
  • Modify your land by creating “lumps and bumps.” Use demolished concrete/bricks to create dry, free-draining areas for wildflowers.
  • Plant a diversity of species, especially those loved by insects; embrace native wildflowers.
  • “We vowed never to use the word weed again. You can learn to love your dandelions and clover.” – Isabella Tree ([11:30])

2. Think Like a Herbivore ([11:55])

• Avoid monoculture dominance; maintain species richness by curating which plants proliferate.
• When gardening, imagine yourself as animals in the ecosystem:
  • “When you're pulling out the thugs, think of yourself as a wild boar rootling out those docks and thistles.”
  • Prune like a deer, mow like a cow—leave areas long, mix mowing patterns, and consider wildflower or chamomile lawns.
• “Thinking of yourself as an animal in an ecosystem is incredibly freeing. It allows you to become more holistic and organic. It allows you to get messy.” – Isabella Tree ([12:25])

3. Find Life In Death ([13:05])

• Leave dead wood, piles of leaves, and seed heads—these create habitat, natural fertilizer, and food for birds.
• Resist the impulse for tidiness; let natural cycles enhance soil and provide for wildlife.

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Broader Call to Action & Vision

• Enormous potential in private spaces:
  • UK has 23 million private gardens—if gardeners embraced rewilding, it “would be four and a half times the area of land designated to National Nature reserves.” ([13:30])
• Rewilding is possible anywhere:
  • From balconies, window boxes, and rooftops in cities to cemeteries and bus shelters—“Even a window box can become a nature reserve.”
  • Examples: Tower of London as a wildflower meadow; the Field Museum in Chicago transformed for migratory birds.
• Changing the aesthetic:
  • Rewilding involves letting go of “obsessions, particularly our desire to be always in absolute control… Rewilding is about embracing the messy and the unpredictable. It’s about letting go. It’s about rewilding ourselves.” – Isabella Tree ([14:05])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Nature can restore itself given the chance… But it doesn’t have to be at vast scale and it doesn’t have to be in the middle of nowhere.” – Isabella Tree ([02:59])
• “We looked at our land in amazement. It was like it was breathing a sigh of relief. And so were we.” – Isabella Tree ([06:10])
• “We can rewild balconies in cities, even in high rise blocks… Even a window box can become a nature reserve.” – Isabella Tree ([13:55])
• “So much of rewilding is about changing the aesthetic. It’s about questioning what we’ve always been taught to think of as beautiful and normal and stable.” – Isabella Tree ([14:00])
• “Rewilding is about embracing the messy and the unpredictable. It’s about letting go. It’s about rewilding ourselves.” – Isabella Tree ([14:13])

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Important Timestamps

• 02:55 – Isabella Tree describes the scalable philosophy of rewilding.
• 04:00-07:00 – The NEP Estate: journey from failed farm to biodiverse haven.
• 08:02 – Can rewilding work in small domestic gardens? Yes—moving from lawns to havens.
• 10:00-13:05 – Isabella’s 3 practical tips for making any space wilder.
• 13:30 – The overlooked collective power of private gardens.
• 13:55-14:13 – Final vision: from individual actions to a global movement and a rewilded self.

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Summary

Isabella Tree’s TED Talk is a passionate, evidence-based plea for large- and small-scale rewilding. Drawing from the miraculous transformation of her own farm, she offers three actionable, creative tips for turning any green space—from gardens to balconies—into a haven for biodiversity. Her message is both hopeful and practical: through small, intentional acts, anyone can “rewild” their world, sparking ecological healing and personal renewal along the way.

Transcript

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This episode is sponsored by Stripe. Has your company ever wanted to test a new pricing model but couldn't? You're not alone. With AI and technology changing nearly every industry, the need for speed in updating new monetization models is essential. Stripe Billing helps you bill and manage your customers however you want. From selling simple recurring billing to usage based billing and sales negotiated contract, millions of businesses worldwide rely on Stripe to grow their businesses their way. From the latest AI leaders scaling every second to centenarian household names launching exciting new revenue streams, Stripe Billing is built to handle them all. Because your business needs should dictate your billing system, not the other way around. Learn how Stripe Billing can power any business or monetization model you can think of. @swepe.com business billing, you're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. For environmentalist and conservationist Isabella Tree rewilding, the process of restoring an area of land to its natural, uncultivated state isn't just reserved for grand parks. It can and should happen in our gardens too. In her talk, she shares the the story of how letting animals roam free on her farmland brought the land back to life, reviving ecosystems, boosting biodiversity, and even capturing carbon just in a few years. She shares some practical tips for rewilding at home and Reminds us that sometimes we don't have to look further than our own backyards to make a difference.

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You may have heard a lot about rewilding recently. It conjures up visions of vast landscapes, reintroductions of wolves, great herds of bison. It's the most important message we can hear at the moment, that nature can restore itself given the chance. But it doesn't have to be at vast scale and it doesn't have to be in the middle of nowhere. Rewilding can happen in your own backyard, in an urban park, anywhere there's a tiny patch of space for it, and it can happen really fast. And that's transformative not just for nature and the climate, but but for ourselves. How do I know? Well, for the past couple of decades, I've been helping to rewild big and small. When my husband was 21, he inherited 3,500 acres of farmland in the busy southeast of England. NEP Estate is on the worst possible land for intensive agriculture. It was already losing money, but Charlie had trained as a farmer, and so for 17 years he tried to turn it around. By 1999, we were one and a half million pounds in debt. We knew we had to do something radically different. We wanted to work with nature rather than battling against it all the time. We began to rewild. Europe, like Africa and all the other continents of the world, was once home to vast numbers of free roaming animals. Animals that we hunted to extinction or close to it. Their disturbances shaped the land. They cleared forests, they opened up wetlands and created grasslands. They stimulated the soil, they spread seeds. We were really excited by large scale rewilding projects happening in Europe that were showing that by introducing these animals back into the landscape that nature could recover, that biodiversity could rocket. But could it actually happen at smaller scale? Could it happen on a farm like ours that had been plowed and drenched with chemicals for decades? Could we bring our own land back to life? The first steps were so much fun. We pulled up all the internal fences, we smashed up the Victorian drains, We allowed the water to sit where it had always wanted to sit. And the fields began to scrub up with thorny bushes. And soon trees began to recolonize. And then we ring fenced the whole area and began to introduce our free roaming old English longhorn cattle for their extinct ancestor, the aurochs, Exmoor ponies for the extinct tarpan, Tamworth pigs for wild boar, red and fallow deer, and eventually beavers. The results were beyond our wildest dreams. Everywhere these animals went, life surfaced in their Wake, our land became a kaleidoscope of complex, shifting habitats, the kind of messy margins that wildlife loves. Soon we were hearing nightingales and turtledoves, birds on the verge of extinction. In Britain, we had bats and owls and dung beetles and butterflies homing in on us as if out of nowhere. And our soil was restoring too. So suddenly we were pulling down vast amounts of carbon, whereas before, under the plough, we'd just been releasing it. And all of this happened in five years. We looked at our land in amazement. It was like it was breathing a sigh of relief. And so were we. Suddenly we could just sit back and watch the miracle of the Earth restoring itself. Of course, we couldn't just let the numbers of animals grow and grow in our small project. Biodiversity flourishes when there are neither too many grazing animals nor too few in vast wilderness areas. Nature takes care of this herself. But we don't have wolves and lynx and bears in the southeast of England, so we had to become the apex predator. And that meant suddenly we had an income stream that surprised us. We had wild range meat. And together with wildlife tourism, it's become one of the ways that we can finance rewilding. It's turned the fortunes of the estate around. Inspired by nep, hundreds of thousands of acres are now rewilding in the UK on land that isn't suitable for intensive modern agriculture. But of course, not everybody has hundreds of acres to play with. And soon we were receiving messages from people who who had seen the magic of NEP, but wanted to know if they could rewild their back garden, their schoolyard, their urban park. Yes, you can. Our house has a Victorian walled garden of about an acre in size that for years was dominated by a monoculture lawn. Lawns have become an obsession the world over, ever since the 1950s, when artificial fertilizer and weed killers and mowing machines became available to everyone. We looked again at our high carbon, high maintenance, green desert and wondered why on earth we had it three years ago. We decided to rewild it. It's become a wildlife haven. In just three years, biodiversity has increased 35%. Rewilding a garden isn't about simply closing the garden gate and letting it go. It takes intentional interventions to create the right balance of plants and to create the kind of habitats that wildlife loves. So this is what we've learned. These are our three top tips for making your green space and garden wilder. First, the earth is not flat in nature. There are mounds of ant hills and mole hills and pits made by pigs and wallows Made by rolling bison. Creating lumps and bumps produces patches of sun and shade and damp and dry, which create conditions for a much wider spectrum of plants. And that creates many more opportunities for wildlife. We happened to have some old farm buildings that we were demolishing nearby, so we asked the diggers if they would come and dump hundreds of tons of crush brick and concrete onto our perfected lawn. You may have a patio or a piece of concrete or tarmac that you can pull up, crush it up and mix it with sand, and you have the perfect free draining medium for a dry garden. In a dry garden, you can have plants like wildflowers that really love poor soil conditions. And because you're not having to water and fertilise, you're saving yourself a lot of time and money. But you're also helping the planet. We've planted 1100 different plants, mostly from arid parts of the world. But you don't have to have that many. You can make an enormous impact just by choosing plants that insects love, and by extending the pollinating and nectar season and supporting forgotten creatures like night flying moths, some of our greatest pollinators. And all of these plants are rubbing shoulders with our native self. Seeding wildflowers. We vowed never to use the word weed again. You can learn to love your dandelions and clover. Second, think like a herbivore. The job of a gardener is never to allow one single plant to dominate. If you do, you lose all those plants that are creating species richness in your garden. So when you're pulling out the thugs, think of yourself as a wild boar rootling out those docks and thistles. And when you're pruning your roses or your climbers, you're the nibbling teeth of a deer. Thinking of yourself as an animal in an ecosystem is incredibly freeing. It allows you to become more holistic and organic. It allows you to get mess. There's still room for a lawn in the wilder garden, but think of it as part of the mosaic. Consider a wildflower or a chamomile lawn. And when you mow, be the cow. Graze very tightly in some areas, but allow others to stay long, providing protection for small mammals and birds. Mix it up, grow a Mohican. Finally, find life in death. In nature, death is a primary source of life. But in a garden, we get rid of anything that dies. Leaving dead wood and piles of leaves is fantastic habitat, but it also creates natural fertilizer for next year's growth. And leaving seed heads instead of obsessively deadheading provides really important food for birds over winter. In the UK we have 23 million private gardens covering an area four and a half times the amount of land that is designated to National Nature reserves. And most of those gardens are dominated by a green desert lawn. Imagine if all those gardeners thought differently. If they put away the artificial fertilizer and the herbicides and began to think of themselves as a keystone species. They as a mole or an ant or an earthworm. Like this amazing city gardener who's become obsessed with bees. Everything from bumblebees to sharp tailed bees, to leaf cutter bees to masonry bees. We tend to think of bees as aggressive and scary. But if you watch them, they're just gentle, sensitive creatures going about their business. You can fall in love with them. We can rewild balconies in cities, even in high rise blocks. Even a window box can become a nature reserve. And cemeteries and churchyards and bus shelters and whole streets. We can rewild our public monuments. This is the Tower of London, now a wildflower meadow heaving with bees. And this is the Field Museum in Chicago, once a green desert and now a vital food stop for birds on migration. We can have whole tower blocks erupting in plants, bringing life to our windowsills, capturing carbon, producing oxygen, cleaning the air, insulating us in winter, cooling us down in summer. So much of rewilding is about changing the aesthetic. It's about questioning what we've always been taught to think of as beautiful and normal and stuff stable. It's about shedding our obsessions, particularly our desire to be always in absolute control. Rewilding is about embracing the messy and the unpredictable. It's about letting go. It's about rewilding ourselves. Thank you.

[Podcast Host (Elise Hu)]

That was Isabella Tree at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out [e-mail] curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmanivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balarazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for feed. Thanks for listening.

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