Francis came to a halt. After eight years at Howorth, he had grown to know the mushrooms scattered around the estate, identifying the woods where he might expect to forage giant puffballs, or porcini for lunch, as well as the meadows and pastures where the flimsy and modest-looking liberty caps hid their psilocybin charge, like jewels sewn into the lining of a refugee’s tattered overcoat. Right now, he had almost stepped on a chanterelle. It was evidence of a vigorous mycorrhizal network under his feet, the product of a symbiotic association between fungi, foraging for nutrients in the soil, and the roots of these young trees. In some ecosystems, the nutrients were transferred from favoured plants to struggling ones, but in any case, the whole network was supposed to take much longer to establish. It was exciting to see new knowledge emerging from the wilding experiment that was taking place on the land around his cottage. Ten years ago, his landlords had noticed that the old oaks at Howorth were sickening and beginning to die back; they had lost their bloom and some skeletal branches were sticking out of the canopy like bare antlers. They called in an expert who told them that the oaks were dying from the constant ploughing that churned up their roots and from the pesticides and artificial fertiliser being showered on the soil. Trees that had withstood the demands of shipbuilding, the Industrial Revolution and the timber quotas of the Second World War were being killed by improvements in farming. George and Emma made the radical decision to abandon intensive agriculture and turn over their estate to wilding. The monotony of wheat was replaced by Red deer and Fallow deer, Tamworth pigs, English Longhorn cattle and a herd of Exmoor ponies, acting as proxies for animals that would have roamed Britain in the past – aurochs, tarpan and wild boar – in a landscape that was gradually turning into a kind of English savannah of open grassland dotted with trees and shrubs.