Isabella Tree

Isabella Tree, Lady Burrell (born 1964) is a British author and conservationist. She is author of the Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award-winning book Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm that describes the creation of Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England. The 3500 acre wildland project was created in the grounds of Knepp Castle, the ancestral home of her husband, Sir Charles Burrell, a landowner and conservationist.

Early life
Tree attended Millfield School. She was adopted by an aristocratic British family as a baby. She read Classics, following the advice of author Iris Murdoch and went the University of London.

Career
From 1993 to 1995, Tree was, a travel correspondent at the Evening Standard. In 1999 she was Overall Winner of the Travelex Travel Writers' Awards for a feature on Nepal's Kumaris, or "Living Goddesses" – "High and Mighty" – for the Sunday Times. As of 2022 she writes for The Guardian and National Geographic Magazine.

Personal life
She married Sir Charles Burrell and lives at Knepp Castle in West Sussex. Her father was the son of Ronald Tree and a member of a well connected Anglo-American family active in politics and public life on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Her mother was Lady Anne Tree, youngest daughter of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. She has two children, one of whom is called Nancy and researches rewilding at Oxford University.

Awards

 * 2023: Received a ZSL Silver Medal (Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm)
 * 2019: Shortlisted for Wainwright Prize (Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm)
 * 2018: Richard Jefferies Society Literature Award (Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm)
 * 2018: One of the top ten science books – Smithsonian Magazine (Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm)
 * Overall winner of the 1999 Travelex Travel Writer Awards
 * Shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award (Islands in the Clouds)
 * Awarded the CIEEM (Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management) Medal 2020
 * Awarded the Royal Geographical Society's Ness Award 2021