![]() Knepp Castle Estate is just 45 miles from Central London, but now you might imagine you’re in Africa. Not only had Nature solved our prickly problem, but thanks to sitting on our hands, we’d been given a ringside seat at one of its great spectacles. The following year, our 60 acres of creeping thistle had vanished entirely. By autumn, the caterpillars had wolfed down the leaves, pupated and flown away, leaving our thistle fields in tatters. The whole area took on the appearance of a chaotic army encampment. We walked for half an hour that morning, parting curtains of butterflies.Ī few weeks later, spiky black caterpillars were swarming over the thistles, spinning silken webs like tents. As we approached, our dogs ran into the prickly cover, sending up puffs of orange and brown wings like autumn leaves. from Morocco, had descended on the swathes of creeping thistle to lay their eggs. Outside, thousands upon thousands of them, migrating to the U.K. ![]() ![]() On a warm Sunday morning in May 2009, we woke to see painted lady butterflies streaming past our bedroom window at the rate of one a minute. Just when all seemed lost, out of a clear blue sky came a very different invasion. We worried that the mounting opposition to the thistle outbreak might end our vision to establish a patch of self-wilded nature, a mini-wilderness in the heart of West Sussex before it had even begun. ![]()
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