Isabella Tree, award-winning conservationist and bestselling author, will be conferred an Honorary Doctor of Science at the University of Sussex’s Summer Graduation 2024.

A large skein of greylag geese swoops and glides onto the enormous lake behind Knepp Castle.

“In the past, we would have seen them as bad news,” says Isabella Tree, who lives with her husband, Charlie Burrell, here at his ancestral home. “It would have meant they were eating our crops.”

Now the geese are welcomed to their 3,500-acre estate in West Sussex, along with an abundance of other native creatures and plants.

For the past 24 years, Isabella and Charlie have gradually turned what was a failing farm into a natural haven for wildlife.