Isabella Tree

Isabella Tree (born 1964) is a British author and travel journalist.

Personal life
Tree is the adopted daughter of Michael Tree and Lady Anne Cavendish. She was given up for adoption at the age of six weeks, and did not meet her birth mother until she was 20. Michael Tree, a painter, son of late Conservative MP Ronald Tree and his wife Nancy Lancaster, worked as a director of the auction house Christie’s and in later life ran the interiors firm Colefax and Fowler, taken over by his mother from its founder Sibyl Colefax.

She grew up at Mereworth Castle in Kent, and then in a vicarage in Dorset. The family travelled regularly, which inspired her own travels later in life. After reading Classics at the University of London, she went on to work as a journalist and travel writer. Her first book, The Bird Man, about the Victorian ornithologist John Gould, was published in 1991. 

She married Sir Charles Burrell, settled in Knepp Castle in West Sussex, and continued to travel, writing books about Papua New Guinea, Mexico and Nepal.

She was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on 24 November 2019.

Career
Tree was, from 1993 to 1995, a travel correspondent at the Evening Standard, which she considers to be the big break in her career. She has written five books of nonfiction, which have received praise. Islands in the Clouds: Travels in the Highlands of New Guinea was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She writes for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Observer, History Today and Conde Nast Traveller and her work has also appeared in Reader's Digest Today's Best Non-Fiction, Rough Guides Women Travel and The Best American Travel Writing. 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.

Her book, The Living Goddess (Eland, 2015), is also about the Kumaris, a prepubescent girl worshipped in Nepal and replaced before she menstruates. It has received considerable international interest.

Her 2018 book Wilding - the return of nature to a British farm (Picador, 2018) tells the story of the Knepp Wildland Project, the rewilding experiment on Knepp Estate. Wilding was shortlisted for the 2019 Wainwright Prize.

Books
Islands in the Clouds: Travels in the Highlands of New Guinea (1996)
Sliced Iguana (2001)
The Bird Man: The Extraordinary Story of John Gould (2004)
The Living Goddess (India 2014; first published in the UK by Eland in 2015)
Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm (Picador 2018)

References

Category:1964 births
Category:Living people
Category:British travel writers
Category:British women writers
Category:Wives of baronets
Category:British adoptees