Ben Goldsmith

Ben Goldsmith comes clean: lies, rewilding and the death of daughter Iris

As a 16-year-old, Ben Goldsmith put a large marijuana plant in his mother’s greenhouse and told her it was a lupin. It grew out of control, like a psychedelic beanstalk, “a monster”, “a triffid”, leaves pressing against the glass, blocking out the light. Goldsmith panicked that his mother would guess this was not a lupin at all, so he harvested the flowers and batch-baked hash brownies using The Alice B Toklas Cook Book. Later, when his mother had round to their house her “clucking hens”, as Goldsmith calls them, genteel upright friends and neighbours from Ham and Richmond, they tucked in unwittingly. “My mother had one. And her friend Sue. And whoever else was knocking around; no one too elderly. Initially, there was giggling coming from different rooms,” he continues, “and then people started realising. I was in trouble. God, yes. I was given an absolute rocket.”

Standing in front of me today on the cusp of his 40th birthday, wearing a fleece flecked with dog hair and smelling of cloakroom soap, I can still see the mischievous 16-year-old, thrilled with his prank, worth every second of punishment. It’s one of a series of stories he tells me, all either irredeemably bad, shocking or a bit funny, depending on your outlook.

Boundaries were not much in evidence in his “free-range” upbringing, nor parental oversight (more later). Nor are they much in evidence on his farm, Cannwood in Somerset, where we are right now. That’s mostly because he has ripped them out – miles and miles of barbed wire fencing – as part of his mission to “rewild” his land, encouraging wetlands, wild flowers and native species such as beaver and wild boar (which he feeds), and following the example set by the owners of Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex. He has introduced rare medieval chickens with upright tails (Old English Game), Tamworth pigs and beautiful long-horn cattle (White Park), who blink and flick their ears when we pass later on a whining electric farm vehicle.

read the full article on The Times