In 2019, 15,000 children from primary schools across the UK went out to their local playing field. Instead of kicking a ball around, they dug up worms, looked out for birds, and counted them both.

“The kids were just so enthusiastic about it. It was incredible,” said Blaise Martay, lead researcher from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). Martay had worried about the data quality – she thought children’s counting might vary with their enthusiasm. But the results “showed exactly what we’d expect”, she said: that more worms meant a greater number of blackbirds, robins and thrushes, the birds that rely on earthworms as a vital part of their diets. The data was consistent across school groups.

Earthworms are a keystone species with potentially enormous effects on above-ground wildlife and ecosystem functioning, yet we still know little about them. They live in a hidden landscape below our feet, breaking down organic matter into the soil so it can be used by other soil organisms. As they wriggle around, they create miniature tunnels, so air and water can pass through, with some deep-burrowing worms able to dig tunnels up to 2 metres deep. Sometimes called the “poor man’s tropical rainforest” on account of its biodiversity, topsoil is the bedrock for human food systems, and is where 95% of the planet’s food is grown.

Charles Darwin was so obsessed with these extraordinary creatures that he wrote his last book about them, based on a lifetime of study and fascination, and told his son William that what he hoped his book would reveal was that “worms have much bigger souls than anyone would suppose”. Darwin thought that “it may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organised creatures”, and his book was a bestseller.

But the UK’s first national assessment, published in 2023, found that earthworm populations had declined by a third over the past 25 years. “Such declines would likely have significant effects on soil health, ecosystem structure and function,” researchers wrote in a 2024 “horizon scan” identifying the biggest threats and possibilities for biodiversity, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Large-scale wildlife declines have been reported in oceans, freshwater, and on land, but what is happening under the soil is still relatively unknown. “We know birds that feed on earthworms are declining so we were wondering what was happening with the worms,” said Dr Ailidh Barnes, a research ecologist from BTO who conducted the national assessment.

Her paper found earthworm populations in the UK are in long-term decline of up to 2% a year. It is possible that other countries with similar land-use patterns have had equally dramatic declines. The biggest declines seen in Barnes’s study were in broadleaf woodland ecosystems. “That was the finding we were most surprised by,” said Barnes. It could be because the climate crisis is drying out the soil, or runoff from surrounding farmland.

It is possible that the loss of earthworms could already be affecting broader woodland ecology. On average there are 37% fewer woodland birds in British woods compared with 1970, with declines accelerating in the past five years. “The loss of worms could be playing a bigger part than we realise,” said Barnes.

Healthy worm populations are crucial for entire ecosystems, not just birds. Earthworms are ecosystem engineers. As they burrow and feed underground, they break down organic matter, which is then passed along the conveyor belt to smaller organisms. Wormholes create porous structures for water and air to travel through. They play a crucial role in nutrient recycling and soil fertility, which means they significantly contribute to global food production.

“Earthworms are vital at looking after the soil, which is the basis of all life and what grows our food,” said Barnes.

If trends revealed by her study hold true elsewhere the loss could affect our ability to feed a growing human population. Worms’ contribution to the world’s grain harvest matches that of Russia, according to a 2023 study, which found they help make 140m tonnes of food a year. This would make them the fourth largest global producer if they were a country.

Another paper from last year found more than half of the world’s species live in the soil. Yet despite their importance in supporting ecosystems and providing food for humans, soil invertebrates have been “woefully neglected” in biodiversity assessments. Extensive drainage, pesticide use and the use of inorganic fertilisers are likely to be driving them, but data on trends in population abundance are generally only available from studies covering small areas.

Barnes said: “They are vital for everything. When you start talking to people about earthworms they are interested, but they’re under the ground so they get forgotten about.”

• Welcome to the Guardian’s UK invertebrate of the year competition. Every day between 2 April and 12 April we’ll be profiling one of the incredible invertebrates that live in and around the UK. Let us know which invertebrates you think we should be including here. And at midnight on Friday 12 April, voting will open to decide which is our favourite invertebrate – for now – with the winner to be announced on Monday 15 April.

• Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

Lying on a mound of soft sand inside the nursery, Bani looks like a spoilt child being indulged. Two members of the care team massage her hind leg with oil while the third, sitting at her head, funnels sticks of sugar cane gently into her mouth, clucking reassuringly.

It’s the royal treatment – but Bani, a nine-month-old elephant calf, needs all the medical care and nurturing she can get.

Bani was orphaned in mid-December when she and her pregnant mother were crossing a railway track near Jim Corbett national park in Haldwani. A speeding train smashed into them, killing her mother and flinging baby Bani into a ditch, leaving her with serious injuries and fractured bones.

For several weeks, the frightened calf, unable to stand, was treated locally. When the local forest department caring for her saw no progress, they contacted NGO Wildlife SOS, who sent a team of experts to provide critical care. Once she was strong enough, they transported Bani in a custom elephant ambulance to the Mathura hospital – India’s first specialist elephant hospital.

Since arriving, her life has been an intensive schedule of laser treatment, physiotherapy, hydrotherapy, nerve stimulation and ayurvedic massage. One day, she was able to twitch her tail, to the elation of the staff – it indicated her spine would recover. Then, with the help of a padded harness, she was able to stand for a few minutes, which was a “euphoric moment”, says Kartick Satyanarayan of Wildlife SOS.

“Bani may have to live her life with a handicap but with each day, you can see her becoming less scared and more playful. She loves her bananas and is quite a drama queen, [having tantrums] if she doesn’t get them,” says Satyanarayan.

Bani is the hospital’s first wild elephant and her arrival illustrates the growing threat posed by trains as railway lines cut through forested habitat and migration corridors. Satyanarayan says the Indian Railways’ primary consideration is cost when planning routes, not the need to protect elephants as they forage for food and water.

In India, death from train collisions is the second-highest cause of unnatural elephant deaths, after accidental electrocution. Official data shows that more than 200 elephants were killed in train collisions in the past 10 years. “There’s blood on the tracks when railway lines go through forest areas,” Satyanarayan says.

Indian elephants are classed as endangered, with numbers declining: about 40-50,000 remained in the wild globally at the last assessment in 2019. More than half of the species’ total range has disappeared or been highly fragmented by human settlements, roads and farms. The Wildlife SOS elephant conservation and care centre is a sanctuary for rescued elephants, many of which have come from circuses, hotels, wedding businesses or temples.

Shivam Rai, head coordinator at Wildlife SOS, says most of the 36 elephants in their care have experienced violence at the hands of humans. A number are blind. Many have severe physical disabilities.

“Giving them comfort and dignity is our way of saying sorry – sorry we did this to you, sorry we snatched you from the wild and took you away from your family, sorry for taking everything from you,” says Rai.

The increasing number of elephants being killed by trains has led to calls for changes to the way the railways are managed. Last year, Tamil Nadu in south India installed an AI-enabled surveillance system to monitor elephant movement near railway tracks to help prevent accidents. Sensors pick up elephant movement and alert train drivers, station staff and line controllers.

In other areas, the railways are being fitted with similar systems that sense vibrations, detecting the presence of elephants with nearly 100% accuracy. A system installed in north-east India triggers more than 40 alerts a day.

Flyovers covered with foliage are another option to provide a safe passage for wildlife. In West Bengal, a flyover lined with bamboo and banana trees has been built to encourage elephants to use it and cross the track safely.

But rolling out safety measures is a huge challenge. Indian Railways spans 130,000km (81,000 miles) of track and the country has 150 elephant corridors.

Wildlife SOS believes that if an AI early warning system had been in place, Bani’s mother would be alive and Bani would not be disabled.

“The forest is their home and the trains are invading their homes. Urgent installation of AI-enabled accident prevention systems and strict implementation of speed controls will save hundreds of elephants,” says Satyanarayan.

Of the animals that are hit, Bani is one of the lucky ones. Her progress is steady but slow. Her appetite is gradually improving and she is now able to hold herself up for short periods of time. For the staff who work with her, her recovery is tinged with sadness.

“Bani may never be a normal elephant and can never be wild again,” says Satyanarayan. “She will live with a handicap all her life. Our hope is that she recovers enough to live a life of dignity and freedom.”

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on X for all the latest news and features

A hare springs away over the swell of the hill as we drop down into the wood. On this bright morning, a mistle thrush flings its clear song on to the breeze. Wild garlic shines emerald beneath the trees and woodrush thrusts through fallen beech leaves. Other signs of spring: arrow-shaped lords-and-ladies, pale green flowers of dog’s mercury and, on a sheltered bank, the first primroses.

There’s a feeling of movement, of growth, of upward vitality. The thing that jars is that which is not alive: the twisted, distorted tubes of long-ago tree guards, redundant now that the trees have grown. They cling on, cloven in two, forced apart by bark, still attached to mossy stakes by black ties. Or tumbled and half buried in grass and soil, where they will remain for many years. In an act of guerrilla tidying, we gather a load of the split, broken, battered plastic and pile it under an old piece of wriggly tin. These pieces will still break down into microplastics, but removing them frees the struggling trunks.

This is just a small copse in Northumberland, but this scene is replicated across the country. In this last week I’ve seen: sand-coloured straps of plastic like giant tagliatelle wrapped round a hazel on a nature reserve; a roadside red-stemmed dogwood half-throttled as it tries to throw off its burden; and a top-heavy hawthorn hedge, its marching line of white tubes masking a barren base (to be stock-proof, a hedge needs to be dense right from the base).

Tree guards are used to protect new plantings from rabbits, hares, voles and an ever-expanding deer population. They are, in theory, reusable or recyclable, but few are collected once they are no longer needed, and probably damaging the tree and littering the countryside. Biodegradable alternatives being trialled by the Woodland Trust, the National Trust and the Tree Council are made from materials such as wool or cardboard.

I’m heartened by two Northumberland farmers. One does indeed collect the tubes and offers them for reuse, and these are snapped up on Facebook. The other is planting a mix of species within wooden post-and-rail cages without individual guards.

Country diary is on Twitter at @gdncountrydiary

The sweeping edge of the Pennines at Geltsdale is a cathedral for birdsong on a still spring evening. Everything from thrushes to curlew are calling from this diverse mix of heather moorland, resurgent scrub, rough grassland and pools of water around a rewilded stream.

The conditions on this large nature reserve are perfect for the rare hen harrier to thrive and conservationists hope that this year it will. But there remain fears that illegal persecution will continue to hinder the rare raptor’s recovery.

“There are loads of birds about but they are not lasting very long,” said David Morris, the RSPB area manager for Cumbria and north-east England. “It’s like the Bermuda Triangle for birds when they leave the reserve.”

Last spring, RSPB Geltsdale hosted two successful pairs of nesting hen harriers for the first time since 1999. But a satellite-tagged male bird was found shot dead on a neighbouring grouse moor and the tag of one of five fledglings stopped transmitting in a known hotspot for raptor persecution. Ecologists calculate there could be nine nests on the reserve if there wasn’t so much illegal persecution in the surrounding uplands.

According to 2023 figures released on Monday, the UK and Isle of Man hen harrier population has increased by 20% from 545 territorial pairs in 2016 to 691 pairs. In England, there were 50 breeding attempts in 2023, up from just four pairs in 2016, although numbers are still below the 749 pairs recorded in 2004.

Hen harriers are bouncing back – but illegal persecution is increasing too. Combined Natural England and RSPB data shows that 32 satellite-tagged hen harriers vanished or were confirmed as having been illegally killed in England in 2023 – the highest recorded number of hen harriers killed or to disappear suspiciously in one year.

Newly fledged birds continue to disappear over grouse moors and other shooting estates, and hen harriers remain absent from swaths of suitable habitat in England, including the Peak District and the North York Moors. According to the latest RSPB Birdcrime survey, 71% of confirmed incidents of birds of prey persecution occurred on land managed for game bird shooting.

Hen harriers are targeted because they are seen to consume large quantities of red grouse chicks, which grouse moor managers prize for the lucrative driven grouse shooting season.

Hen harriers’ preferred diet is often voles and on Geltsdale this year conservationists are hopeful that conditions are ideal for hen harriers to thrive. Their security is bolstered by the birds being satellite-tagged by the RSPB as well as Natural England, the government’s conservation watchdog.

“It’s looking like a good vole year,” said Morris. “We want to see a good year and the reserve sustaining four pairs free from any outside interference or illegal persecution. Everything is in the hen harriers’ favour this year. A lot of them have got satellite tags on them so we know there are birds about and we know where they are. We just hope people leave them alone. We’re not asking for much – just the law to be upheld and the police to take it seriously when it isn’t.”

The rising numbers of hen harriers has been welcomed by shooting interests as a sign that the government’s recovery plan – controversial “brood management” – is working.

Brood management enables shooting estates that host multiple breeding hen harriers to have chicks removed from wild nests, raised in captivity and released elsewhere. The process is aimed at preventing shooting estates from being inundated by hen harrier nests and therefore reducing the pressure on gamekeepers or others associated with the estates to potentially commit wildlife crimes.

Andrew Gilruth, the chief executive of the Moorland Association, said: “Fifty per cent of hen harrier habitat in the uplands is managed for grouse shooting yet grouse moors host 80% of their nests – a very significant conservation contribution.

“It is disappointing that the RSPB still can’t acknowledge the extraordinary success of Defra’s hen harrier recovery plan, which has increased the English population to a 200-year high in just five years. The RSPB may be frustrated that grouse moors have more harrier nests than all its nature reserves combined but either way, if it has found evidence of illegal activity it should do what everyone else does, take it to the police.”

At Geltsdale in May 2023, one nest was abandoned when the male bird provisioning it, called Dagda, was shot dead. The bird’s satellite tag led RSPB investigators to find the body on neighbouring Knarsdale moor. The postmortem concluded it died instantly or a short time after being shot.

Northumbria police have made no arrests relating to the incident and the RSPB has submitted a complaint about their investigation. It is understood that Northumbria police are currently considering the complaint.

A spokesperson for Knarsdale Estate said: “We take the protection of wildlife extremely seriously and were deeply concerned when we were made aware in May last year of a fatally injured hen harrier. To be clear, no one from the estate was involved in this incident and RSPB confirmed this in its Birdcrime Report issued in November 2023 stating: ‘for the avoidance of doubt, there is no suggestion that the landowner, agent or any employee was involved in any way.’

“The estate deplores any form of wildlife crime and has happily had satellite-tagged hen harriers present on and over its land for years without any issue, and we continue to have a healthy and diverse raptor population.”

A Northumbria police spokesperson said: “We received a report on 11 May last year that a hen harrier had been found dead in countryside in the Haydon Bridge area of Northumberland.

“It sustained injuries consistent with being caused by a firearm. Anyone with information should use the ‘report’ page of our website or call 101, quoting NP-20230511-1263.”

According to RSPB staff, because shooting estates are able to access the satellite-tag location data of captive-reared birds once they are released under the brood management scheme, the satellite tags that should deter illegal persecution in this instance can lead people who want to harm the birds straight to them.

The Scottish government recently passed a bill introducing licensing for grouse shooting in Scotland; the RSPB and other conservationists want similar legislation in England.

Sam on Zillah

You know what would be genuinely good and interesting? If someone made a miniseries with a big actor or actress that really sunk its fangs into this particular fiddling-while-Rome-burns political moment. As in: we keep being fed a pablum of culture war to distract us from the cost of living crisis that is precipitating an arguably even bigger financial disaster lurking on the horizon. The fact that we’re teetering on the brink of about a dozen different crises would be slightly more bearable if it didn’t feel like the politicians in charge of it cared about nothing other than the being a politician-ness of it. They’ve got one eye on the after-dinner speaking gigs and the consultancy roles they’ve already been taken to lunch at The Berkeley about. They’re fine.

So, you know. That feels like it could be a good background setting for a TV show.

The Regime, then, which – oh, hello. Kate Winslet – who you liked in Mare of Easttown, Titanic, and that bit in the nun outfit in Extras – is here, and she’s absolutely chomping every bit of scenery they’ve got. There’s a nameless state in “Middle Europe” that she’s the tyrannical dictator of, but she’s gone all weird and exists as a highly-strung black hole hurtling through an exquisite palace, making every soldier and secretary and live-in servant bend to her every whim as she does so. There’s a new advisor, a shady clearout of the slithering yes-persons who got them into this mess in the first place, a dead father kept in a Lenin’s Tomb-style glass coffin, a lot of flags and powerful padded shoulders, and a bubbling diplomatic crisis brewing with America. What The Regime does so well is pushes itself (both aesthetically and with the performances) into a place that’s amped up and near-cartoonish – this couldn’t happen, could it! Kate Winslet being so hygiene-conscious that she’s sleeping in an oxygen tent! – which, in its extremity, becomes detached enough from reality that it serves as a canvas primed for some sharp-toothed, bubble-bursting, Stick It To The Man satire. And then … it kind of forgets to do any of it.

Perhaps this is a misreading of the series: sometimes a story can just be a story, sometimes an idea can be a fun idea, not everything needs to be about something else, surely we come to TV for escapism, not a dull clang of reality. Sure. But all the ingredients in The Regime are there – Stephen Frears directs, and it looks great – there’s an incredible early scene, a morning briefing where each and every Yes Man is trying to Yes the loudest, that is shot from sharp mad angles, like you’re watching it with your head on upside-down. Kate Winslet puts in a huge performance as a sort of Daddy’s-Girl adult power toff, doing this incredible tic, purring a quiet “yah” after every sentence, which really is funny every time. And Matthias Schoenaerts is also very good opposite her, despite seeming to have based his entire performance on that clip of Oleksandr Usyk standing stoic while Anthony Joshua did a big mad speech after their fight. It’s got oompah beats of farce and a fascinating-but-wasted character in Andrea Riseborough’s grounds manager Agnes, the loyal and dutiful servant who has seen every shade of madness unfurl within the palace walls. And then, an American sort of turns up for a meeting for a bit. They put a painting up. There’s a bit of a panic about an intruder. There’s a speech made to the camera. All the pieces are there, nothing is happening with them. You are constantly waiting for the teeth to bite.

How you feel about The Regime might depend on how you felt about The Menu, co-written by series creator Will Tracy (who also wrote three episodes of Succession – look how excited you just got when I mentioned Succession!), a film that cast Anya Taylor-Joy as “a normal person” and Ralph Fiennes as “whatever Ralph Fiennes wants to do, really”. For me, it didn’t quite hit – the best bits were when it was satirising the current moment in food and restaurant culture, and Nicholas Hoult’s turn as an unbearable foodie bro, but it lost me when it just became “what if some mad stuff happened?”. That, I think, might be my issue with The Regime: at every turn I kept expecting something interesting or clever or wicked to unfold, and then every episode seemed to end with the same moral, which is: “Kate Winslet’s being a bit weird, isn’t she?”. If you’re into that, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re agitating for something more: well, I guess let’s just hope Armando Ianucci has something in the works.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson’s most famous image back when she was Sam Taylor-Wood, the talented Young British Artist, was a self-portrait standing in a black suit holding a rigid upwards-pointing hare. Hares appeared in her work elsewhere and it is a cornered hare, ready to dart any second, that comes to mind as I sit opposite her now. She’s 57, and has the clean beauty of someone who spends time in California, but uses London teenager slang, like “bare” to mean “very”. She is wearing a blue Sézane shirt that the eldest of her four daughters gave to her on Mother’s Day, embroidered with “Sam” – which was going to be “Mum” except her daughter feared she wouldn’t wear it – and eating seed crackers and a ­pistachio dip, which she insists I try.

She hopes I don’t mind that she’s sitting here in a London restaurant “with my zip and button undone. Because,” her voice rings with amusement, “why not wear jeans when you’ve got a tummy ache?” It’s been upset for days, a possible consequence of being “in a hole” for two years making Back to Black, her Amy Winehouse film. Anyway, she is glad to catch me fresh from a screening of it and is ready to hear what I think.

This is her fourth film. All are beautiful to look at, but the story of Winehouse, the singer who died aged 27 of alcohol poisoning in 2011, might be the most devastating. Taylor-Johnson says she “seems to pick intense, deep subjects”, as if by accident. Like Winehouse, her life has always been everywhere in her work. Plus, for very different reasons, both artists have been picked over for their choice of partner. Winehouse was pursued by paparazzi through Camden’s cobblestone alleys because of her bad-boy, drug-hound husband Blake Fielder-Civil. Taylor-Johnson has been called a “groomer” online by deranged teens because she is married to heart-throb actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, 23 years her junior.

She has a soft spot for Nowhere Boy (2009) about the young John Lennon because it was her first feature (and where she met Aaron), but “Back to Black probably is the best thing I’ve done”. You see, she learned from the “horrendous” experience of directing Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), on which there were incessant struggles with author EL James, “never to compromise my creative process again”. And what she drew from A Million Little Pieces (2019), the low-budget adaptation of James Frey’s crack memoir, was teamwork and never to forget the “nuts and bolts creativity of art school”. (She gleefully recounts mixing brown paint for consistency and rigging up a system with pin-pricked rubber tubing to create the effect of shit sliding down walls.)

On Back to Black, she set out to immerse herself fully in “Amy’s psyche: her world, her life, her trajectory, her music, her lyrics, her environment. I became instinctive in her space. That was really what I loved doing and what I feel I’m good at doing.” The more she walked in step with Winehouse, saw what Winehouse saw, the more she felt she was slipping into “madness”. It took its toll, “emotionally, mentally, physically, because it sucked me to a place that I didn’t understand how to get back out of at the end. I can’t really explain that without sounding, you know, quite out there.”

The result is at times impressionistic, at times poetic. Taylor-Johnson was told by Janis, Amy’s mother, about a canary Amy kept called Ava, a bird she loved so much that when it died she put it in a sunglasses case and insisted on taking it to a cemetery for a proper burial. “That really stuck with me. That bird is so reflective of her, her state, the fragility of it.”

It’s the second Winehouse film; the first was the Oscar-winning documentary Amy (2015) by Asif Kapadia. Taylor-Johnson describes hers as the “love story” between Winehouse (played by Marisa Abela) and Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell). Poor old Reg Traviss, her boyfriend when she died, doesn’t get a look in. Winehouse had issues before meeting Fielder-Civil, not least bulimia. She liked a drink – “rickstacy” in the film, an evil-sounding concoction made with banana liqueur – and was partial to the odd spliff, but opened gigs shouting, “Class A drugs are for mugs”. By the middle of the film, she is both obsessed with Fielder-Civil and smoking a crack pipe. Because it’s Winehouse’s perspective, Taylor-Johnson turns the volume down on the entire universe shrieking Leave him! as she became visibly more addicted. “Amy loved him,” she says, “and we’re seeing him through her eyes. Whether we judge him for what’s right or wrong is a separate issue.”

Of course, sailing upwards from the wreckage of this turbulent, edge-of-sanity love, is the lyrical and musical genius that formed the tracks on Back to Black. Did Taylor-Johnson meet Fielder-Civil? “No. We had a few meetings set up, but the closer they got, he would cancel. Jack [O’Connell] met him and was like, ‘I understand who he is. He’s somebody I could’ve hung out with.’” Alison Owen, the film’s producer, found him charismatic, and understood why Winehouse fell in love with him. “And that’s so important. I couldn’t present Blake as someone twisted, tortured. He had to be somebody who we as an audience understood and loved.” And, anyway, Taylor-Johnson doesn’t believe in “stupid one-dimensional demon” characters.

Although she met the Winehouse family, “out of respect, because it would’ve felt really wrong if I hadn’t”, she paid less attention to Winehouse’s diehard fans. She knew they might disapprove, just like the Beatles fans who had made an “overwhelming” noise over Nowhere Boy. “So, it wasn’t my first rodeo of handling massive fanbase subject matters, but I had to push everything out [of mind]. I’m shooting, thinking, ‘Is this how she would want it to be seen?’ Right down to door handles and curtain fabric, an earring or sofa.”

Winehouse is rooted in her Jewish background. Her heritage was important to her, Taylor-Johnson says. She wore a Magen David necklace, “and I wanted to couple that with her family connection”. Winehouse’s grandmother Cynthia (Lesley Manville), for instance, is a huge influence. Winehouse’s father, Mitch, like Fielder-Civil, has been vilified after her death – accused of greed and a failure to get her proper treatment. (He called the Kapadia documentary “horrible”). Here, Eddie Marsan gives a sympathetic portrayal. Yes, Mitch is a bit controlling, but father and daughter are close and loving. “I actually met Mitch with Eddie on that table over there,” Taylor-Johnson says, pointing to a quiet corner behind me.

She thought at first Abela wouldn’t “inhabit the grit and the toughness” of Winehouse. “Because Marisa is sweet, gentle, charming, self-effacing; quiet. There were other girls who came in and had that raw energy.” But Abela said, “Give me a minute”, as Taylor-Johnson was setting up the camera. “And then she looked up and into the lens. I went, ‘Oh my god, it’s her.’ She just summoned the spirit.”

Taylor-Johnson still cries at key moments, despite having seen the film “a gazillion” times. Did she come to understand what lay behind Winehouse’s self-destruction? “Not really. Most addicts I know say, ‘I’m the only one who could have ever saved me.’ So it’s difficult to cast blame. I spent a lot of time with James Frey, for example. He was like, ‘I have no idea where it came from. I had a healthy upbringing. Great parents. Middle-class. Happy.’”

“Sorry,” she says, breaking off to double-kiss someone from Los Angeles. She seems to know everyone here, including all the waiting staff. The sofa she’s parked on faces the door, so there’s constant interruption. When she returns, she says she and Aaron, also British, have recently moved back to the UK. They made this sudden decision one evening two years ago, when summer was high and hot and England looked seductive. “We were like, ‘Let’s not go back.’” Meaning: let’s not go back to California. “It was June. It was heaven.”

So, the family uprooted. That is, Angelica, 26, and Jessie Phoenix, 17 – her daughters with ex-husband Jay Jopling, the art dealer – and Wylda Rae, 13, and Romy Hero, 12, her daughters with Aaron. They have settled in Somerset, in arcadian bliss, along with dogs, cats, cows, pigs, chickens and rabbits. “I’ll turn to Aaron and say, ‘Should we get another dog?’, and he’ll look at me for a minute and go, ‘Yuh.’ He always says yes to any mad thing I suggest. That’s why we’ve got 14 animals.”

She’s not sure if she regrets the move now, with a stomach ache on a rainy day in spring, she jokes. “Post-pandemic, it was that feeling of wanting to come home. I mean, LA is great if you’re always in the nature aspects of it – walking in canyons, down at the beach, surfing. But shopping malls are the most depressing places to find yourself on a Saturday afternoon. I much prefer Golborne Road [near Portobello market, in west London]. Or Bath or Bruton or Frome.”

The Taylor-Johnsons are an unconventional pairing, because it’s still unusual for a high-profile woman to be much older than her husband, as opposed to the other way around. Arguably, the director–lead star dynamic was in some senses a reversal of the dealer–artist dynamic of her marriage to Jopling. She met Aaron when he was cast aged 18 as the young John Lennon on Nowhere Boy in early 2009. Their chemistry was unmissable to those on set. She was 42 and recently separated from Jopling. Aaron was not “groomed”, as the online trolls suggest, but the one pursuing her, he has said. They were engaged by the time the film premiered in October 2009 and their first child was born the following year. They married in 2012.

Was she at all hesitant, I ask. She had experienced abandonment by her father, then when she was 15 her mother handed her a note and said: “Give this to your stepdad, I’m leaving you all.” Did that not make her cynical about relationships? “If I had been cynical for a second, it wouldn’t have worked. If I had questioned anything, it would never have worked. I’m quite instinctual. I’ve gone feet first into everything in my life. I’m always, ‘This seems amazing’, and I jump straight in and go through the experience, whether good or bad. It’s definitely a ‘Fuck it, let’s go with it’ approach. And I’m a great believer that the heart overrides everything. Love conquers all.”

In interviews, she has often stressed that the family is never apart. They used to move en masse, all six upping sticks to film sets; alternating jobs “one on, one off”, so that one parent could always be hands-on with the children. More recently, Aaron’s career has really taken off. This year alone he stars in Kraven the Hunter, a superhero blockbuster; Nosferatu, with Bill Skarsgård and Nicholas Hoult; and at the time of writing he was tipped as the next James Bond (a rumour he seemed to scotch, saying, “I don’t feel like I need to have a future drawn out for me. I feel like: whatever’s drawn out for me, I can fuckin’ do better”). For the first time in their married life, they were separated when he flew alone to shoot The Fall Guy in Australia for six weeks while she was on Back to Black. “We drafted in his parents to help with the kids and we all went, ‘Bye!’” She mimes waving Aaron off on the plane. “But that was tough and neither of us enjoyed it, so it’ll be back to one on, one off  now.”

I am curious: does the age gap ever show up? In terms of different interests or cultural reference points? “No, it never does. I mean, it’s coming up now because you’re asking. And it comes up on the outside perspective of people who don’t know us, because I guess people will always … ” She flicks her hand but can’t capture the word. “We’re a bit of an anomaly, but it’s that thing: after 14 years you just think, surely by now it doesn’t really matter?”

Both of them have distinct fanbases. She says she only really likes being recognised in the street if she’s with one of her children and can say: “See? I’m not just a mum. I am actually important in the world, so you can actually help me by putting your socks on.” Who are Aaron’s fans? She gives me a look. “The obvious,” she says, by which she means teenage girls. “And every so often a diehard, big-bearded Marvel fan.”

Interactions are “mostly” nice in person, but there are vicious people online. “They’re abusive about anything,” she says, nonchalant. Does she avoid going on social media? “No, I don’t. Because it’s just there, but it doesn’t mean anything. It is just people upset with their own sadness; with misgivings about their own life.” Do their children face prejudice? “Not really. Or, if so, I don’t think they care. They see two loving, happy parents, so it doesn’t really register. They just think people are a bit mean, or mad.” She says again that they have been married for 12 years and together for 14. She was with Jopling for nine. “So, if you think of it in that way, then the age gap doesn’t really make any difference.”

Sam Taylor-Johnson (then Wood) graduated from Goldsmiths in its “golden era”, a photographer and video artist. Michael Craig-Martin and Jon Thompson were among her lecturers. Students, including her then boyfriend Jake Chapman, were taught to be “artists in the real world, not just sitting in your studio”. The ethos, she says: “Do it, don’t wait.” Her early works such as Fuck Suck Spank Wank (1993) – in shades with her trousers down – capture the sulky, defiant spirit of the YBAs.

She and Jopling got together before he was the king of the British art scene, when his now famous White Cube gallery was just a 14 x 14 sq ft space. “Tiny: it was like an office room. One of the first times I went there, he had a Tracey Emin show, just her little drawings on the wall.” She quips of the Emin-Jopling decades-long professional relationship, “Tracey used to say, ‘He’s a great dealer and a great deal more.’ They are still going strong, Tracey and Jay. She is the great love story in his life.” But Taylor-Johnson is still on good terms with her ex-husband: “We get on really well.”

In 1997, Taylor-Johnson won Most Promising Artist at the Venice Biennale. That same year, Angelica was born and she and Jopling married. But she returned again and again to the doctor fearing something wasn’t quite right. “I felt like I had no energy. I felt like shit. I was feeling all these pains and not eating really well. Maybe the passing blood thing should have been a red flag. But it was just like,” she mimics a doctor’s annoyed voice, “‘You’ve just had a baby. That’s what it is.’” That December, she was diagnosed with the first of two primary cancers she has had (“I think it’s called being unlucky”) and a foot and a half of her colon was removed on Christmas Eve. In 1998, she was nominated for the Turner prize, while undergoing treatment.

Two years later, in 2000, she had breast cancer. “You won’t believe it, but I got misdiagnosed the second time as well.” She had enrolled with a “fancy” doctor and went to see him with an underarm lump, thinking, ‘That’s not normal.’ Without an examination or tests, she was dispatched on grounds she didn’t need any more prodding or needles. “Let’s leave you alone,” he told her (“very English”), and so the cancer was left for a whole year. “So bad,” she says now. “I had to have a mastectomy and six months of chemo. I see him on the street and I want to punch him.” She watched the opening of Tate Modern from the chemotherapy ward.

All the pain and fear of death she felt was channelled into her art: Still Life (2001) is the speeded-up film of a decaying bowl of fruit; A Little Death (2002), a hare, arranged legs upwards, decomposing stomach first. Later she made Suspended (2003), a series of photographs in which, dressed in vest and knickers, she appears to float. She had hired a bondage expert to tie her up in different shapes and positions, and afterwards digitally removed the ropes to create a sense not of torturous constraint but freedom, of letting go. Although, she said afterwards: “I don’t think you ever really let go of cancer once you’ve been through it.”

Her later work features a lot of celebrities. There is David (2004), a 107-minute video of David Beckham asleep that was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, and a series of photographs of actors crying that included Laurence Fishburne (2002) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (2004). Was that the precursor to a move into film? “I always wanted to make films in the back of my mind,” she says, but it wasn’t until she met Anthony Minghella when they were both judges for the British Independent Film Awards that the opportunity presented itself. She said she was mouthing off, ‘That film is a piece of shit, blahlala. And then someone would say [puts hand up], ‘Actually, I produced that.’” This somehow tickled Minghella. “He said, ‘You’re very … ’, I think he meant opinionated, but he said ‘… knowledgable. Have you ever considered making films?’” They made Love You More (2008), a gem of a short film written by Patrick Marber that revolved around a Buzzcocks soundtrack. “It completely gave me the bug for film-making.”

Was her art abandoned? “It feels like two different sides of my personality: my art world life and my film world life,” she says. She’d like to return to it, “but because I exited the art world, it’s a really strange position to be in in terms of trying to come back in again”.

She shows me some new work: a series of exquisite photographs of her suspended from a crane in Joshua Tree, the US national park, surrounded by nature. They represent a moment in space and time, of reflection, feelings she had about living in America, the alien landscape – beautiful, but at the same time “brittle and quite brutal”. In hindsight, she realises stringing herself up 50ft in the air above ginormous rocks was pretty dangerous. “And painful. I did the first ones nearly 20 years ago. I’m still pretty physically strong and fit, but, I’ve got to admit, I noticed the changes. I was like, waaaahhh, as I went up. And hanging upside down. It really fucking hurt. For about three weeks I wasn’t able to walk properly.”

In December, she put on a new exhibition of this work in a gallery in Rome. “And no one … ” she falters. I think both of us are surprised by what she is about to say: that few people came. “It really blew my mind.” Apart from the date – too near Christmas – she and the gallerist both wondered if people had failed to make a connection between Sam Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Wood. “They didn’t realise that we are one and the same.” The idea that this might be a problem “just hadn’t crossed my mind”. She and Aaron blended their surnames when they married, which Aaron described as the desire to be part of one another. It seems astonishing, nonetheless, that she would sacrifice the name recognition she had built up over years of hard work.

But then Taylor-Johnson emphatically does not believe in looking back. One critic described her as someone who lives “a chronologically compartmentalised life”. Perhaps this survival skill was forced on her by her bolting parents. When I ask about moving to East Sussex aged 11 with her mother and stepfather, she says she is processing it in real time as we speak. The entire period was bleak. The house, in the village of Crowborough, “had a very dark atmosphere” – ironic, given it was named Sunny Villa. “It was an old house, which makes it sound grand, but it was not.”

It had thin walls covered in brown hessian and was damp, and so riddled with rats that when she went to her attic bedroom at night, she could hear them scrabbling above her head. (She is now so phobic that walking down the street with the actor Naomi Watts in New York recently, two rats popped out of a drain close to her, and, “I was two or three blocks away before Naomi even noticed.”)

From this “terrible fucking squalor”, her mother and stepfather had run a “post-hippy, meditating, yogi-kind of, but not quite” commune with a constant carousel of strangers. Taylor-Johnson, her younger sister and half-brother were largely left to their own devices in a way that she describes as “unhinged and boundary-less”. I ask what she means by this. “I’m racking my brains as I process my childhood. Because they didn’t care, is the simple answer. At 14, I could go out and come home three days later. They’d be like, ‘Oh, hey.’ Which is quite difficult and confusing as a kid.”

About six months after her mother, Geraldine, left, Taylor-Johnson was walking to school and saw a kitchen blind go up in a house nearby. There in the window was her mother. She hadn’t seen or heard from her since she left. The blind went quickly down again. Geraldine had run off with another man.

Geraldine has since written a memoir claiming she left because a series of visions guided her to seek the holy grail. She subsequently moved to Australia with her third husband. Taylor-Johnson, meanwhile, was struggling through O-levels, moving into a bedsit by 17. “You go through that phase of anger and hurt and pain. Then there comes a point where forgiveness is as healing for you as it is for the other person. It gets to a point where you don’t want to carry that pain and anger any more. And, then also feeling, ‘Actually I’d quite like a relationship with one or both of my parents.’” That is made difficult by the fact that Geraldine still lives in Queensland. “Yeah, she’s really full-on.” Her father is remarried and living in Barbados, “so I don’t really see him, either”.

Does she understand their behaviour? “They had me when they were 18, so I understand to a certain degree. But I’m a parent, so, at the same time, I think, ‘Wait, how could you have headed off like that?’”

A waitress interrupts to ask if the gluten-free option Taylor-Johnson has ordered is because of an allergy or a preference. Taylor-Johnson tells her not to worry, but afterwards mutters: “I could explain that gluten just fucks my stomach up.” She went to the doctor yesterday, but the doctor flapped her away saying, “It’ll go”, in the way that UK doctors do. “In LA, I’d be given five different things.” She laughs unhappily, and says that in a way she admires the stoicism of the British patient.

She regrets telling an interviewer a few years ago that she was an alcoholic, because she’s not. She just meant the YBAs used to drink a lot in the heady 90s. Actually, after being ill “your capacity to do anything harmful to yourself in any way just makes you panic”. She stopped drinking completely in the pandemic. Then in August, thought, “Oh, this is ridiculous. Of course, I can have a drink. Oh boy, battery acid on a fragile system.” It took until Christmas to recover, she says. “I’m not even joking.”

Her friends give her the eye-roll when she says this, but with a life so busy shuttling between Somerset and London, she has to be careful not to be capsized. “There’s no downtime.” She tries to decompress with an evening routine that involves taking a magnesium salt bath, listening to a podcast and drinking a mug of Yogi bedtime tea. And there’s Aaron. “He gives me that sort of stability, calmness. I’m definitely the kind of frenetic, mad energy that needs someone to anchor me. Keep me a bit more grounded. Which he certainly does. He really loves being quiet, in nature. He’s a real stay-at-home person.”

The fear of cancer comes and goes, she says. Mostly, it’s “deep in the rear-view mirror. But when I have to go for annual check-ups, it comes quickly into the forefront.” Sometimes, she will cancel appointments and not tell Aaron, who “gets very irate. I turn into a tantrum-y five-year-old, like, ‘I’m not going.’” She shakes her head furiously. “I could throw myself from a moving car on the way to any hospital appointments. Aaron has to double lock the car to make sure I can’t get out, then get me there, push me through the doors, hold me down. It’s quite a process.”

She says nothing bothers her – not stepping on set with hundreds of people, not the fans, not the trolls – because, “the most frightening thing I can do is walk through those hospital doors”. She’s laughing as she says this, but also packing her phone into her bag to leave. I imagine Aaron trying to reassure this wild creature in the car before she leaps away. I feel as if I am trapping her myself as I glance down at my last few questions and attempt a stalling tactic. But the instinct to escape is hardwired, like the restless need to keep moving forward.

James Rainey reads trees like most people read signposts.

The senior ecologist with the rewilding charity Trees for Life is using a small hand lens to identify a particular lichen that is wreathing the base of an aspen tree in a secluded glen on the west coast of Scotland. He is looking for “ecological clues” of species associated with the ancient Caledonian forest that once covered most of the Highlands, like this aspen, certain wildflowers, such as serrated wintergreen, and some lichens, such as black-eyed Susan and Norwegian specklebelly.

Wild pines have been growing in Scotland since the last ice age. This is a globally unique ecosystem that supports rare wildlife, including red squirrels, capercaillie and crossbills. Now less than 2% of the original growth survives, with just 84 individual Caledonian pinewoods officially recognised, having last been documented more than a quarter of a century ago.

But now Trees for Life and Woodland Trust Scotland have become aware of up to 50 other hitherto uncharted wild pinewoods, both from historical documents and anecdotal contemporary reports. The charities have turned tree detectives as they embark on the painstaking process of mapping – and hopefully reviving – these remote pockets of forgotten forest before they vanish for ever.

Rainey says the ecological investigators use three strands of evidence to pinpoint where these pinewoods first stood.

“First there’s the historical evidence, like old maps and texts,” he says. “Rev Timothy Pont, a Church of Scotland minister and cartographer, made incredible sketch maps of the Highlands in the late 1500s, which mention ‘fir woods’ in some areas, the old word for pine woods.”

There are cultural clues too, such as Gaelic place names referring to pine or woodlands.

The first ordnance surveys of the 1800s were remarkably accurate, and often used conifer symbols to represent pine woods. Trees for Life digitised these maps and superimposed the present-day landscape, making it easier to identify where they suggest unplanted or wild pine sites once were.

Rainey says: “Then we look at the landscape context of the site: is the pine associated with planting around a big house for example, or is the setting more natural?

“And finally, we use the ecological evidence: wild pine usually grows alongside old birch trees, while planted pine is often mixed with larch. Many ancient pinewoods also have lots of stumps scattered through them, and certain kinds of plants and lichens that indicate ecological continuity.”

After the last ice age, the pine was one of the first trees to return to Scotland, and there are microfossils in Glen Affric that date from 9,900 years ago. Mainly a tree of the Highlands and uplands, most of its decline has been caused by human deforestation.

“The emphasis after the second world war was on creating strategic resources for Britain, resulting in many areas of the Highlands being ploughed and planted in rows for commercial forestry,” says Rainey. “This was often done with cheap land that included ancient woodlands and it was really devastating to the last remaining trees.”

Restoration is possible, however, especially since some old trees survive along with the ancient woodland soil and seed bank: seeds stored in the soil, which can germinate once the heavy shade of commercial conifers is removed.

On the site we are currently exploring, which ranges along a river gorge, through woodland and commercial forestry then up to a high mountain dam across nearly 10 miles (16km), Trees for Life estimates there are about 85,000 seedlings unable to grow taller because of grazing by sheep and deer. Commercial trees – such as Sitka spruce – are not as tasty to the herbivores, so are usually left alone.

As the gorge deepens, Rainey points out the first indications of ancient woodland: a huge stool with thickly twisted trunks of regrowth, like a petrified octopus clinging to the rocky bank and aged between 400 and 500 years old.

Rainey has identified 23 pines in this area, 17 in the gorge and six on the crags higher up the mountain, all rooted in places least accessible to grazing deer. The needles have been taken for genetic testing to confirm their heritage.

Further along the gorge, we find a clump of pines beside the river, each of them in a uniquely gnarled and complicated shape, unlike the uniform rows of bushy soldiers standing to attention in the commercial plantations.

A few more kilometres in we find a young wild pine, a fresh blue-green in colour, probably a sapling from one of the ancient river trees, and aged about 12 years, according to the nodes that grow annually. It has already been eaten down by deer.

Much further up the mountain, buffeted by an icy wind, a handful of ancient pines are huddled in inaccessible spots across the otherwise bare shoulder.

Rainey says: “This would have been filled with trees but is now empty – these are the most critical areas in need of regeneration and we want the whole of the old growth woodlands to recover, not just the pines, but oak, rowan, birch, alder, hazel.

“In 100 years’ time people could be looking at quite a full woodland on this side of the hill and not believe that it was in such a state of degradation – the capercaillie and wildcat could live in a place like this – so if you want them back too then you have to restore these woods.”

They look a little like cockroaches and have bulging orange eyes, and trillions of them are about to erupt from the earth in much of the midwestern and eastern United States. The emergence of two groups of cicadas will assemble a chorus of the insects not seen in several hundred years, experts say.

The simultaneous appearance of the two cicada broods – known as Brood XIX and Brood XII – is a rare event, not having occurred since 1803, a year when Thomas Jefferson was US president. “It’s really exciting. I’ve been looking forward to this for many years,” said Catherine Dana, an entomologist who specializes in cicadas at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “For the public, it’s going to be a really special experience.”

There are thousands of species of cicadas around the world but only 10 are considered periodical – having a life cycle that involves the juvenile cicadas living underground and feeding on plant sap for years before emerging en masse to the surface.

This year will see Brood XIX, the largest of all periodical cicada groups, emerge after a 13-year dormancy underground at the same time as Brood XII, a smaller group that appears every 17 years. The emergence will occur in spring, as early as this month in some places, and will see trillions of cicadas pop up in as many as 16 states, from Maryland to Oklahoma and from Illinois to Alabama.

This phenomenon, which has been dubbed “cicada-geddon” or “cicada-palooza”, will see huge clumps of cicadas across urban and rural areas, where the insects will make quite a noise – their songs collectively can be louder than a revving motorbike. After a frenzy of calling and mating and being devoured by predators, the cicadas will begin the cycle all over again in July.

The two broods may only overlap slightly in a small area of central Illinois, meaning there mostly won’t be a larger-than-normal boom in numbers in any one place, but researchers have said the emergence of all seven periodical species found in the US will be noticeable in many places and provide a rare glimpse of a grand ecological spectacle.

“I like to remind people that this is a natural wonder of the world. You just don’t see this biomass of terrestrial life anywhere else,” said Dana. There are several theories as to why cicadas do this, among the most popular being that an overwhelming surge of the creatures ensures that a good number will survive predators to spawn the next generation.

Some Americans are planning trips in order to see hotspots of cicadas, with other, more insect-phobic people wondering whether they should flee the onslaught. Cicadas aren’t harmful to people or pets in any way, though, with the insects having a straw-like mouth rather than any sort of biting parts. Some cicadas have been found to expel jets of urine when threatened, however.

As with most interactions between humans and the natural world, humans pose the bigger threat. Cicadas choose to burst aboveground when the soil temperature hits a certain point – usually around 64F (17C) – and global heating, caused by the burning of fossil fuels, is potentially scrambling this natural process.

“This could mess with their phenology. If they come out earlier than usual, that can be problematic for them,” said Dana.

For now, onlookers can still enjoy this rare burst of nature in their gardens and public spaces. “Sit back and be in awe at the spectacle,” advised John Cooley, a cicada expert at the University of Connecticut who tracks the emergences. “It will be over soon enough. Then think about where you will be in 13 or 17 years. It’s a time for introspection.”