Monks Wood Wilderness: 60 years ago, scientists let a farm field rewild

Recently, I've been thinking about "City Country Fingers," a way of integrating urban and agricultural land found in Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language." You can read his description of the pattern here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm

With the Monks Wood rewilding in mind, I wonder how we could transition urban areas toward a city country finger pattern. Though perhaps there should be three kinds of fingers: city, agriculture, and wilderness. Alexander's "country" is just farmland, though he envisions its recreational use too.

The part of Northeastern Connecticut where I grew up has experienced a happenstance version of this. It's a densely wooded area. As a kid, exploring in the woods you'd always find stone walls, old rusted out trucks from the 30s, the foundations of old houses, etc. I assumed the stone walls were from colonial times and that the trucks had been driven deep into the woods and abandoned. It blew my mind when I learned that in fact the whole area had been farmland just 60 or so years before. Those trucks were left to rot in a field. Those stone walls were at the border between fields. And the forest came back pretty quickly and reclaimed it all.

We should do a lot more of this everywhere.

My dad had 120 acre farmland in middle of Lake Michigan (Beaver Island).

Did a few years of chain cutting young tree and juniper saplings down and let it be grazed by neighborhood livestock.

Then we stopped clearing the saplings.

Fifty years later, it’s all been heavily reforested, many with huge 40-45yo maple, birch, and douglas fir.

Still have the old light aircraft photo of entire land. Looks nothing like Google Earth now.

But it is a great hunting and forage (mushroom) land now.

1000 sqmi of rewilded land: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Exclusion_Zone

So about 50 years and any farmland can turn into a wild forest again? Aka, the deforestation can be reversed in about 50 years?