Gill Sim

When I meet people and they ask “what do you do?”, I am not really sure how to respond.  Perhaps it should be “I try to incorporate the Natural World into my life each day.”

I am a qualified Horticulturalist, with my own gardening business in South East England. Specialising in wildlife friendly gardening I have a passion for plants along with the myriad of wild creatures I encounter.  I have a wealth of experience, having worked in many types of garden, from National Trust property to the smallest courtyard in the centre of London.  It’s a challenge, but I enjoy it immensely.  

Nature will always confound you, but she will bring beauty and harmony with time and patience.

Since childhood the natural world has been an integral part of my life.  As a youngster I received a prized Blue Peter badge for my photo of a Sparrow, taken with an old Kodak Brownie 127 from my mother.  This really kick started my love of photography too. Studying biology and other sciences at school I dreamed of being a Biologist (actually a Marine Biologist - which I blame on Jacques Cousteau and his ‘Undersea World’).  However, it was not to be, and my life took another direction for some years.

Exploring the natural world during that period was confined to my leisure time, taking trips to wild places in the UK and abroad, visiting interesting gardens, photographing everything, joining clubs and experimenting with plants in my garden.

For the past 15 years or so, I have been involved in countryside conservation, learning about the environment, biodiversity, ponds, wetlands, and woodland, heath and downland management. To see an area of scrubland transform over time, into a meadow teeming with wildlife, or to sit in a woodland glade you have opened up, watching butterflies fluttering in the sunlight, cannot be described in words.

For the last 4 years I have been working with the team at SimonKingWildlife.com sharing the Natural World on the internet.  It has opened up a whole new horizon to my life, sharing the wild world across the globe, and I have met some wonderful people along the way. It has also fueled my passion for photography, and more recently film.  My experiences out in the field inspire my work as a gardener, the two environments being inextricably linked.

Here at Wildlife Whisperer I hope to share my love of gardening and wildlife, with interesting topical information, projects of importance and the challenges we face in these economic and environmentally troubled times.

“In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous” -  Aristotle