The People behind the Project
Meet our team
At The Wildlife Garden Project, we have a small team of nature-loving people working behind the scenes on our videos, projects and campaigns.
Over the years we’ve had help from lots of amazing volunteers who’ve given their time to help spread the wildlife gardening word and to them we’d like to say a massive thank you!
Laura Turner, Director
Laura started the Wildlife Garden Project in 2010 with the hope of getting as many people as possible to help the wildlife in their gardens through wildlife friendly gardening.
She is a filmmaker who shoots, edits, and has a passion for the natural world. As well as making our video tutorials, she spends her time getting the wildlife gardening word out by working on our projects and campaigns, and managing our websites and social media pages.
She has worked on conservation documentaries in Australia, big cat safaris in Kenya and most recently she edited a feature length film, Britain’s Hidden Fishes by Jack Perks. Back home in Nottingham, she also runs her own video production company, Laura Turner Film, making videos for charities and businesses as well as educational videos for kids.
Tina Lindsay, Director
One of Tina’s first memories is looking for worms to measure and race wearing wellies and Spiderman pj’s. Thanks to her Mum, she discovered her lifelong love – birds. Growing up, she wanted to be feral – chasing, exploring, discovering and learning at every opportunity. She’s travelled widely from Costa Rica to Borneo and had remarkable adventures – however, is now completely content sharing space with the wild things in the UK, being as captivated as ever.
In the past 12 years, Tina has worked for Froglife, spent 4 years as Events, Lectures & Authors Coordinator for The British Birdwatching Fair (Birdfair), and as Campaign Manager for Chris Packham’s UK Bioblitz. Currently she working with Wild Justice and other groups, projects, campaigns and naturalists and is really excited to be part of the Wildlife Garden Project team.
Ellie Mitchell, Wildlife Gardener
Ellie is a professional wildlife gardener in Nottingham. She gardens organically and has a passion for making gardens as attractive to wildlife as possible, while creating beautiful spaces for people too. In 2021-2023 Ellie co-hosted The Wildlife Garden Podcast, where she interviewed the experts and researchers in wildlife gardening, to get the most up to date science out there for everyone to use. She loves encouraging others to join in with her obsession with plants, particularly native plants, and the wildlife they provide for.
When she’s not wielding her secateurs in her clients’ gardens, she writes about wildlife gardening for the members’ magazine of Plantlife, the national plant conservation charity. More locally in Nottingham, she volunteers for Wild.NG, a group of residents that is trying to make our urban spaces wilder and more beautiful. Alongside all that, once a week she also finds time to volunteer weekly at Hedgepigs, where she helps care for sick or underweight Hedgehogs, to give the population a helping hand.
Tom Shields, Director
Tom works in agriculture, but in his free time enjoys all things wildlifey, especially birds and moths. He runs moth traps all around Nottinghamshire, becoming obsessed with them during the summer months.
He is also a licensed bird ringer, mainly monitoring birds in his garden, but also monitoring Tawny and Barn Owls around South Nottingham. He has a very wild garden, which thrives mainly on neglect!
Helen Hutchings Cox, Wildlife Gardener
Helen Hutchings Cox (aka @helenlikesplants) is a gardener on a mission to get everyone gardening in a nature friendly way, no matter their background or size of space. She believes that gardening holds the key to making the world a better place, by connecting people to nature and to each other.
She is known for her practical, beginner-friendly advice showing people how easy it is to grow food, flowers and wildlife-friendly spaces in any setting – from containers and allotments to new build rubble banks, awkward spaces and secret walled gardens.
She holds a number of roles with gardening and nature based charities and all of these strands tie together with the one goal of widening access to and championing nature for everyone, and safeguarding it for future generations.
She trained in horticulture at Sparsholt College in Hampshire, but before the call of the compost heap was too loud to ignore, Helen was a sustainability director, working with some of the world’s largest companies on their nature strategy. She is currently undertaking a masters in Biodiversity and Conservation, focusing on biodiversity in gardens.
Dr Linda Birkin, Community Entomologist
A professional insect-enthusiast and science communicator, Linda is particularly interested in urban biodiversity and wildlife gardening – especially those parts of it all that creep, crawl, buzz and scuttle! She specializes in citizen / community science, both because of how important these projects are to ecology as a whole, and the empowering nature of on-the-ground investigation and curiosity. Her work aims to bring understanding and interest about invertebrates to the widest audience possible, through talks, workshops and outdoor entomological activities for all ages.
Basically, Linda wants to talk to you about bugs.
All of you. Anyone and everyone. About all the bugs.
Special thanks
A huge thank you to the following people for their contributions to this website and our videos over the years:
Website photography
Lindsey Bowes
Jack Perks
Allen Holmes
Chris and Robert Turner (Laura’s mum and dad)
Piers Warren
Writers
Emma Fraser
Luke Raymond
Andy Mayo
Sharon Roberts
Phil Bruss
Gemma Wren
Toby Greet
Dan Reed
Logo, graphic design and merch art
Colin Marshall
Merch art
Laura Mathews
Danny Cleary
We would like to give a huge thanks to Michael Turner (Laura’s little brother) for designing our first website and being on call to solve all kinds of website related questions when we first started out, and for helping us to get started with the project.
Huge thanks as well to Michelle Widdison, Tom Shields, Lee Kelly and all the wildlife experts, camera operators and volunteers who gave up their weekends to help at events and to work on our films.
Finally, we would like to thank Dorothy and Peter Boden, Bryan and Loraine Oak, and Chris and Rob Turner (Laura’s parents) for allowing us to use their beautiful wildlife gardens for filming our video tutorials.
Event Photos
Video Shoot Photos
