Gill Gent (1927-2018) cutting the cake as guest of honour of the Wildlife Trust BCN’s 50th anniversary event
We were so sorry to hear about the death of Gill Gent in October 2018. Gill was Northamptonshire plant recorder for decades. Her death came very close to that of Rob Wilson, who took on the recorder’s role when Gill stepped down. Losing them both in such a short space of time left a huge hole in the natural history community of the county. Gill’s botanical skills were incredible, but the most amazing thing about Gill was just how universally liked she was: the most incredibly patient teacher and advisor, giving up so much of her time to help others develop an interest in wildlife, particularly botany of course. By the early nineties, when I first started working at the Wildlife Trust in Northamptonshire, Gill was well established as the county’s most eminent botanist.
Work was well underway on the first of the two floras she and Rob produced together for the county, but despite the huge amount of work involved in pulling the flora together, Gill always found time to help run courses and provide advice on the plants found on the Trust’s nature reserves. She was remarkably tolerant of young botanists turning up on her doorstep clutching moth-eaten specimens, often without the vital characteristic for identifying them properly. If she wasn’t in she was equally polite about finding specimens lying on her doorstep pressed between sheets of whatever paper we’d found floating around in the car or van we were passing by in. No matter how easy the plant should have been to identify, or how impossible it was given the state in which it had arrived, there would always be a polite phone call the following day. Gill would either tell us what it was (and how interesting it was, what habitat it should have been in, and how to look after it) or carefully to explain what we needed to look for to be able to properly identify it next time.
Gill’s encouragement of Wildlife Trust staff and volunteers over the years was unceasing. Until a few months before her death, she was still finding the energy to join the Pitsford Nature Reserve recording group, giving her always sound advice on the botanical interest of the site where she had provided so much input into developing our understanding of its importance and ecology.
I was lucky enough to know Gill a little outside the conservation world, thanks to a shared love of music. Her enthusiasm on that front was on a par with her love of plants, and she had a way of spreading the joy she felt to those around her. She will be terribly missed, but she will be remembered not only for her amazing patience but also for the legacy of her work on understanding and communicating the wild flowers of Northamptonshire, not least through the revised flora, an invaluable contribution to conservation work in the county.
Matt Jackson, Conservation Manager (Bedfordshire & Northamptonshire), Wildlife Trust BCN