Our story

Apithanny grew up in the Scottish Borders countryside and is passionate about restoring lost hay meadows to our landscape. She is currently finishing up her PhD and works as Species-rich Grassland Officer for the charity Butterfly Conservation. Her free time is dedicated to volunteering on several environmental charity boards – but she also loves painting and writing about nature in her field journal.

David is a public law barrister with more than 20 years of experience working primarily in areas of local government, planning and housing. On learning about the UK's devastating loss of biodiversity, he became determined  to try and reverse this decline. Together with Reuben Singleton, David founded Merlindale Nature as a means of achieving that goal.

Cat is a biologist with a 30-year career as a scientist and medical writer. Returning to her native Borders in 2015, she became heavily involved in protecting her local environment, leading a grassroots campaign to save a 200 year-old woodland on the Tweed. As a Trustee of Planning Democracy, she aims to promote greater equality and fairness in the planning system to benefit our environment and people.

A true countryman, Reuben has lived in rural areas all his life, growing up on a small dairy farm in Gloucestershire before studying at Aberystwyth University. Since then, he has forged a career in nature conservation in Scotland working in both the public and private sectors. For the last ten years he has run his own company, Tweed Ecology, providing ecological expertise across northern England and southern Scotland.