julia watkins

Julia Watkins is a popular author and blogger known for her Simply Living Well blog, which provides people with simple and slow ways to make their home and garden sustainable. She is the author of two wonderful books: Simply Living Well and Gardening for Everyone, and her online audience includes more than a quarter of a million Instagram followers. She is also the co-founder of the non-profit Lookfar Conservation project, which supports ethical and regenerative ecological and agricultural practices in Latin America and parts of Africa.

Watkins is unashamedly inspired by the older, slower, more natural methods of living that have been all but lost amid today’s headlong rush toward speed and instant gratification. She was inspired to pursue these methods of living by memories of her grandparents and by the time she spent volunteering with the Peace Corps in West Africa, living with an agrarian community in Guinea.

Today, she lives in Chicago with her family, tending to her home and garden and writing both her blog and her books. There is perhaps an irony in her social media fame, given her old-school methods, but the message she is spreading is one of simplicity and slowness — a message that more and more people are hearing and finding inspirational.