Kathleen DeMaria is the owner of an organic gardening company in Seattle. She is a King County Master Composter, and serves as a director-at-large for the Northwest Perennial Alliance, where she chairs the scholarship committee and is on the Linnaeus Celebration Committee.

Greg Rubin, owner of California’s Own Native Landscape Design, has been working with native plants for more than twenty years. He left a successful career as an engineer, in favor of creating native gardens for the San Diego area, and lectures regularly on his favorite native plants.

Judy M Horton has been designing gardens for fifteen years. An avid gardener, she has been involved with the Garden Conservancy’s Open Days Program since 2000. A board member of the California Garden and Landscape History Society and the Los Angeles Arboretum Foundation, she has recently begun to focus on garden and landscape preservation issues in the Los Angeles area.

Don Schultz is horticulture manager for the Water Conservation Garden at Cuyamaca College in El Cajon, California. He also teaches classes on irrigation and gardening topics both to homeowners and landscape professionals. In his spare time he enjoys hiking and camping, particularly in Southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and Joshua Tree National Park.

Demitra Bowles Lathrop holds a degree in English literature from University of California at Berkeley. She has served as editor and contributor to various arts, design, and literary publications. She lives and gardens in San Francisco, where she is active with a number of philanthropic groups.

Iain M Robertson has taught at the University of Washington for over twenty years. His interests include plants as a design medium, human experiences of landscape designs, and urban ecological design. He has practiced as a landscape architect in his native Scotland and on the East and West coasts, and has consulted with several Western arboreta and botanic gardens.

Pat Rubin lives in Auburn, California. She writes about gardening for The Sacramento Bee, and has also written for Fine Gardening, Family Circle, San Francisco Chronicle, California Journal, and more. She is especially interested in mediterranean-type  plants, but is also working to collect every kniphofia she can find.

Frederique Lavoipierre is the creator and author of “Garden Allies,” a series that ran for 10 years in Pacific Horticulture magazine. She also teaches classes and workshops on sustainable landscaping, including ecological principles, habitat gardens, beneficial insects, soil ecology, freshwater ecology, and aquatic invertebrates. Follow her on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Garden.Allies.

Diane Cary is communications director at the UC Davis Arboretum, a researcher in the Landscape Architecture program at UC Davis, and an independent curator and arts programmer.

Ellen Zagory is director of horticulture at the UC Davis Arboretum, where she frequently lectures on bringing wildlife into the garden.