Paddy Wales, author of Journeys Through the Garden, has published many images and articles in Canadian and American books and magazines. She teaches photography, lectures on gardening and photography, and is working to build a new botanical garden in her town of Roberts Creek, near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Glenda Jones, following a career in graphic arts, began a garden maintenance service in 1990, while studying horticulture at Foothill College. She continues her life-long passion for gardening, maintaining her own small Palo Alto garden with a focus on California native plants and compatible mediterranean climate plants.

Erik Hagiwara-Nagata is a specialty rare plant grower and proprietor of Garden Delights Nursery in Sonoma County. He can be reached via his website, through which he is available to answer questions about plants.

Marsha Stout has been growing organic edibles and ornamentals at her home for twenty years. A member of the California Rare Fruit Growers, her prime interest in temperate and subtropical fruits, and enjoys trialing fruits not commonly grown in her frost-free area of Santa Monica.

Terry Hernstrom, a third-generation landscape professional from Illinois, is the director of gardens and grounds at Kimberly Crest House and Gardens in Redlands, California. He also is active with the Redlands Horticultural and Improvement Society and the Friends of Prospect Park.

Frederique Lavoipierre coordinates the Garden Classroom and Entomology Outreach programs and the annual Insecta-Palooza at Sonoma State University.  A founding director of the university’s Susatainable Landscape certificate program, she continues as an instructor there.  She holds a MS in Biology, with an emphasis on ecological principles of sustainable landscapes; her research was on plants that attract natural enemies.

Paula Panich, a garden writer and writing teacher, lives in Los Angeles and in Idyllwild, California, where she rents a writing shack in the woods, barely disguised from its origins as a 1941 mail-order garage from Sears. She has recently fallen in love with the volcanic rock, grasses, lichens, and mosses of Iceland.

Richie Steffen is curator of horticulture for the Elisabeth C Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle, where he manages the rare plant collections and leads the acquisition of new plants. He is an active member of numerous horticultural societies in the area and lectures widely about garden-worthy plants.

Frederique Lavoipierre is the volunteer manager at Santa Barbara Botanic Garden. She also teaches classes and workshops on many aspects of sustainable landscaping, including ecological principles, habitat gardens, beneficial insects, soil ecology, fresh-water ecology, and aquatic invertebrates.

Neil Bell is a horticulturist with the Oregon State University Extension Service in Marion and Polk Counties, where he oversees the Master Gardener program. He researches the hardiness of woody plants for western Oregon with a particular interest in evergreen and mediterranean climate genera.

Marie Barnidge-McIntyre is the staff horticulturist for Rancho Los Cerritos in Long Beach, California, and did the majority of the research on trees for the restoration of the historic orchard there. She also operates Gardens by Design, a consulting firm, from her home in Thousand Oaks, California.

Carol Bornstein is one of Southern California’s most highly respected native plant specialists and co-author with David Fross and Bart O’Brien of California Native Plants for the Garden (Cachuma Press, 2006). Carol was horticulturist for the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden for nearly thirty years.

Roger Raiche is the founder of Planet Horticulture, a design-build landscape firm that emphasizes unusual plants in naturalistic and ecologically minded garden designs. His twenty-three-year career at the UC Botanical Garden (Berkeley) transformed the California Collection. He collected extensively, discovered three species, and introduced many new native cultivars.