Suzanne Ferris is a garden designer and a botanical illustrator who writes about horticulture. Her past includes a stint as an arts manager for the King County Solid Waste Division, a letterpress printer and hand papermaker for Sea Pen Press and Papermill, and a public artist on Waldron Island. Her botanical interests include conducting plant trials testing soils both native and manufactured. Her future may include designing a line of furniture for outdoor spaces for Newwood Corporation. Plan B is to open a private eating club that Falstaff might enjoy.

Suzanne received a Fine Arts degree from Madison, Wisconsin and attended horticulture classes at Edmonds Community College. She has tended a large garden in Seattle for thirty-six years and is currently writing a book about her garden mentors, including a chapter about Phil Wood, with whom she worked. Suzanne accepts commission work.

Matthew V Maggio has been passionate about horticulture from his childhood days in the vegetable garden through an educational process both formal and informal. With a degree from Cal Poly in his pocket, he has launched a career in Southern California as nurseryman and landscape designer, focusing on succulent plants.

Elizabeth Navas Finley has written on gardening, design, and horticulture for the San Francisco Chronicle and numerous magazines. A garden designer and Marin Master Gardener, she has been involved with the gardens at Falkirk Cultural Center for the past five years.

Rob Lee came to gardening through composting and a love of coastal conifers. Tiring of the challenges of a sand-dune garden in San Francisco, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he now pursues writing and art photography—in a darkroom! (roblee43@gmail.com)

Rainie Fross, a co-owner of Native Sons Nursery, is a technical writer whose garden essays can be found at http://nativeson.typepad.com/rainies_corner/; others have been published in Garden Compass. She has been negotiating her garden’s evolution for thirty-two years.

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.

Judith M Taylor, a retired Oxford-trained neurologist, now practices history without a license in San Francisco. She has published several books, most recently The Global Migrations of Ornamental Plants: How the World Got into Your Garden (2009). The begonia story is part of a future book on plant breeders and their obsessions.

Katherine Hayes Greenberg is a garden designer with a passion for California’s native plants. She is a past president of the Mediterranean Garden Society and the Pacific Horticultural Foundation, for whom she continues to organize and lead international garden tours.

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.

Mary Wilbur, a native of Wales, worked in the field of psychiatric care, and has gardened in England and New York. She is now active with the Greater Trinidad Garden Club in Trinidad, California, where she has lived and gardened for more than a decade.

Richard G Turner Jr is the editor emeritus of Pacific Horticulture. After receiving degrees in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of Michigan more than thirty years ago, he escaped to California, where he has worked in the fields of garden design, public garden education and administration, and garden publishing. His small, chemical-free San Francisco garden provides habitat for wildlife while serving as a test ground for mediterranean-climate plants.