Jill McKenna Reed

https://www.beethinking.com

Jill McKenna Reed is a poet, writing instructor, and beekeeper in Portland, Oregon. She co-owner of Bee Thinking, a beekeeping supplier specializing in foundationless hives. When she is not writing or teaching, she can be found catching swarms or help new beekeepers around the Portland area. Jill earned her MFA in creative Writing/Poetry, at Portland State University.


Tori Johnson

Tori Johnson is a landscape architect with an interest in the varied bioregions of the West. She is a lover of plants, projects, and foraging plant material for kitchen table arrangements. In 2011, speculating on West Oakland’s sandy soils and kind summers, Tori started growing cut flowers on an empty lot. When the opportunity to partner with Game Theory Academy came about, Tori directed the site development and programming of the new WOW Farm Flower project.


Sue Goetz

https://www.thecreativegardener.com

Sue Goetz is a garden designer, writer, and speaker. Through her business, Creative Gardener, she works with clients to personalize their outdoor spaces—from garden coaching to full landscape design. A self-proclaimed plant nerd, as most plant-driven garden designers are, Sue has a special passion for herbs. 
She is the author of The Herb Lover’s Spa Book, recently published by St. Lynn’s Press. www.thecreativegardener.com


Dan Corum Kate Reedy

Dan Corum & Kate Reedy

Dan Corum, aka Dr. Doo, manages the Woodland Park Zoo Compost program, delivers engaging environmental and natural gardening presentations, is a Master Gardener and a keen observer and photographer of the natural world. Passionate about gardening since she was 12, garden designer, writer and instructor Kate Reedy, worked for over 10 years in the nursery industry and taught high school horticulture. Kate and Dan collaborate in life and the garden in Seattle.


Patty Cassidy

Patty Cassidy

https://www.pattycassidy.com

Patty Cassidy, MA, is a life-long gardener and registered horticultural therapist who works with elders who live with dementia. She is the president of the Friends of the Portland Memory Garden (www.portlandmemorygarden.org) and serves on the national board of the American Horticultural Therapy Association. Her award-winning book, The Illustrated Practical Guide to Gardening for Seniors, (Anness Press, 2011) has been translated into French and German. www.pattycassidy.com.


Lee Butalla

Lee Buttala

Lee Buttala is an Emmy Award-winning producer of Martha Stewart Living. He has written for The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, New York, and Garden Design, was the preservation program manager for the Garden Conservancy and studied landscape design at Kyoto University of Art and Design, 
the English Gardening School at the Chelsea Physic Garden, and the New York Botanical Garden. His latest book is The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving.

 


Lydia Plunk

Lydia Plunk is a Southern-California writer admired for her enthusiastic observations focusing on her great passion: the glory of garden-centered living. She is an FIDM graduate and the former city of Diamond Bar Commissioner as well as a member of Garden Writers Association, Southern California Horticulture Society, and the Pasadena Writer’s Salon. Since 1995 Lydia’s words on authentic beauty have graced newspapers, magazines and new media. Her graphic-driven professional collection is presented at www.lydiaplunk.com.  Her blog, www.averygoodlife.blogspot.com is frequently updated.


Rick Peterson

Great Plant Picks

https://www.greatplantpicks.org/

Rick Peterson manages the Great Plant Picks educational program at the Elisabeth Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle, Washington. His home garden in Federal Way, which he shares with frequent Pacific Horticulture contributor Richie Steffen, is landscaped with “restrained exuberance” and includes overly abundant collections of species rhododendrons, iris, epimedium, ferns, and a plethora of other rare and unusual flora. Both plead guilty to the current menagerie of potted plants waiting patiently in the driveway…


Ann Northrup

Ann Northrup spent her undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in microbiology. Her interest in plant pathology started there, but she took a five-year diversion to work in the field of medical diagnostics at Bio Rad Labs in Richmond, California, and another two years as a molecular biology research assistant at UC Irvine. Returning to plant pathology, Ann earned a master’s degree UC Berkeley. She has worked primarily in disease diagnostics of ornamental plants, first with Soil and Plant Lab in Orange, California, and then with Nurserymen’s Exchange in Half Moon Bay.

Ann currently consults privately in plant pathology and arboriculture and teaches horticulture classes at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills and Merritt College in Oakland. One of her professional pleasures is volunteering at the Sick Plant Clinic. She is also an active volunteer in the UCCE Master Gardener program for Santa Clara County. In her spare time, she enjoys playing her flute in a woodwind quintet in Saratoga and with the Saratoga Community Band conducted by her husband. And of course … she gardens.


Lorene Edwards Forkner

Lorene Edwards Forkner lives and gardens in Seattle where she pursues a good and delicious life filled with family and friends together with all things horticultural, believing that the really good part is in the blending of one’s passions.

Lorene is the author of five garden books including Hortus Miscellaneous (Sasquatch Books), Handmade Garden Projects, and The Timber Press Guide Vegetable Gardening: Pacific Northwest. Lorene is also the author of the newly released “Color In and Out of the Garden,” Abrams Books, 2022. Follow along at ahandmadegarden.com. She was the editor of Pacific Horticulture from 2012-2019.


Daniel Mount

https://www.mountgardens.com

Daniel Mount hails from a long line of wandering gardeners, nurserymen and farmers.  He received his first shovel for his second birthday and began his gardening career in the sand box later that afternoon. Spending most of his youthful summers in a vegetable patch, on a farm, in parks, or in the woods, the curiosity of a scientist and the soul of a poet were awakened in him. Daniel went on to study fine arts and botany at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, from which he received a BS in Botany.

Drawn to the legendary gardening climate of the Pacific Northwest, Daniel moved to Seattle, Washington in 1988. Since that time he has created, maintained and consulted on gardens primarily in the Puget Sound Basin. The skills he acquired working in the passionate gardening environment of  Pacific Northwest have opened many doors. Daniel was invited to Cologne, Germany, where he worked on urban rooftop and courtyard gardens as well as rural estates. He was next called to Orto dei Semplici Elbano on the Island of Elba, Italy where he collected and designed with the unique flora of this island.  He maintains an ancillary connection to this garden to this day. Closer to home he has consulted on projects and designed gardens in and around Durham, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Phoenix, Arizona.

Daniel has settled on a small farm nestled in a 150-acre bird sanctuary, which he shares with his partner, innumerable slugs and a bear, in the Snoqualmie River Valley east of Seattle. He enjoys growing organic vegetables and fruits, raising ducks and experimenting with flood tolerant plants. He creates gardens and also teaches and writes about plants and gardening.

www.mountgardens.com


Frederique Lavoipierre

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.