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.

C Colston Burrell a lifelong gardener, garden designer, author, photographer, naturalist, and teacher, grows all the hellebores that will fit in his garden near Charlottesville, Virginia.

Judith Knott Tyler is trained as an artist, and designs gardens. With her husband Richard, she owns and operates Pine Knot Farms in Clarksville, Virginia, specializing in hellebores.

Walter Levison is an ASCA-Registered Consulting Arborist working independently in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a contract city arborist for the City of Belmont.

Dave Muffly is an ISA Board-Certified Master Arborist on the Canopy board of directors. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer, he practices ecological horticulture in the Bay Area.

Mary L Harden is a botanical illustrator, an avid gardener, and a dedicated educator for thirty-five years, currently teaching at both San Francisco Botanical Garden (SFBG) and Sharon Art Studio in Golden Gate Park.

J Charmain Giuliani, noted horticulturist and landscape designer, has been an instructor for over twenty years, currently teaching at both City College of San Francisco and SFBG; she is also a botanical illustrator and enrolled in the Master Class with Mary at SFBG.

Carola Ashford, a landscape architect, received a fellowship appointment to Alcatraz Island from the Garden Conservancy in 2003. She was a project manager for the Alcatraz Historic Garden Project.

Marty Wingate is a garden writer and lecturer in Seattle. She writes a weekly feature in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and maintains her own website at www.martywingate.com.

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.

Allan Mandell is a widely published and internationally known garden photographer, winner of several awards from the Garden Writers Association. After many years in Portland, Oregon, he has recently moved to Victoria, British Columbia, with his new bride.

Susan C Eubank has been a librarian for twenty-four years, a botanical garden librarian in San Francisco, Denver and, now, Los Angeles, and a plants person forever. She tends gardens in Pasadena and Springville, California.

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. Richie is co-author of The Plant Lover’s Guide to Ferns from Timber Press. He is an active member of numerous horticultural societies in the area and lectures widely about garden-worthy plants.

Robert D Raabe is Professor Emeritus of Plant Pathology at University of California, Berkeley. He introduced a faster method of composting was commonly known as the “Berkeley method” or “fast composting”, this method produces finished compost in as little as 14 to 21 days. He is also the author of The Ortho Home Gardener’s Problem Solver.

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.

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.

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