Sandy Masuo

Sandy Masuo is an editor, a writer, and an inveterate plant nerd and persistent citizen scientist. Gardening is her passion and succulents are an obsession. Sandy served as associate editor in the publications division of the Los Angeles Zoo. She also co-edits the Association for Zoological Horticulture (AZH) newsletter. From 2010 to 2014, she served on the SCHS Board, continues to manage the SCHS Facebook page, and intermittently contributes to the SCHS newsletter


Christopher Lee Wassenberg

CHRISTOPHER LEE WASSENBERG is Director of the Leaning Pine Arboretum and a lecturer in the Horticulture and Crop Science Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Christopher received his Bachelors degree in Environmental Horticulture and his Masters degree in Recreation, Parks, and Tourism Administration at Cal Poly. He teaches students about arboriculture, California native plants, landscape maintenance and construction, and public garden management.


Nancy Swearengen

NANCY SWEARENGEN has been an active leader in the International Mediterranean Garden Society since the early 1990s. As a staff member at University California Botanical Garden she specialized in interpreting botanical and natural history subjects and programming field trips and study tours throughout the West. Nancy is a Berkeley native and a member of the Pacific Horticulture office staff.


Paula Henson

Terra Bella Water

https://terrabellawater.com

PAULA HENSON is a water conservationist, landscape designer, writer, and educator. Her company Terra Bella Water promotes water education and provides water awareness presentations for anyone from preschoolers to homeowners. She has been designed award-winning rainwater harvesting systems and landscapes in the Los Angeles area and is an EPA Watershed Wise Landscape Professional and an ARCSA (American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association) Accredited Professional.



Neil Bell

Neil Bell is Community Horticulturist for Oregon State University Extension, oversees the Master Gardener program in Marion and Polk counties, as well as evaluates drought-tolerant shrubs for the Willamette Valley.


Virginia Hayes

Virginia Hayes is Curator of the Living Collection at Ganna Walska Lotusland in Santa Barbara, California, where she is responsible for maintaining plant records for the extensive plant collections. Virginia holds a Master’s degree from University California Santa Barbara where she did research on the unique floral characters of lotuses (Nelumbo nucifera) and their variation among wild populations. She writes a popular gardening column for the Santa Barbara Independent and contributes to other California and national publications.


Suzanne Ferris

Deodara-Arts

https://suzanneferris.wordpress.com/

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.


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.


Earl Nickel

https://www.normsnursery.blogspot.com

EARL NICKEL is an Oakland-based horticulturist, writer, and photographer. He writes a weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle profiling garden-worthy plants and has contributed feature articles to Pacific Horticulture, Fine Gardening, and various Bay Area newspapers. Erle maintains a large and varied garden and blogs for Annie’s Annuals and at www.normsnursery.blogspot.com.


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


Richie Steffen

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.


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.


Linda Beutler

LINDA BEUTLER is a fearless gardener who grows a great variety of plants on a city lot in Portland, Oregon. Linda has been the curator of the Rogerson Clematis Collection at Luscher Farm since 2007, was elected president of the International Clematis Society in 2013, and has taught horticulture at Clackamas Community College for more than 16 years. She is the author of Gardening with Clematis: Design and Cultivation and Garden to Vase: Growing and Using Your Own Cut Flowers (both Timber Press). Her novel, The Red Chrysanthemum, was published by Meryton Press in 2013.


Carol Bornstein

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.