Saxon Holt is a professional garden photographer who contributes regularly to Pacific Horticulture and is widely published in books such as Hardy Succulents, The American Meadow Garden, and Plants and Landscapes for the Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Area. Saxon lives and gardens in Novato, California and is a member of the PHS board of directors. www.photobotanic.com

Hans Mandt is currently the president of Northwest Horticultural Society and is responsible for their annual symposia. A former professor of computer science, he recently retired as senior manager of a computing research group at The Boeing Company. He and his wife Tina garden a challenging hillside in Seattle.

Paul Bonine is a garden writer, lecturer, and owner of the wholesale specialty plant nursery Xera Plants, in Portland, Oregon.  A lifelong plant man, Paul has worked in the nursery industry for nearly twenty years and consulted for NPR, the Sunset Western Garden Book, and The Oregonian. He is the author of Black Plants: 75 Striking Choices for the Garden (Timber Press, 2009).

Paul lectures on low-water gardening, unusual vines, and deer-resistant gardening. He lives in Portland, where he tests and selects new and useful plants for Pacific Northwest gardens.

librarian San Diego Public Library
San Diego, California

owner, The Gardener
Berkeley, California

Wayne Armstrong is a retired professor in the Life Sciences Department of Palomar College, San Marcos, California, and author of the natural history website Wayne’s Word (waynesword.palomar.edu). He contributed the section on Lemnaceae (now Araceae) to the revised Jepson Manual, a new flora for California.

Phoebe Gilpin, a resident of San Mateo, California, has long been active with the Garden Club of America through membership in the Hillsborough Garden Club. She has a particular interest in the history of gardens and has contributed to the Archives of American Gardens at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. She is also a member of the California Garden & Landscape History Society.

Jean Myers escaped to rural Gilroy, California, after many years building a career in Silicon Valley. With a deep interest in wildlife, she developed her new garden with a focus on California native plants, working closely with consultants to make sure that the garden served the local wildlife as much as for her family. Follow more of her story at casadosrios.org.

Laurel Woodley is a retired biology professor at the community college level. Long interested in Southern California native plants and in desertadapted plants, she is active with many cactus and succulent groups. She has taken a lead role in verifying the identity of all the plants at the South Coast Botanical Garden in Palos Verdes, California.