Puck Erickson is a landscape architect and co-founder of Arcadia Studio (www.arcadiastudio.com), a team of landscape professionals with offices in Santa Barbara, California and Phoenix, Arizona. A resident of Santa Ynez Valley for many years, Puck has gardened since childhood and thrills at the opportunity to put client, site, and plants together in a sustainable landscape.

Valerie Easton, a garden writer for the Seattle Times, is also the author of several books on gardens and gardeners. She manages a small but highly productive garden in Langley, Washington; there, she first began to appreciate the value of designing for low maintenance, resulting in her latest book, The NEW Low-Maintenance Garden (Timber Press 2009).

Eileen Shields’ early gardening years were spent in Western Pennsylvania where her mother, Mildred, grew nearly everything the family ate and, come September, had canned, pickled, or frozen anything that wasn’t moving. Eileen has, so far, resisted the temptation to revisit this tradition, thanks to the ever-present snails in her garden.

Suzanne Biaggi combines her training in sculpture with her love for landscapes in her design/project consultation studio, S.BIAGGI/sculptural landscapes (www.sbiaggi.com), in San Francisco and Petaluma, California. She has recently become certified in Permaculture Design and is now also a Green Roof Consultant.

Max Howard, a senior at Bard College, has been volunteering for OBUGS since he was ten years old. He has contributed in such capacities as teaching assistant, funding researcher, editorial writer, and garden hand; he plans to continue his work with OBUGS in the future.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.