Gardening For Dummies

Sue Fisher is a lifelong plant enthusiast whose main aim is to make gardening as user-friendly and approachable as possible. After training at Oaklands College, St Albans, the first ten years of her career were spent in the nursery and garden centre industry, including five years as plant buyer for a group of top garden centres and a landscape company. In 1990 Sue decided to bring her enthusiasm for plants to a wider audience and became a freelance writer and broadcaster. To date she has written ten books, including Garden Colour, Essential Plants for Small Gardens, and Fast Plants, as well as co-authoring Ground Force Garden Handbook and Geoff Hamilton’s Gardening Year, and contributed to several of the Reader’s Digest gardening books. Her gardening features have been published in many magazines and newspapers, including Gardeners’ World, Gardens Monthly, and Garden News. Sue currently gardens in Buckinghamshire where her two young children are fast making her an expert on family gardening.

Michael MacCaskey began his college career as a creative arts student at San Francisco State University in 1969, but in the process became instead a passionate gardener. By 1976 he received a Bachelor of Science degree in ornamental horticulture from California State Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Since then, he’s had the good fortune to work for and learn from garden editors such as Walter Doty, Richard Dunmire, Joe Williamson, and Bill Marken. A second-generation Los Angeles native (zone 9), he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Vermont-based National Gardening Magazine (zone 4) in 1994. Since then, he’s been learning about gardening in a short-season, coldwinter region. His magazine writing has been honoured by both the Western Magazine Publishers Association and the Garden Writers of America.

Bill Marken is the editor of Rebecca’s Garden Magazine, a new publication from Hearst Magazines Enterprises based on the popular television show. A lifelong resident of California, Bill served as editor-in-chief of Sunset, the Magazine of Western Living, from 1981 to 1996. Earlier in his career, he wrote for the magazine’s garden section, pitched in on several editions of the bestselling Western Garden Book, and generally nurtured his interests in subjects related to gardening, landscaping, travel, and other aspects of the good life in the West. A vacation garden at 6,200-feet elevation gives him insight into coldwinter climates with 100-day growing seasons.

The National Gardening Association is the largest member-based, nonprofit organisation of home gardeners in the US. Founded in 1972 (as ‘Gardens for All’) to spearhead the community garden movement, today’s National Gardening Association is best known for its bimonthly publication, National Gardening magazine. Reporting on all aspects of home gardening, each issue is read by some half-million gardeners worldwide. For more information about the National Gardening Association in the US, see its Web site at www.garden.org.