Judith Phillips is a landscape designer, garden writer, and teacher with 35 years' experience designing gardens in the high desert. She loves working with native and xeric plants because they are beautiful, conserve water, and support wildlife. Her design projects have included more than a thousand home gardens in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona, as well as a healing garden at a local hospital and habitat gardens at two national wildlife refuges. In addition to writing two editions of New Mexico Gardener's Guide and collaborating on Water-Wise Plants for the Southwest for Cool Springs Press, Phillips is the author of Southwestern Landscaping with Native Plants, Revised Edition; Natural by Design; and Plants for Natural Gardens. She has written numerous magazine articles, water conservation essays, and educational brochures. Phillips teaches an arid-adapted plants class in the landscape architecture master's degree program at the University of New Mexico.

Mary Irish is a garden writer, lecturer and educator. She lived and worked in Arizona for 25 years before returning in 2012 to her native Texas, where she currently manages the plant sales program at the San Antonio Botanical Garden. She is a frequent contributor to national and regional publications, including American Gardener and Nursery Management, and has written several previous regional gardening guides for Cool Springs Press. She was also a contributor to Cool Springs' Water-Wise Plants for the Southwest. She and her husband Gary live in Castroville, Texas, a historic town in the South Texas plains.