Garden Symposium

Stefani Bittner

Stefani Bittner is the owner of Homestead Design Collective, a San Francisco Bay Area landscape design firm focused on creating beautiful gardens that provide edible harvests. Stefani is the co-author of The Beautiful Edible Garden (2013), Harvest: Unexpected Projects Using 47 Extraordinary Garden Plants (2017), and The Fragrant Flower Garden (2024), all published by Ten Speed Press.

Stefani’s team offers a unique and sophisticated approach—using both organic farming and fine gardening skills—for people who want help creating aesthetically designed, organic, edible gardens. Homestead provides design, installation, and full-service organic maintenance, harvesting, bee keeping, preserving, floristry, and composting services. Homestead is the design team behind the Test Gardens for Sunset Magazine and the chef focused edible gardens for Robert Mondavi and Prisoner wineries. Her gardens can be found in commercial properties, public spaces, and private residences, and her work has been featured in San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Sunset Magazine, Food & Wine, Time Magazine, Better Homes & Gardens, Modern Farmer, Food52, and Gardenista.com

Lucy Hunter

Lucy Hunter is an award-winning landscape designer, based in the rural mountains of North Wales, with over 20 years of experience creating garden spaces for clients at home and abroad. She is a self-taught photographer and fine artist who would describe herself as a ‘restless creative.’

Lucy is passionate about the natural world, flowers, and landscapes in all their guises. She travels the globe, designing gardens, teaching, and encouraging guests in sell-out workshops to take cues from the landscape and nature to inspire their creativity and floral world.

Lucy has published two books under The Flower Hunter, on floral design inspired by the seasons and the landscape. You can find her @lucytheflowerhunter.

Dan Hinkley

Dan Hinkley is a professor, plantsman, nurseryman, garden writer, horticulturalist, and design consultant. Born in North Central Michigan, he currently resides in Washington State, where he serves as director emeritus for Heronswood Nursery, which he founded with his partner Robert Jones in 1987. Heronswood’s offering of rare and unusual plants led him on collecting trips to China, South and Central America, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Nepal, Vietnam, Taiwan, Sikkim, Bhutan, Northeast India, and Myanmar numerous times a year for the past 22 years.

Dan has written for numerous periodicals, including Pacific Horticulture, The American Gardener, Garden Design, The Gardener, Horticulture Magazine, American Nurseryman, Gardens Illustrated, Martha Stewart Living, Fine Gardening, and The English Garden, and has had recurring features in Horticulture Magazine and The Seattle Times. He has appeared as a garden correspondent on Martha Stewart Living, and in 2007 explored the flora of remote mountains in China on PBS’s Nova: The First Flower. Dan has been the recipient of many awards, including the distinguished Veitch Memorial Medal for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the science and practice of horticulture from the Royal Horticultural Society.

Dan currently resides in Indianola, Washington with his husband of 37 years and their two goldendoodles, where he is in the process of realizing the gardens of Windcliff. Among many and varied garden spaces, the project includes an arboretum based entirely on his collection work of three decades, a large greenhouse, a generous potager, and an experimental meadow, all on 6.5 acres of south-facing bluff overlooking the Salish Sea. When not working in the gardens, Dan works as a horticultural consultant with architects and landscape architects on a broad assortment of projects across the globe, including the Amazon Spheres in Seattle and the Kogod Courtyard at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.