Kathleen Norris Brenzel, Garden Editor, Sunset Magazine

Kathleen Brenzel is garden editor of Sunset Magazine. Born in Santa Monica, she spent summers in the Pacific Northwest and learned early on to love the differences between the cool forests around Puget Sound and balmy, palm-lined canyons of home. While overseeing the magazine’s garden content, she edited Sunset’s Gardening in the Northwest, California Top 10 Garden Guide, Gardening in the Southwest, and the Western Garden Book of Edibles. Sunset’s Western Landscaping Book, which she pitched, developed, and edited, led to a nationwide franchise.

Along the way, Brenzel appeared regularly on TV gardening programs, including the Grow-It series for HGTV, House Doctor for ABC-7 in San Francisco, and The Victory Garden for public television (for which she served one season as West Coast hostess). She has lectured on gardening topics in Alaska (aboard the cruise ship Crystal Symphony), Hawaii, and at garden shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, and Boston. In 2000, Brenzel’s passion for Hawaii’s native and endemic plants, which she wrote about in the magazine, earned her an Environmental Journalism Fellowship at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Lawai, Kaua’i. In 2007, she received The American Horticultural Society's Horticultural Communication Award. This ninth edition of the New Western Garden Book is her fourth as the book's editor.