Annette Giesecke is the Elias Ahuja Professor of Classics in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of Delaware, USA. She is author of Classical Mythology A to Z (2020), The Mythology of Plants: botanical lore from Ancient Greece and Rome (2014), and The Epic City: Urbanism, Utopia, and the Garden in Ancient Greece and Rome (2007); and co-author of The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden (2015) and Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden (2012). She is co-General Editor of the 6 volume series A Cultural History of Plants (Bloomsbury, 2021), of which she is editor of the volume A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity.

David Mabberley is a botanist and author based in Australia. He is Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College, University of Oxford, UK; Emeritus Professor, University of Leiden, The Netherlands; and Adjunct Professor, Macquarie University, Australia. He has written many books on botanical art and science, the best known of which is Mabberley's Plant-book: A Portable Dictionary of Plants, their Classification and Uses (Ed. IV, 2017). He has carried out extensive botanical fieldwork across Africa, Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and South America. He has been President of both the Society for the History of Natural History and the International Association for Plant Taxonomy, and was Keeper of the Herbarium, Library, Art and Archives at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.