James R. Cothran (1940–2012) was a landscape architect, urban planner, and garden historian in Atlanta, Georgia, where he served as an adjunct professor of garden history and preservation at the University of Georgia and Georgia State University. A fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects, he served on the boards of the Cherokee Garden Library at the Atlanta History Center, the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation, the Southern Garden History Society, and Trees Atlanta. Cothran previously authored Gardens of Historic Charleston, Charleston Gardens and the Landscape Legacy of Loutrel Briggs, and the award-winning Gardens and Historic Plants of the Antebellum South, all published by the University of South Carolina Press.

Erica Danylchak holds degrees in history from Boston University and heritage preservation from Georgia State University. She has worked in archival science at the Cherokee Garden Library and Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center and in preservation as executive director of the Buckhead Heritage Society. Danylchak served as a research fellow for the Georgia Historic Landscape Initiative and in 2009 received the Jenny D. Thurston Memorial Award from the Atlanta Urban Design Commission. She currently works in educational publishing and lives in Atlanta.