The California Wildflower Superbloom—A Garden Photographer’s View
Guest Speaker: Saxon Holt
Saxon Holt has been a professional garden photographer for 30 years, and a CNPS member 35. In recent years he has been seeking to combine these two passions to inspire gardeners to use the diverse palette of native plants. The 2017 superbloom in southern California’s deserts became an incredible opportunity to illustrate that God’s garden can become our garden. A life-long gardener from a family of gardeners, Saxon Holt spent his professional time as a commercial photographer until 1985, when he discovered the gardening market and could no longer stay indoors. He quickly developed a reputation as a photographer with a distinct vision and understanding of plants in the landscape.
Saxon owns PhotoBotanic.com and Summer-Dry.com. PhotoBotanic is a garden picture resource for photos, e-books, and photography workshops, where his first e-book on garden photography received the Gold Award as the best Overall Garden Book from the Garden Writers Association. Summer-Dry is an ongoing project to provide gardeners in California and other summer-dry climates a photo resource of climate-appropriate plants for sustainable gardening. His work has been featured in diverse publications from Architectural Digest and Pacific Horticulture magazine to Smithsonian and Money magazine; with 20+ books, Saxon’s work is known throughout the gardening world. He is the Photography Program Director at San Francisco Botanical Garden, a Fellow of the Garden Writers Association, and Board Member of Pacific Horticulture Society. He is currently working on The Summer-Dry Garden to be published by Timber Press in 2019.
