John Andrew Brookes MBE was a garden and landscape designer. He started designing gardens and landscapes in the late 1950s and designed thousands of gardens. He also taught and lectured about horticulture, landscape and interior design. Beginning as a Modernist and working with Dame Sylvia Crowe, Brenda Colvin, Geoffrey Jellicoe and other notable architects and landscape architects, Brookes came of age in the dawn of garden and landscape design for the middle classes in Britain and in the heyday of 1960s London. Brookes was influenced by painters such as Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholsen, and brought abstract and modernist principles to garden design.[2] He espoused the concept that a garden's design should be based first and foremost on the needs of its occupants, taking it out of the realm of the grand garden traditions which were labour-intensive, expensive, and high maintenance. He is the author of over two dozen books, including Room Outside and John Brookes, Master Class, that have been translated into several languages and has taught and lectured in venues around the globe, including Iran, Argentina, Japan, Russia, and the US. In 2004 Brookes was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his for contributions to Garden Design and Services to Horticulture. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John\_...]

David Conrad Taylor, BVMS, FRCVS, FZS, was a British veterinary surgeon. He was the first veterinary surgeon to specialise in zoo and wildlife medicine. Taylor worked with zoo and wild animals from 1957, acting as a consultant on the treatment of some of the rarest species on Earth. He was world-renowned as an expert in marine mammal medicine. In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, Taylor wrote a popular series of autobiographical books that charted his life and experiences as a "Zoo Vet". These books were adapted for Television in a drama series, One by One. He continued to be a prolific writer until his death. [wikipedia]

David Alderton is a UK-based writer specialising in pets and natural history topics. Growing up in a home surrounded by pets, he originally trained to become a veterinary surgeon. An allergic dermatitis acquired in his final year of study forced a change of career however, and so led him into the field of writing about pets and their care. He has since become a regular contributor of articles on this subject to a wide range of newspapers and magazines in the UK and abroad, and also participates frequently in radio and television programmes. His books have currently sold over six million copies, and have been translated into 30 different languages. David’s titles have won awards in the USA from the Cat Writers' Association of America and the Maxwell Medallion from the Dog Writers’ Association of America, as well as being nominated for the Sir Peter Kent Conservation Book Prize. He has also chaired the National Council for Aviculture, the umbrella organisation for bird-keeping clubs and associations in the UK, and is a member of the Kennel Club, as well as editor of the monthly magazine Practical Reptile Keeping.