Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp is an award-winning garden writer, photographer, speaker, teacher and consultant. She loves plants and watching them grow; loves their fragrances, textures and seasonal changes; figuring out how to encourage them to thrive; seeing which insects or animals visit them—all the attributes that make them garden-worthy. She also runs a four-season container service, and so plants about eighty containers three or four times a year, depending on residential and commercial clients' needs, and trials about fifty plants a year. Jo Ellen is also knowledgeable about green/sustainable living and how to help people incorporate these practices in their daily lives. She's been writing and speaking about gardening, landscaping, travel and plants for thirty years.

Before freelancing, she was a longtime newspaper reporter at The Indianapolis Star, writing an award-winning weekly garden column; founding editor of Michigan Gardening, Iowa Gardener and Minnesota Gardener, and editor of Wisconsin Gardening magazines; founding editor of Indiana Living Green magazine, focused on sustainable living; editor of On the QT, the national award-winning digital newsletter published six times a year by GardenComm: Garden Communicators International; and a digital writer for lawn and landscape companies.