Marianne Willburn is a gardening columnist, speaker and author of Big Dreams, Small Garden, and one of the six-person writing team at GardenRant.

A regular contributor to Better Homes and Gardens, The American Gardener, and other national gardening magazines, Marianne has also been a weekly newspaper columnist for over a decade and is the recipient of several Gold and Silver Media Awards from Garden Communicators International (formerly GWA).

Marianne also guides European garden tours with CarexTours, a D.C. based tour company dedicated to exploring public and private gardens in a small group experience.

She believes strongly that you should never wait for the 'perfect space' to create a restful garden oasis for yourself and your family; and she has spent much of her gardening life in small city and suburban gardens in places as diverse as California, England and the Mid-Atlantic. In 2013, she began gardening intensively and exhaustively on ten acres in a rural corner of Northern Virginia and shares her gardening life each week on her blog, smalltowngardener.com. .