The addition of depth in the shadowbox frame allows for these botanicals to display the exquisite 3D characteristics of the marine botanical often including the holdfast. They can be hung or displayed on an easel like as pictured.

Annie is a life-long educator and learner who values kindness and wants to leave the world a better place. On a visit to California from Indiana at the age of 18 she fell in love with the first ocean she had ever seen, Monterey Bay. She returned a year later to stay and worked her way through college eventually acquiring her teaching and special education credentials from CSU Chico. She started teaching in the Aromas/San Juan School District when she and her husband moved to Capitola in 1984 working nights to earn an additional Resource Specialist Certification. In Aromas, she helped to pioneer the inclusion of children with special needs into the mainstream classroom to the benefit of the special needs students AND the larger studentbody. When she & her husband expatriated to Hong Kong in 1993 for his work, she
formed a team of specialist teachers in the expat community and offered these same special needs services where none were available. The team specialized in working with multi-cultural families with differing parental languages and cultures that were problematic to a child’s education in a foreign country.

Starting their family overseas, Annie became increasingly involved in her children’s education focusing on reading and multi-cultural story telling. After moving to Singapore in 1998, Annie became a founding board member of an NGO chartered with restarting the school system in Siem Reap, Cambodia’s 2nd largest city, after the devastation of the Pol Pot regime. Besides the challenge of setting up a teach-the-teachers program, where none existed, she took on malnutrition impeding learning by initiating a “Food for Thought” program. Still running today, it provided the village women with a kitchen and food enabling then to start preparing the main morning meal at 4am – feeding the students as well as their younger siblings that were not yet school age. Today there are 14 Caring for Cambodia schools in Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat, and they are
the model by which all schools in Cambodia are evolving.

While living for most of 15 years as an expat, Annie brought her two daughters back to the family home in Soquel each summer on “home leave”. Just a mile up from New Brighton Beach, summers were spent on the Sanctuary’s beaches with summer passes at the Boardwalk and as Friends of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Never losing that continuity with Monterey Bay. When the family repatriated back to Soquel in 2007, her children attended local schools where Annie worked in their classrooms until High School. Once both her
children were in high school, Annie started teaching again at Soquel Elementary where she worked with a team supporting at-risk children. Annie was the Math Interventionist alongside her partners for reading and
English as a 2nd language. When COVID struck she taught for a year online before retiring.

Annie has been a lifelong learner including scuba diving & sailing – both in the states and overseas. When living in Hong Kong and traveling into Mainland China, Korea, Taiwan & Japan, she explored ceramics, jewelry making, & Asian decor. Her explorations continued after relocating to Singapore as she travelled extensively through southeast Asia exploring ancient temples, weaving, and other arts all the while vacationing at some of the best beaches in the world. On Valentine’s Day 2023 her husband built her a botanical press thinking she would press flowers in her retirement. But during her morning walks on the beaches of the Sanctuary, she started picking up wrack & drift seaweed which started her on her current journey with marine botanicals. Annie & her family have donated 4 pieces of Annie’s 3-dimensionally framed marine botanicals to the Panetta Institute for Public Service co-chaired by Secretary Panetta & his wife Sylvia in recognition of their work in establishing & preserving the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Secretary Panetta is also the Chairman of the Sanctuary Foundation.

Annie’s works are loving created under the name of Oceanic Botanicals and she donates 7% of each sale to the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.

For more information on Annie’s founding of Oceanic Botanicals, check out her Instagram account below.

• Instagram

After Kevin graduated with a BS in Business Administration in 1975, he followed his heart and started working in wood making simple pine cabinets and wooden kitchen accessories that he sold at craft fairs. He later partnered with a gifted woodworker and together they built cabinets, wainscoting, & stairways, for custom homes.  After a few years, Kevin decided he wanted to be a woodworker for the pure pleasure & well into retirement but not burn out on it as a profession.  So, at 30 years of age, Kevin went back to school and got degrees in Industrial Arts (cabinetry & furniture) and computer science thinking he would teach.  However, in 1984 Kevin got a job with Motorola in customer training for their new M68000 microprocessor and opened Motorola’s training center in San Jose, which morphed into Silicon Valley.  It was “right time/right place” and started him on a wonderful 30+ year journey in global tech.

In Kevin’s retirement, he is partnered with his wife, Annie, collecting wrack (seaweed on the beach) and drift (in the surf).  He has built her varying sizes of botanical presses and a dehydrator for preserving nature’s art from the ocean in its unique 3-dimensional form and true colors.  Besides designing and building presses & drying equipment, Kevin designs and builds custom shadowbox frames in his wood shop on their property in Soquel CA, just a mile up from Monterey Bay.  Kevin uses the finest hardwoods and then applies a hand rubbed finish of a Danish oil mixture that he developed before applying a final protective wax coating.  Kevin is currently working on perfecting a new line of glass cloches containing ocean artifacts collected from beaches around the world.  He recently acquired a wood lathe and is turning the bases for these cloches from hardwoods.

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