I was brought up to believe that all crawly creatures were something to be despised and, immediately upon sighting, KILLED. I had no idea that these terrible, loathsome bugs were necessary for not only human life but all life, nor about their vital inter-connection with soil renewal.

In my teens when I started spending time in untouched nature I began to feel an unexpected connection which evoked a deep sense of calm mixed with kinship. 

Alternatively, whenever I lay my eyes on man’s manicured, decimated and domesticated ‘nature’ that looks contrived and out of place, it looks as if someone without design sensibility tried too hard to make their fee. These manicured English lawns, originally exported from a small humid island nation to this country, still populate all sorts of U.S. suburban climates, including deserts in the Southwest, in favor of their native plantings. Fortunately, lawns are slowly falling out of favor as people are slowly realizing the amount of care and water lawns take is antithetic to their natural environment.

Some years ago, while living in Japan, I gifted my teacher a bouquet of flowers. He unabashedly wiped away hundreds of years of ikebana culture and proceeded to dump the bouquet into a vase filled with water. This act of seeming irreverence for tradition, but not for nature, made a deep impression on me.

Fast forward to recent years when I took several classes and seminars in landscape design at New York Botanical Garden to hone my skills to become a landscape designer - but something didn’t click. Not being able to put my finger on it or move forward, I felt stuck. So I quietly continued volunteering at the Botanical Garden’s family food gardens, sniping away in the tremendous heat of the Rose Garden - (ugh, more pruning to meet someone’s standard of eye-catching beauty). All the while I tended my wild and crazy bunch of terrace plants. 

Edwina von Gal says she started her business without a plan but with a passion. And it looks like that passion - her relationship with the outdoors - has only flourished with time.

She knows Mother Nature is the best designer. She happily lives with the surprises nature reveals, letting go of her preconceived notions and even asks her clients if they can live with spaces that allow for surprises - for things to happen that she didn’t do. This is her exploration and her life’s work - sort of a “letting go” - from the infinitesimal to the big picture. 

A testament to her success is that Hurricane Sandy caused no damage to either her house on stilts (an office of Marcel Breuer designed by principal Hamilton Smith) nor her waterfront meadow. The only telltale the storm came and left was a waterline on one of her sculptures. In direct contrast, her neighbors, also on waterfront property, found their gardens destroyed. 

No matter her bevy of high profile, name-droppable clients, she now counts just as valuable clients in the form of the birds, bees and butterflies as well as the endless and vast variety of creatures that alight her or her clients’ properties. She also includes as equally valuable the soil, wind and water. 

because the birds coming to her property need to feed

…the Boy Scouts were contracted to put up a pole for OSPREYS to nest and feed their youn. 

A dripping pipe keeps the water fresh for birds and does double duty to water her petasites plants, a plant that flourishes in moisture. 

BIRDS need to feed their baby chicks 

Because HONEY BEES need a lot of water, yet have short legs, she puts stones in her bird baths for them to walk up to the water and sip.  

Even after it fell to the ground Edwina kept a dying BLUE SPRUCE totem pole that has been hosting a succession of living animals. She says she will keep it until it eventually melts into the earth. 

When stones got packed down in her driveway she gave up the “tidy” gravel look in favor of natural STONES and WOOD CHIPS from the bark of her trees. They became the literal foundation for her driveway and walkways. 

She made BRUSH PILES - huge broomsticks - when her compost bin got too full. Within the safety of these piles, THRUSHES and RABBITS make their home. 

Cut MEADOW GRASSES (bunch grass or panicum) get raked up and made into a haystack looking like an homage to Monet. 

No bio mass leaves the property. Bio mass is anything that can be broken down by natural means over time. 

de-fence against deer destruction   

DEER are predators that are destroying the entire understory of Eastern Long Island. There is no ground cover for ground nesting birds (they used to be a predator of ticks). This huge imbalance of the deer population came as a consequence of the original screening of the Disney film Bambi over half a century ago.  

Wrapping the trunk of trees with a twine-like rope helps keep deer away from the bark. 

                            garden

EDWIN’S PLAYPEN - her vegetable garden - happenstance vs. hover

Edwina likens having a garden to control vs. no control. Like raising children - one is never sure how much to hover over them or to throw your hands up and say, ‘That’s who they are.’

Her garden is partially her hover. But she does find that every bed is under her control. She finds that raised beds are easier to keep and the soil stays healthy from year to year as opposed to having an on the ground garden where you have to replace the soil every year. The raised beds also keep out the voles.

She keeps a cold frame (left background) with a glass cover - like a mini greenhouse - on one of the raised beds. This supplies her with lettuce for most of the winter. 

The vigorous survive in her vegetable garden. She let’s a lot come up where it will. An artist friend made sculptures (right foreground) and placed them as guides to mark where her watering hoses are. She says she grows something different on the arches/garden trellises every year. One year it can be gourds and the next year something else. She allows plants to take over. The gourd might take over a chair placed in the garden - where she never has time to sit anyway. This combination of doing and letting go exists more for her in the garden than the meadow. 

The trellis in both her garden and on the patio of her office seem to be a recurring element. This upward and downward growing of vines has a tendency to move the eyes around and adds visual interest. This same principle is used in interiors and was discussed in Scale/Diagonal

 THE PERFECT EARTH PROJECT - a chemical free environment

Edwina sees a disconnect between environmentalists and the landscape industry. The people making designed landscapes for their clients put chemicals on lawnsthat make it unsafe for the owner’s children, grandchildren and pets. Whereas environmental and gardening people are of the mindset to let things happen naturally. She likens the landscaping group to people who take probiotics yet wash their hands with hand sanitizer. She reiterates that there is a direct relationship between soil biome and our gut biome and maintains that an important overlap exists between human health and the soil we come in contact with.

Many of us are collectively hoping and realizing through the promotion of the Perfect Earth Project and like-minded initiatives, that the landscape industry comes to see themselves more as land stewards and that the land is everyone’s sanctuary in need of protection.

(Photos courtesy of Edwina von Gal’s lecture giving at NYBG and those taken by Lindsay Morris, Eileen Le Guillou and Jody Harrow onsite)