Do you want to do something truly beneficial—for your family, your community, and the environment? It all starts with how you relate to your land. Join Perfect Earth Project’s Edwina von Gal in the Far Barn at the Polly Hill Arboretum in West Tisbury on June 18 for an inspiring and practical talk on ecological land care. She’ll explore what it means to work with your landscape rather than against it—eliminating toxic chemicals, reducing maintenance stress, and fostering resilience, biodiversity, and beauty. Learn how simple changes can create a healthier, more sustainable outdoor space that supports pollinators, wildlife, your pets, and you. After the talk, Edwina will be joined by local experts for an interactive Q&A and discussion. Bring your questions on topics like toxic-free lawn care, habitat creation, tick and pest management, and cost-saving alternatives to conventional landscaping.
Free. Space is limited, those who are pre-registered will be admitted first. Pre-register here.
Free your garden and design for independence! Join renowned landscape designer Edwina von Gal and Toshi Yano, Director of Perfect Earth Project, as they discuss their new vision of nature-based gardening. In this May 22 American Horticultural Society webinar, Edwina and Toshi will show how the approaches that drive contemporary horticultural aesthetics and methods often do not prioritize the health of plants, people, and the planet. Instead, they will offer a holistic approach to land care that’s based in the science of plant-wildlife relationships, soil microbiology, and water and biomass management. Edwina and Toshi will show how this new approach, based on what they call “PRFCTPractices”, is being implemented in landscapes as diverse as home gardens, public parks, colleges, corporate campuses, and cemeteries, and how you can incorporate them into your own practice.
A leading voice in sustainable gardening and landscape design, Edwina von Gal founded the Perfect Earth Project in 2013 to promote nature-based, toxic-free land care for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. As principal of her eponymous landscape design firm, Edwina created landscapes with a focus on simplicity, sustainability, and beauty for private and public clients around the world. Her work has been published widely, including in The New York Times, Vogue, and Architectural Digest, and her book Fresh Cuts won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing in 1998. In 2023, she was named a legend and trailblazer in Wallpaper’s Guide to Creatives in America. She has served on boards and committees for a number of horticultural organizations; she is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity, and is an honorary trustee of Native Plant Trust. In 2022, she received the Long House Visionary Award from Long House Reserve. Her other awards include the New York School of Interior Design’s Green Design Award, the Isamu Noguchi Award, and Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts.
Toshi Yano is the Director of Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating, engaging, and inspiring individuals, land care professionals, and decision makers to adopt the toxic-free, nature-based, and climate-responsible land care practices necessary for a healthier, more sustainable—and more beautiful—environment for all. He is a Director At Large at the American Public Gardens Association (APGA), where he chairs the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility Committee; a co-founder of BIPOC Hort, an advocacy group for people of color working in designed landscapes; and the Landscape and Garden Advisor at Wethersfield Estate & Garden, where he previously worked as Director of Horticulture. While at Wethersfield, he spearheaded the process that placed the site on the National Register of Historic Places, and won the New York State Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation and The Garden Conservancy’s Jean and John Greene Prize for Excellence in the Field of American Gardening.
The Garden Futures Summitis a two-day, in-person event that looks to sustain the remarkable passion and interest in gardening today by presenting a selection of the most exciting ideas shaping the future of gardens and society at large. The Summit, on September 29th and 30th, will focus on three essential topics within contemporary gardening: environment, community, and culture.
On the first day of the Summit, to be held at The New York Botanical Garden, more than a dozen influential speakers from across the gardening world will participate in sessions organized around the Summit topics. They will discuss the extraordinary potential of gardens and gardening to improve our physical, cultural, and emotional health and well-being.
On the second day of the Summit, attendees will be treated to exclusive experiences at both private and public gardens throughout New York City and the greater metropolitan area that embody the forward-thinking and transformative potential in gardens today. Tours will be announced later this summer.
The breadth of speakers at the Summit and the combination of talks and tours will be of interest to all gardeners, designers, architects, and students who are passionate about gardens and their enormous potential in society. The Keynote Address will be given by Lady Isabella Tree (pictured below) on The Book of Wilding – A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small. Isabella Tree is an award-winning journalist and author of five books. Her first best-selling book, Wilding, tells the story of the daring wildlife experiment she began in 2000: rewilding her and her husband Charlie Burrell’s 3,500 acres of unprofitable farmland at Knepp Estate in West Sussex, UK. In less than twenty years their degraded land has become a functioning ecosystem again, wildlife has rocketed, and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. What has happened at Knepp challenges conventional ideas about nature, wildlife, and how we manage and envisage our land. It reveals the potential for the landscapes of the future. Isabella also writes for The Guardian, National GeographicMagazine, and Granta.
Other speakers include Edwina von Gal, founder of The Perfect Earth Project. Edwina von Galis a leading voice in sustainable gardening and landscape design. She founded the Perfect Earth Project in 2013 to promote nature-based, toxic-free land care for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. As principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, Edwina creates landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. Joining her as session speakers will be Horatio Joyce of The Garden Conservancy, Vanessa Keith of StudioTEKA Design, Jeff Lorenz of Refugia Design, and Rebecca McMackin, horticulturist and garden designer.
You will also have the opportunity to hear Jennifer Jewell, Radio Host and Author of Cultivating Place. This year, Jewell was awarded the American Horticultural Society’s Great Gardener Morrison Award for outstanding horticultural communication. Her third book, What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seedswill be published in September. On the topic of Community, session speakers will include Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, and Sam Stewart-Halevy of New Affiliates, Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architects, Peter Lefkovits of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Nicole Thomas of Urban Health Lab.
In another thread, horticulture and culture are on a collision course—and that’s a good thing. Forgotten garden histories, the challenges of preserving mid-century landscapes, and the growing engagement of the visual arts with the natural environment are the animating topics in a session to be led by Melissa Chiu. She is director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern and contemporary art. Dr. Chiu’s current organizational focus is transforming the Hirshhorn into a 21st-century institution through the revitalization of the museum’s campus, including a new design for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden by artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. Joining Melissa will be Cindy Brockway of The Trustees of Reservations, David Godshall of Terremoto of LA, Abra Lee, horticulturist and historian, and Brent Leggs of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
Berkshire Botanical Garden presents Midori Shintani, head gardener of Japan’s famous Tokachi Millennium Forest, in its online Winter Lecture, “Discovering Tokachi,” on February 18, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Midori will share how she and her team have nurtured the native forests and cultivated garden areas through the seasons. She will also explain how her gardening methods are rooted in the accumulated wisdom of the ancient Japanese belief of mother culture, and how she has built a solid partnership with garden designer Dan Pearson and her garden team.
The Tokachi Millennium Forest is located at the foot of the Hidaka Mountains in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. The project was originally started in 1990 by a local newspaper company that acquired about 990 acres there to create a carbon-offsetting forest. Eventually this became a project to restore the natural forest ecosystems, to share with the public and be sustainable for the next 1,000 years. The garden project of the Tokachi Millennium Forest began in 1996. In 2008, the forest officially was opened to the public, and has continued to evolve.
Midori Shintani was born and raised in the Fukui Prefecture in central Japan, in the countryside surrounded by sea and mountains. Spending time with plants in this area rich with nature was an early influence. Midori trained in horticulture and landscape architecture at Minami Kyushu University, Japan. In 2002 she moved to Sweden and trained to become a gardener at Millesgården and Rosendals Trädgård. In 2004 she moved back to Japan and worked at a garden design and landscaping company and perennial nursery, gaining experience in both traditional and modern techniques to create her own gardening style. Since 2008 she has been the head gardener of Tokachi Millennium Forest, merging “new Japanese horticulture” into wild nature. She writes and lectures widely.
Tickets for the Winter Lecture are $30 for members of Berkshire Botanical Garden and $35 for non-members and are available online at berkshirebotanical.org/events or by calling 413-320-4794.
Established in 1997, the Winter Lecture Series was initiated by the Berkshire Botanical Garden to bring inspiring and noted speakers to the region to talk about horticulture, landscape design and history, plants and plant exploration, and home gardening. Past speakers have included such luminaries as Tom Coward, Marco Polo Stufano, Dan Hinkley, Edwina von Gal, Penelope Hobhouse, Bill Cullina, Fergus Garrett, Debs Goodenough, Dr. Michael Dirr, Ken Druse, Anna Pavord, Thomas Woltz and Margaret Roach. Proceeds from ticket sales support the Garden’s education programs.
This year the Garden Conservancy rolled out something entirely new for Open Days, the Nature-Friendly Gardens Nibbled Leaf category, and we want your opinions, input, and questions! Please join Page Dickey, Edwina von Gal and Open Days staff Horatio Joyce and Amy Murray for a Town Hall style Zoom. Find out what it’s all about: what we mean by nature friendly, what it takes to “qualify”, why it matters, how we have managed our own challenges, and whatever else is of interest to you. Here’s your chance to chime in. The event will begin at 1:30 Eastern time and is $5 for Garden Conservancy members, $15 for nonmembers.
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar.
Members of the Frank & Anne Cabot Society for planned giving have complimentary access to Garden Conservancy webinars. All Cabot Society members will automatically be sent the link to participate on the morning of the webinar. For more information about the Cabot Society, please contact us at info@gardenconservancy.org or 845.424.6500.
More than thirty years ago, Page Dickey served on Frank Cabot’s advisory committee to help launch the Garden Conservancy and went on to cofound the Conservancy’s celebrated Open Days program. Beyond her service to our organization, Page is an unmatched voice in the realm of garden writing. The author of eight books, she has written of the material challenges and successes of creating her own gardens, Duck Hill and Church House, and of transcendent notions such as the spirit of place. She is both garden designer and philosopher, and her distinct perspective is an inspiration for so many passionate gardeners.
Principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, Edwina von Gal creates landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. Her work has been published in many major publications and her book “Fresh Cuts” won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing in 1998. She has served on boards and committees for a number of horticultural organizations and is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity. In 2013, Edwina founded the Perfect Earth Project to promote toxin-free landscapes for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. She is the 2017 recipient of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts. In 2018 she received the NY School of Interior Design’s Green Design Award and The Isamu Noguchi Award.
Our obsession with tidy, “clean” landscapes is proving to be harmful to the things and the ones we love. How can we step away from the need for ‘neat’ and let nature play a role in how we perceive, design and maintain our human dominated lands? The rewards of gardening with nature, not against it, are a fabulous mix of process and perception. Edwina von Gal will discuss the reasons why we need to change the way we garden, the difference it can make, and how to make it all happen. Join her and the Berkshire Botanical Garden community online on February 19 at 10 am in a transformative commitment to actually do something incredibly effective about climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
Edwina von Gal has been principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, creating landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. She has collaborated with noted architects such as Maya Lin, Frank Gehry, Annabelle Selldorf, and Toshiko Mori, on projects for Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Richard Serra, Larry Gagosian, Robert De Niro, Jann Wenner and many others in the environmental, design and art communities. Edwina’s work has been published in most major publications. Her book “Fresh Cuts” won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing. In 2008, while designing the park for The Biomuseo Panama, she founded the Azuero Earth Project, promoting native species reforestation on Panama’s Azuero Peninsula, perhaps the first of its kind to work without synthetic chemicals. In 2013, she created the Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising consciousness about the dangers of toxic lawn and garden chemicals, and the importance of planting native species, to protect the health of people, their pets, and the planet. In 2021 she launched a new initiative, Two Thirds for the Birds, a call to action to landscape and environmental professionals to make all their projects habitat friendly. She is currently converting her own property, Marshouse, into a laboratory and teaching center for Whole and Healthy landscape practices.
Edwina received the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art’s Arthur Ross Award in 2012 and is the 2017 recipient of Guild Hall’s Academy of the Arts Lifetime Achievement Award for the Visual Arts. In 2018 she received the NY School of Interior Design’s Green Design Award and The Isamu Noguchi Award, as well as the Conservator Award from Quogue Wildlife Refuge in 2020. She lectures regularly about nature-based landscape solutions.
The reasons to remove toxic chemicals from our landscapes are many and many homeowners are seeking landscape professionals who can deliver healthier landscape options. However, too often clients give up on pesticide- and fertilizer-free landscapes because their expectations are not met, the results are not what they had in mind, or the process is confusing to them. How do landscape professionals educate, manage expectations, and keep a client’s trust during the transition?
Edwina von Gal from Perfect Earth Project will discuss solutions that are minimal in cost and aesthetically pleasing, in this Ecological Landscape Alliance webinar on Wednesday, January 17 from 4 – 5.. She will share her ideas on how to convince clients that a toxin-free landscape is worth pursuing, how to anticipate common problems, and how to communicate effectively.
Edwina von Gal, Principal of her landscape design firm on Long Island since 1984, Ms. von Gal has striven to integrate simplicity and sustainability into her design of landscapes for private and public clients around the world. Her work has been published in major publications and her book Fresh Cuts won the Quill and Trowel award for garden writing in 1998. She has served on boards and committees for a number of horticultural organizations, and is currently on the board of What Is Missing, Maya Lin’s multifaceted media artwork about the loss of biodiversity. Ms. von Gal designed the park for the Biomuseo, a museum of biodiversity in Panama City and stayed on to found the Azuero Earth Project with like-minded friends and scientists. The process convinced her to extend the toxin-free message to the US and consequently, she launched Perfect Earth Project in 2013. Most recently, she was appointed as a Master Teacher at the Conway School for the 2015-2016 academic year. She is the Green Schools Alliance Site and Landscaping Expert.
