Edwina von Gal, East Hampton, NY

Edwina is a landscape designer and environmentalist whose goal is to create beautiful gardens without synthetic chemicals. In 2013, she founded Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to raising consciousness about the dangers of synthetic lawn and garden chemicals and to promoting toxic-free techniques that provide beautiful, safe results at no extra cost. Edwina’s property, Marsh House, is her laboratory and demonstration space, as well as an ecological refuge of sorts, as it is on a protected salt marsh. The rest of the four-plus acres contains a variety of natural restoration and garden areas, all works in progress: two types of meadows, vegetable and flower beds, and a moss garden. She does not remove any biomass from the property; rather, she finds various uses for materials generated, creating log walls from invasive trees and haystacks from meadow cuttings. Her collaboration with professor and author Doug Tallamy, the “Two-Thirds for the Birds” initiative, focuses on inspiring people to plant more native plants in their gardens to provide habitat, increase biodiversity, and help reverse rapidly declining bird populations.

@edwinavongal perfectearthproject.org

“Through Open Days, it is great to know that there are so many others who share my interests and want to share them with me. No one seems to mind that my garden is not pristine. It is about ideas and experimentation.”