Good morning!

Over the past five-plus years of The Slowdown, we’ve put a lot of effort into what could only be called, to use a helpful Stewart Brand phrase, “whole-earth thinking.” Making our At a Distance podcast and book was largely about exploring this concept—one episode, with the technology journalist John Markoff, was literally about the term and Brand himself—and several of our Time Sensitive conversations over the years have delved deeply into this terrain, too, whether with The New York Times journalist David Wallace-Wells, known for his conversation-shaping writing about the climate crisis, or with the Indigenous climate activist Xiye Bastida.

Our latest Time Sensitive episode—the final one of Season 9—features the celebrated East Hampton–based landscape and garden designer Edwina von Gal, who takes a planetary-lens approach to gardens, lawns, and landscapes. I’d even go so far as to call what she does “whole-earth gardening.” As the founder of the nonprofit Perfect Earth Project, she’s become one of the leading advocates and voices for chemical-free non-agricultural land management in the U.S., as well as—through her latest effort, Two Thirds for the Birds—planting more native species and eliminating pesticides as a bird-saving (and planet-healing) measure.

I hope you come away as inspired by von Gal as I am. On the episode, citing the pressing nature of the climate crisis, she speaks about her work with great urgency, clarity, and excitement: “This period of time is, for me, actually uniquely exciting and a nervous-energy joy in that there is a giant wrecking ball headed right for us, and we’ve never had a really good reason to garden before…. Now there’s a really serious purpose behind what I do.” For her, gardening is meditative—she calls what she does “landscape therapy”—but also a vital, pragmatic way to help mend ourselves and the world around us.

I thought this message from von Gal could be a nice note to end the season on, and to head into summer with.

—Spencer