They are pooling their funds to buy old cattle ranches before developers buy the land for high-rise resorts, casinos and golf courses. They are reforesting eroded lands and planning to build with local wood, and local labor, and living off the grid with wind and solar power. 

Last month von Gal stood on a windy cliff on the Azuero Peninsula, about 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, southwest of Panama City. Frangipani trees were blooming everywhere. 

"People here call them cocoloche," she said, stepping lightly, in black flip-flops, over the fresh planks of recently felled teak trees. "So I call this Punta Cocoloche." 

Von Gal, whose clients include Calvin Klein and Richard Serra, recently bought part of an old cattle ranch here. She will plant trees on the overgrazed hills and set up temporary quarters in a shipping container, ordered from Panama City.

"I'll put a little porch on the front," she said. "When I leave, the whole thing folds up and locks."

The land rush began gradually, after the United States transferred control of the Panama Canal to Panama in 1999, and Panama began courting eco-tourists and retirees to bolster a struggling economy.

The Panamanian Rubén Blades, a salsa singer and musician, film star, Harvard-trained lawyer and political activist, fled the country with his family in the 1970s, before the dictator Manuel Noriega began his rule of violence and corruption. Now, Blades is back, as Panama's minister of tourism. 

"Noriega is gone," Blades said. "We have so much to offer in this country. And people are coming in droves." 

The newcomers include von Gal's friends, Maya Lin, the designer and artist, and her husband, Daniel Wolf, an art collector and investor, who built a house on land in Bahia Honda a few years ago. They introduced her to Ovidio Diaz Espino, a lawyer and investment banker, who, like Blades and many other native sons, had left the country and come back. Diaz Espino, who now owns about 120 hectares, or about 300 acres, along the coast, invited von Gal to his low-slung beach house to see the 5-hectare sliver of land high on a point across the cove that he wanted to buy to protect his view. It was Punta Cocoloche. Von Gal bought the land with Diaz Espino for $30,000. 

Diaz Espino has also been reforesting his land with the help of Mark Wishnie, a Yale-trained forester. So far the plantings include more than 40 species of native trees on about 10 hectares. Some of these trees, like mahogany, cocobolo and purpleheart, are endangered after generations of slashing and burning for cropland and pastures. 

Wishnie co-founded the nonprofit Native Species Reforestation Project (also known by its Spanish acronym, Prorena) about four years ago in collaboration with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. 

In Bahia Honda, a lusher, more forested landscape than the parched hills of Azuero, which receives 50 percent less rain, Wishnie is working with Lin and Wolf to plant shade-loving cacao, as well as vanilla, which is actually an orchid vine. Both are native to Panama. 

"If Prorena can prove that these cash crops can be grown, which require forested areas, then they can prove that the local farmers can make money without cutting down trees," Lin said. 

Lin is designing a field station and greenhouse, pro bono, for Prorena, on land donated by Diaz Espino. 

Von Gal and Wishnie are also part of a private corporation founded by ecologically minded friends that recently bought about 80 hectares of eroded pasture. The group will plant trees and build a number of eco-sensitive houses. The friends named the corporation and the land Madrono, after a native tree.

Because Panama is now a big market for second homes for foreigners, they will plant hardwoods to beautify the landscape and improve the habitat for birds and other wildlife, not to mention improve real estate values.

All this talk is a long way from Southampton. Though up on the highest hill in Playa Venado, von Gal's cellphone started ringing. It was an assistant from Calvin Klein's office. How are they going to plant those trees on the roof?

Last spring von Gal began to edit the landscape severely around Klein's 72-room castle on the Atlantic Ocean in Southampton. Known for her spare plantings, she likes to tell her clients that "the obvious obscures the obvious." Why plant a tree tutu of impatiens, for example, around a magnificent oak? 

Klein had an overdose of obvious. "Oh my gosh," she said. "Foo dogs, shark tanks, cascading waterfalls with weeping plants." She got rid of them all, and the tennis court, too. She brought in tons of sand and created artificial dunes behind the real ones, and rolled them right up to the front door. On the other side, facing Shinnecock Bay, she planted red fescue and bayberry and pine. She used massive stones, already there, to make a staircase to the door on the bay side.

"But it's mostly buried," she said. "Very minimal. Calvin style. Grass will grow in the cracks." 

But, really, she said, "I just want to be here." And here means Panama. In the evenings she can hear the howler monkeys and watch their young swinging from one branch to another. 

One evening, as an ocean liner in the hazy Pacific headed north toward the entrance of the canal, she pointed out the cecropia trees growing like weeds along the water. Farmers like to cut these down, too. 

"Look at the silhouettes their leaves cast on the ground," she said, looking down and then up, at the lobed leaves, held aloft like parasols. "These are some of my Dr. Seuss plants. I want a whole grove of them here." 

She pictures poroporo, with bright yellow flowers, growing by the entrance to the museum. And near the old ficus, she will plant big natives, like ceiba, with its buttressed trunks, and quipo, whose broad branches, high in the sky, cradle the giant harpy eagle and her young. 

She wants to recruit docents from the local garden clubs to tell the stories of these trees and beloved herbs, like limoncello, or lemon grass, an Asian grass used in soups and teas. And she imagines a walkway going right into the canopy of the giant fig tree, which belongs to a genus that stars in the museum of biodiversity. 

She turned toward the skyline of Panama City and said, "How am I ever going to go back to Mrs. So-and-So's petunias after all this?"

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