KRISTEN GREGORIEV may have erred in leaving her San Anselmo home accessible to birds and beasts. She walked into her living room a while ago “to find a mama deer had left a fawn the size of a large Chihuahua there, wedged between two flowerpots.”
The “mama had gone off to graze,” she remembers, “but the baby woke up and started screaming. Mama came bounding down the hill and immediately retrieved her.”
Gregoriev swiftly got out of the way, knowing not to interfere with a beast and its offspring, and just let the “rescue” happen.
The incident, she says, was probably the most surprising thing that’s happened in her late-in-life life as an environmentalist.
Gregoriev, retired since 2016, is now immersed in gardening at home as well as at varied public sites of the nonprofit Refugia Marin, where she helps replace “invasive plant species” with native plants, and “cultivates a haven for local pollinators.”
She loves it.
The “spiritual nature of gardens can be really soothing in this time of chaos,” she says.
But she doesn’t love it all the time.
‘Something’s always dying’
“Gardening is a real leap of faith that something’s going to work, that critters aren’t going to get to it, that there isn’t going to be a lethal heat spell no matter how much you’ve watered.
“Nature’s a bitch. Something you’ve been nurturing gets eaten. Something’s always dying.”
It wasn’t long after Gregoriev joined Refugia Marin in 2023, she says, that “they pounced” because of her 40-plus years in nature-centric small businesses. So she’s become the nonprofit’s treasurer, putting in about 30 volunteer hours a month working with gardens and numbers.
“By forging strong partnerships … we work together towards our shared goal of enhancing the natural beauty of our community and creating spaces for people to enjoy.”
Kristen Gregoriev
The group was founded in 2021 in Corte Madera’s Town Park by its then-and-now executive director, Dana Swisher, an award-winning, longtime second-grade teacher at the Neil Cummins Elementary School in Corte Madera.
“She kept looking on the other side of a fence and seeing a fallow strip of weeds,” explains Gregoriev, who knew her through the Marin Monarch Working Group. So, Swisher finally stopped thinking about it and instead spent the requisite time — with the ultimate help of about eight board members and about 80 volunteers — to transform the strip into a thriving native plant habitat.
Refugia Marin’s purpose now, according to its website, “extends beyond conservation; we strive to educate the community about the myriad benefits of native plants while creating thriving wildlife habitats.
“By forging strong partnerships with schools, community leaders, and like-minded organizations, we work together towards our shared goal of enhancing the natural beauty of our community and creating spaces for people to enjoy.”
From weeding to seeding
Refugia (a plural word that means safe havens) is a volunteer organization except for three paid employees. Its public spaces include the Pollinator Garden at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael and the People’s Garden in Cove Park, Corte Madera.
Refugia’s latest project is Habitat Garden, behind the new Larkspur Library, that’s intended, according to the website, to “serve as a visible demonstration of climate-resilient planting and local biodiversity.”
Gregoriev has gardened at all the sites except the library and Hall Middle School’s outdoor classroom in Larkspur. “I’ve done a lot of weeding, lots of pruning, planted a couple of trees, planted seeds, and weed-whacked with a new, lighter electric machine,” she says. “It’s very rewarding to see an area that you’ve tended.”
She’s also “done outreach, staffed tables set up at events like May 9’s Eco-Friendly Garden Tour and other community events.”
She’s been engrossed, too, in Refugia Marin’s highly successful April 28 fund-raiser, An Evening in Conversation at the Lark Theater with best-selling journalist and CNN series host Kara Swisher, Dana Swisher’s sister-in-law, and acclaimed Fairfax author Anne Lamott.
Gregoriev maintains that she’s “super-fortunate” to be able to work with the organization’s volunteer nature enthusiasts, a “wonderful group of people — bright, funny, smart, diligent. I’m the Old One, going to be 70 in September; everyone’s younger than me, the youngest in the mid-30s.”
Though happy, she regrets coming “pretty much late to the party. I was a passive environmentalist who only became active after I retired (although I’d designed environmental T-shirts that kids would want to wear).”
She says it’s “nice to work in areas other than my own because I have too many deer here.” But she still revels in changing her backyard into a pollinator paradise.
Preference for pollinators
Gregoriev prefers working with plants native to California “because they’re more suited to our climate and they’re more beneficial to the pollinators — bees and butterflies — because they’ve evolved over time to have a beneficial relationship with each other.”
Her favorite public site is “the original Town Park, because I’ve seen the most evolution, watching one-gallon plants really take off and become more beautiful.”
Her favorite plants? “The Ceanothus, a shrub with beautiful purple flowers that butterflies really go for; the Pitcher Sage, another shrub that smells unbelievably good to me, that has beautiful bell-like delicate pink flowers, and, as for a tree, the California buckeye, which supports all the caterpillars which in turn support the songbirds, the small birds that snatch the caterpillars to feed their babies.”
The gardening she’s doing, she says, brings her “delights and quiet satisfaction. I’ve done this kind of gardening since I was in college at UC Davis.”
As for toiling behind her own place, she says, “When we first moved in, we tried to plant anything that the deer wouldn’t eat. Now, I’m really trying to plant native, and I am finding some things the deer are not so fond of.”
Asked what the favorite plants in her yard are, first she answers flippantly, “Anything that grows,” then more seriously adds, “I have a lot of Milkweed for the Monarch butterflies.”
Gardening, she muses with obvious joy, “is a dialogue. You do something and then it does something. It’s not a one-way thing.”