Refugia converts householders into native plant advocates, one garden at a time.
By Jared Brey
Jeff Lorenz stood beneath the mid-June solar at FDR Park, monitoring the ultimate touches on his firm’s exhibit for the Philadelphia Flower Present. The exhibit house, ordinarily an asphalt parking zone, had been coated in mulch and lined with shows, all within the last moments of building.
Groups of workers scuttled about in branded T-shirts—“REFUGIA: Purposeful Design for the American Panorama”—inserting timber, shrubs, grasses, moss, and flowers in clumps for planting the following day.
The vegetation had been native, as they’re in all of Refugia’s tasks. You could possibly discover them all through the coastal plain, Lorenz mentioned: pitch pine, grey birch, bald cypress, Atlantic white cedar, wax myrtle, blueberry, swamp milkweed, large coneflower, hay-scented fern.
A small, sloping path manufactured from Pennsylvania bluestone would circulate with water when the present opened the following evening. The boardwalk was comprised of bald cypress boards. A part of the house was enclosed beneath a mycelium roof manufactured from lion’s mane and reishi mushrooms.
It was Refugia’s seventh yr exhibiting on the Philadelphia Flower Present—an incredible device for advertising and marketing and recruiting, Lorenz says. However as curiosity in Refugia’s work has accelerated, Lorenz quietly confided, he’d begun to wonder if it was a distraction. “We’re slammed,” he mentioned. “Each facet of our enterprise is overwhelmed proper now.”
Lorenz based Refugia in 2015. The corporate started with small jobs within the Philadelphia suburbs, serving to householders incorporate native, pollinator-friendly vegetation into their lawns and gardens. Steadily, the enterprise has grown, with a number of panorama architects and designers on employees and an increasing community of residential gardens and public commissions beneath its belt.
Refugia’s development has mirrored an explosion of curiosity amongst householders in native vegetation and pollinators. Particularly, over the previous few years, a motion to kill the grass garden and exchange it with ecologically helpful flora has taken maintain in sure components of the American suburbs.
Refugia is headquartered on the Most important Line, a community of Philadelphia suburbs linked by commuter rail that’s among the many wealthiest locations in the USA. Among the many space’s manicured lawns, Refugia’s strategy has discovered detractors in addition to fans.
However its portfolio is rising quick. On its web site, the corporate claims an ecological “Greenway Community” of greater than 75 native gardens it has accomplished inside 5 miles of its house base in Narberth, Pennsylvania. And plenty of extra are within the works. Lorenz says he needs the corporate to be “simply large enough” to satisfy the demand for native gardens within the space and, within the course of, assist make the suburbs extra environment friendly with stormwater and extra helpful to bees, birds, butterflies, caterpillars, and, by extension, people.
“The entire objective of our enterprise is to pepper the suburbs and concrete areas with habitat,” Lorenz says. “If there’s any direct method that we are able to all say we’re doing one thing concerning the altering local weather and species collapse and all this stuff, it’s on personal property.”
Ecological Hyperlinks
Lorenz, whose father taught sustainable engineering at Villanova College and cofounded the sustainability consultancy Environmental Assets Administration, tries to proselytize for native species with out being preachy.
He regularly cites the writer Doug Tallamy, an entomologist who has known as native gardening “a grassroots resolution to the extinction disaster.” In his books Bringing Nature Residence and Nature’s Finest Hope, Tallamy has framed the nation’s suburban yards because the final, finest likelihood to revive among the ecological perform of the developed panorama and promoted “a suburban ecosystem that’s complicated sufficient to maintain itself going with out micromanagement on our half,” as he wrote in Bringing Nature Residence (see “Large Tree, Small World,” LAM, September 2021).
Refugia’s Greenway Community is a small model of Tallamy’s “Homegrown Nationwide Park,” an advocacy effort to create 20 million acres of native plantings round the USA, representing about half the privately owned garden house within the nation.
Refugia’s web site features a testimonial from Tallamy, and at one time, Lorenz repeatedly handed out Tallamy’s books to potential purchasers, says Kayla Fell, Refugia’s inventive content material supervisor (and Lorenz’s spouse). More and more over the previous few years, the method has reversed, Fell says: Householders, already transformed to the trigger, strategy Refugia in search of assist making their gardens extra practical and helpful to bugs.
On a Tuesday morning in June, Lorenz drove with Amy Matusheski, a summer season intern, to go to a possible shopper at a three-story stone home in Wynnewood, a Most important Line suburb. The proprietor, Dan Mercer, had moved from town in 2016 along with his spouse, Swati, and their 10-year-old daughter. When he purchased the home, Mercer mentioned, the entrance garden had been principally grass, with “mountains of mulch” surrounding planted areas.
Mercer had progressively eliminated the garden and the mulch and coated the entrance yard in native vegetation, a few of which he planted and a few of which grew on their very own, together with boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), and bee balms. He’d established a collection of rain gardens with sweet-scented joe-pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum), swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), jap bluestar (Amsonia tabernaemontana), and woodland sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus), which captured virtually all of the runoff from his home. However there was one downspout that also spilled into the driveway. He known as Refugia in search of concepts about tips on how to divert the remaining water into the backyard. And he was additionally in search of methods to revamp the again patio and develop the yard backyard.
Within the backyard at his final home, Mercer advised Lorenz, he’d had grapevines, which had been good till the fruit obtained heavy and dropped, rotted, and attracted bees and wasps. Was there a local vine that grew in a similar way? Lorenz really helpful trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) or crossvine (Bignonia capreolata), each of which might cowl a trellis and produce huge, colourful flowers within the spring and summer season.
“And so they don’t have tendrils, so that they received’t adhere to it; they simply wind round,” he advised Mercer. “They received’t destroy the construction.”
Mercer turned concerned about native plantings after seeing how a lot flooding affected native trails in Wissahickon Valley Park, the place he volunteers. The stormwater runs off suburban lawns and overwhelms the native creeks. Mercer wished to be a part of an answer.
“I’m not going to avoid wasting any parks or something like that. It’s simply me. It’s a small lot,” he says. “However, you understand, plenty of easy efforts may add as much as one thing vital.”
Native Community
Every time potential, Refugia sources vegetation from a small net of native growers, together with Pure Landscapes Nursery, High quality Greenhouses, North Creek Nurseries, Sam Brown’s Wholesale Nursery in Pennsylvania, and Nice Run Nursery in New Jersey. In addition they pull some species from Pizzo Native Plant Nursery in Illinois.
Some vegetation are purchased in bulk and saved at Refugia’s headquarters, particularly hardy shrubs and small timber, Lorenz says. Delicate perennials and fungus-prone grasses they have an inclination to purchase as soon as they’ve a planting plan for a selected venture. The corporate features a yr of panorama stewardship for many of its installations, and in the middle of upkeep, employees repeatedly pull cuttings to propagate in Refugia’s greenhouse. Often they’ll make changes to the soil at a sure web site, however sometimes they select a plant palette primarily based on present circumstances.
Over the previous yr, pandemic-related provide chain points have principally sorted themselves out for Refugia’s wants, Lorenz says. However sudden shortages have continued to happen as native demand for native vegetation spikes, particularly on civic tasks. The native-plant motion is rising for a couple of causes, says George Coombs, the director of horticulture on the Mt. Cuba Middle, a botanical backyard centered on native vegetation in Hockessin, Delaware. One is that the thought of serving to bugs like monarch butterflies, that are “cute and fuzzy and charismatic,” is a comparatively straightforward promote. The opposite is that planting natives is much less of an act of sacrifice than different actions taken on behalf of the atmosphere.
“So many conservation behaviors require you to surrender one thing—much less water, much less electrical energy,” Coombs says. “However you don’t have to try this with vegetation. You may add native vegetation, hold all those you’ve all the time liked, and nonetheless have a extremely helpful impression.”
Panorama architects deserve some credit score for pioneering the usage of native species in private and non-private gardens, says Andrew Bunting, the vp of horticulture for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which places on the Philadelphia Flower Present. Particularly, Andropogon, primarily based in Philadelphia, and Oehme, van Sweden, primarily based in Washington, D.C., had been early proponents of the native plant motion, he says. The usage of natives has grow to be far more commonplace since these companies started utilizing them within the Eighties. And whereas natives can be utilized in lots of the similar formal types as conventional ornamentals, they’ve additionally grow to be strongly related to a selected meadow aesthetic. Some folks need that. Others, together with some in Philadelphia’s rich suburbs, don’t.
“For lots of people, most likely, the garden and the shrubs [have] extra to do with management,” Bunting says. “There’s one thing there that’s not essentially horticultural. So, to get folks to shift to the prairie or meadow fashion—for most individuals, that’s a serious shift.”
Along with internet hosting the greenway map on its web site, Refugia posts street-facing indicators on the native gardens it vegetation. It’s a advertising and marketing device, however Fell says it’s additionally “designed to inform folks why it seems to be like this.”
Rob Gladfelter, ASLA, the director of operations at Refugia, joined the corporate in 2021 after getting a bachelor’s in panorama structure at Temple College. Earlier than that, he’d labored in landscaping and horticulture for greater than a decade. It’s been thrilling to see a shift towards native vegetation in public gardens, he says, and to work for an organization that has a mission to handle the local weather disaster. And one which stands by its rules, he says, together with being prepared to get fired by a shopper for refusing to plant a rosebush. He’s comfortable to plant a standard backyard with hedges, he says, so long as they’re native.
“We actually need everyone to do it,” Gladfelter says. “The entire thought is we actually wish to change folks’s notion of what a wholesome panorama seems to be like.”
Lorenz says he tries to comply with the native ethos in the case of hardscaping, too. He sources bald cypress boards from native lumberyards, and he’s an fanatic of Pennsylvania bluestone, a sedimentary sandstone used for panorama steps and pavers that he sources from HEPCO Quarries, which has a stone yard in West Chester, Pennsylvania. It’s a novel stone that solely happens in a small space of northeastern Pennsylvania and southern New York, says Brad Hepler, a co-owner of HEPCO Quarries. The layers differ in measurement, from the five-foot-thick “noticed rock” that’s processed and used for wall caps, mantels, hearths, and lintels to the extra delicate, irregular slabs used for steps. It takes plenty of forethought and planning to extract and market all components of the rock, Hepler says, and never all quarries do it. HEPCO operates on a 205-acre plot of land in Windsor, New York, in response to Hepler, who says the corporate has been actively quarrying the identical 10-acre part of it since 2005.
The bluestone slabs that Refugia used for the Philadelphia Flower Present had been an opportunistic buy, Lorenz says—two pallets had been ready for an additional shopper who canceled. “We simply attempt to have our supplies be in the identical world because the vegetation we use,” he says.
Jared Brey is a contract reporter in Philadelphia and a contributing editor to the journal.
