{"id":111657,"date":"2026-05-21T15:41:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-21T22:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/?p=111657"},"modified":"2026-05-21T15:56:28","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T22:56:28","slug":"in-refugia-marin-gardens-environmental-retiree-nurtures-plants-and-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forallevents.com\/reviews\/in-refugia-marin-gardens-environmental-retiree-nurtures-plants-and-community\/","title":{"rendered":"In Refugia Marin gardens, environmental retiree nurtures plants and community"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kristen Gregoriev with a crowd pleaser at Hall Middle School in Larkspur during an eco garden tour on Saturday, May 9, 2026. Gregoriev, a retiree, volunteers with nonprofit Refugia Marin, helping to replace invasive plant species with native plants to cultivate havens for local pollinators. (John Waters via Bay City News)<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

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Kristen Gregoriev may have erred leaving her San Anselmo home accessible to birds and beasts. She walked into her living room a while ago \u201cto find a mama deer had left a fawn the size of a large Chihuahua there, wedged between two flowerpots.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cmama had gone off to graze,\u201d she remembers, \u201cbut the baby woke up and started screaming. Mama came bounding down the hill and immediately retrieved her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gregoriev swiftly got out of the way, knowing not to interfere with a beast and its offspring, and just let the \u201crescue\u201d happen.<\/p>\n

The incident, she says, was probably the most surprising thing that\u2019s happened in her late-in-life life as an environmentalist.<\/p>\n

Gregoriev, retired since 2016, is now immersed in gardening at home as well as varied public sites of Refugia Marin, where she helps replace \u201cinvasive plant species\u201d with native plants, and \u201ccultivates a haven for local pollinators.\u201d<\/p>\n

She loves it.<\/p>\n

The \u201cspiritual nature of gardens can be really soothing in this time of chaos,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

But she doesn\u2019t love it all<\/em> the time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cGardening is a real leap of faith that something\u2019s going to work, that critters aren\u2019t going to get to it, that there isn\u2019t going to be a lethal heat spell no matter how much you\u2019ve watered.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>\u201cNature\u2019s a bitch. Something you\u2019ve been nurturing gets eaten. Something\u2019s always dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long after Gregoriev joined Refugia Marin in 2023, she says, that \u201cthey pounced\u201d because of her 40-plus years in nature-centric small businesses. So she\u2019s become the nonprofit\u2019s treasurer, putting in about 30 volunteer hours a month working with gardens and numbers.<\/p>\n

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(Brian B. Beard via Bay City News)<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The nonprofit was founded in 2021 in Corte Madera\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe kept looking on the other side of a fence and seeing a fallow strip of weeds,\u201d explains Gregoriev, who knew her through the Marin Monarch Working Group. So, Swisher finally stopped thinking about it and instead spent the requisite time \u2014 with the ultimate help of about eight board members and about 80 volunteers \u2014 to transform the strip into a thriving native plant habitat.<\/p>\n

Refugia Marin\u2019s purpose now, according to its website \u2014www.refugiamarin.org<\/a> \u2014 \u201cextends beyond conservation; we strive to educate the community about the myriad benefits of native plants while creating thriving wildlife habitats.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Refugia (a plural word that means safe havens) is a volunteer organization except for three paid employees whose public spaces include the Pollinator Garden at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael and the People\u2019s Garden in Cove Park, Corte Madera.<\/p>\n

Its latest project is Habitat Garden, behind the new Larkspur Library, that\u2019s intended, according to the website, to \u201cserve as a visible demonstration of climate-resilient planting and local biodiversity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gregoria has gardened at all the sites except the library and Hall Middle School\u2019s outdoor classroom in Larkspur. \u201cI\u2019ve done a lot of weeding, lots of pruning, planted a couple of trees, planted seeds, and weed-whacked with a new, lighter electric machine,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s very rewarding to see an area that you\u2019ve tended.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Refugia Marin Habitat Garden blooms in Corte Madera Town Park in Corte Madera on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Kristen Gregoriev via Bay City News)<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

She\u2019s also \u201cdone outreach, staffed tables set up at events like May 9\u2019s Eco-Friendly Garden Tour and other community events.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s been engrossed, too, in Refugia Marin\u2019s highly successful April 28 fund-raiser, An Evening in Conversation<\/em> at the Lark Theater with best-selling journalist and CNN series host Kara Swisher, Dana Swisher\u2019s sister-in-law, and acclaimed Fairfax author Anne Lamott.<\/p>\n

Gregoriev maintains that she\u2019s \u201csuper-fortunate\u201d to be able to work with the organization\u2019s volunteer nature enthusiasts, a \u201cwonderful group of people \u2014 bright, funny, smart, diligent. I\u2019m the Old One, going to be 70 in September; everyone\u2019s younger than me, the youngest in the mid-30s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though happy, she regrets coming \u201cpretty much late to the party. I was a passive environmentalist who only became active after I retired (although I\u2019d designed environmental T-shirts that kids would want to wear).\u201d<\/p>\n

She says it\u2019s \u201cnice to work in areas other than my own because I have too many deer here.\u201d But she still revels in changing her backyard into a pollinator paradise.<\/p>\n

Gregoriev prefers working with plants native to California \u201cbecause they\u2019re more suited to our climate and they\u2019re more beneficial to the pollinators \u2014 bees and butterflies \u2014 because they\u2019ve evolved over time to have a beneficial relationship with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her favorite public site is \u201cthe original town park, because I\u2019ve seen the most evolution, watching one-gallon plants really take off and become more beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her favorite plants? \u201cThe Ceanothus, a shrub with\u00a0 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gardening she\u2019s doing, she says, brings her \u201cdelights and quiet satisfaction. I\u2019ve done this kind of gardening since I was in college at U.C. Davis.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for toiling behind her own place, she says, \u201cWhen we first moved in, we tried to plant anything that the deer wouldn\u2019t eat. Now, I\u2019m really trying to plant native, and I am<\/em> finding some things the deer are not so fond of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked what the favorite plants in her yard are, first she answers flippantly, \u201cAnything that grows,\u201d then more seriously adds, \u201cI have a lot of Milkweed for the Monarch butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gardening, she muses with obvious joy, \u201cis a dialogue. You do something and then it <\/em>does something. It\u2019s not a one-way thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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This article was first published on<\/strong>LocalNewsMatters.org<\/a><\/i><\/strong>, a nonprofit site supported by Bay City News Foundation http:\/\/www.baycitynews.org\/contact\/<\/a><\/i>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sherwood \u201cWoody\u201d Weingarten, a longtime voting member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics Circle, can be contacted by email at\u00a0voodee@sbcgloba<\/i><\/a><\/em>l.<\/a>net<\/i><\/a> or on his websites, https:\/\/woodyweingarten.com<\/i><\/a>and\u00a0https:\/\/vitalitypress.com<\/i><\/a>. His books include <\/em>Rollercoaster: How a man can survive his partner\u2019s breast cancer<\/em>, aimed at <\/em>male caregivers;\u00a0<\/span>MysteryDates \u2014 How to keep the sizzle in your relationship; The Roving I<\/i>, a compilation of 70 of his newspaper columns; and\u00a0<\/span>Grampy and His Fairyzona Playmates<\/i>, a whimsical fantasy intended for 6- to 10-year-olds that he co-authored with his then 8-year-old granddaughter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Kristen Gregoriev may have erred leaving her San Anselmo home accessible to birds and beasts. She walked into her living room a while ago \u201cto find a mama…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"yasr_overall_rating":0,"yasr_post_is_review":"","yasr_auto_insert_disabled":"","yasr_review_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[837,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-joe-cillo","category-woody-weingarten"],"yasr_visitor_votes":{"stars_attributes":{"read_only":true,"span_bottom":"