A mid-Atlantic design/build firm is converting homeowners into native plant advocates, one lawn at a time.

By Jared Brey

Home Grown | Landscape Architecture Magazine

Refugia specializes in transforming lawns into pollinator-friendly habitats.

Jeff Lorenz stood under the mid-June sun at FDR Park, monitoring the final touches on his company’s exhibit for the Philadelphia Flower Show. The exhibit space, ordinarily an asphalt parking lot, had been covered in mulch and lined with displays, all in the final moments of construction.

Teams of employees scuttled about in branded T-shirts—“REFUGIA: Functional Design for the American Landscape”—placing trees, shrubs, grasses, moss, and flowers in clumps for planting the next day.

The plants were native, as they are in all of Refugia’s projects. You could find them throughout the coastal plain, Lorenz said: pitch pine, gray birch, bald cypress, Atlantic white cedar, wax myrtle, blueberry, swamp milkweed, giant coneflower, hay-scented fern.

A small, sloping path made of Pennsylvania bluestone would flow with water when the show opened the next night. The boardwalk was made from bald cypress boards. Part of the space was enclosed beneath a mycelium roof made of lion’s mane and reishi mushrooms.

It was Refugia’s seventh year exhibiting at the Philadelphia Flower Show—a great tool for marketing and recruiting, Lorenz says. But as interest in Refugia’s work has accelerated, Lorenz quietly confided, he’d begun to wonder whether it was a distraction. “We’re slammed,” he said. “Every aspect of our business is overwhelmed right now.”