Monthly Archives: November 2022

Sierra Madre Post Office

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Lush, Leafy, Low-Water, Fire-Defensive Wildlife Habitat

Retired fire fighters Bob Spears and Jim Walsworth spearheaded the renovation of the Sierra Madre Post Office gardens, an effort funded by the San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. They envisioned removing the highly combustible junipers and arson grasses in favor of a demonstration of fire defensive landscaping.

January 2025 Notice: While fires and recovery are in progress, we encourage Angelenos
to stay in their home communities and visit our fire defensive demonstration gardens
via their dedicated websites. We’d love for you to visit in person once danger has passed,
and nearby residents are further into recovery processes.
Thank you for your love and consideration.

Once surrounded by high-mass and highly flammable junipers, the post office garden now features an ember resistant Zone 0, a stormwater sinking bioswale, and drought-resistant indigenous foliage.

FormLA Landscaping’s Isara Ongwiseth desgined the garden. Spears and Walsworth installed much of the garden’s infrastructure, including the expansive bioswale and subsurface, low-flow, drip irrigation and weather based controllers. The garden’s native foliage was installed by the Sierra Madre community, led and instructed by FormLA team members.


The extraordinary rains of 2023 quickly grew the foliage. The garden is now fragrant, evergreen, ever-blooming, and ever-berrying wildlife habitat! In 2024, Bob Spears and a team of Eagle Scouts expanded the Zone 0 in the adjacent, vacant lot. The structure is now surrounded by the full five-foot ember resistant zone recommended for high fire severity areas.

Douglas Iris and Alumroot enjoy the riparian space near the bioswale.
The ember resistant Zone 0 protects and serves as a walkway.
Blue Eyed Grass greets visitors at the Balwin entrance.
Sunny Monkey Flowers greet visitors on Mariposa.
Isara Ongwiseth, US Representative Judy Chu ,
Bob Spears, Jim Walsworth,
Mayor Robert Parkhurst, and Georgia Case.

In April of 2023, Spears, Walsworth and Case were honored with congressional recognition for this effort by U.S. Representative Judy Chu, who joined for the garden’s dedication. Learn more about the project timeline, stakeholders, fundraising, material acquisition, and volunteer engagement from Bob Spears in our Client Insights.

In October of 2025, Spears inspired the expansion of the ember resistant zone (Zone 0) around the Post Office. Noah Posin, an Eagle Scout with Pasadena Scout Troop 5, guided the work, which also included removing the arson grasses filling the vacant lot between the post office and its residential neighbors.

Plant Palette

While no plant is fire proof, there are plants that hold hydration well in high, dry heat and do not travel to wild spaces. When well placed, spaced and maintained, they can be fire defensive. See our Pinterest page for the Sierra Madre Post Office palette and several others.

Defend and Discount

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November 2022. By Cassy Aoyagi: Angelenos have an added incentive to make our homes Safer from Wildfire – California now mandates our insurance companies provide discounts for taking action. What a gift! As big as that gift is, it’s far from the full story!

January 2025 Notice: This article is designed to provide long-term guidance.
If you have been asked to evacuate, Get Set and Go!

The new law also mandates that insurance companies reveal a property’s score and give owners an opportunity to appeal their assessment. Whether you want to angle for a discount or defend your defensive actions, we have an abundance of resources to help you prepare to earn the best possible score and rate:

Fire Defensive Landscape Maintenance

When it comes to your landscape, the actions most in line with those defined by Safer from Wildfire relate to fire defensive maintenance practices. You might be surprised how incredible simple these life saving, discount earning tasks are!

Fire Defensive Landscape Qualities

If you’ve been alerted to a potential rate hike or loss of insurance, landscape maintenance is still a great place to start. A landscape renovation that references the distinct vulnerabilities of your home, as I showcase in our tours, will go further toward defending both your rate and your home.

While we’ve all been trained to think of taming nature as the best way to protect ourselves, the best way to become safer from wildfire is to think home first. It’s also the best way to earn insurance discounts!

Home and Neighboring Structures

Being safer from wildfire means making the most flammable objects in the wild (our homes) less receptive to fire. The state’s framework recognizes this by placing home hardening ahead of landscaping actions. This may not be as onerous as you envision. While maintenance of the spaces nearest your home can low-hanging fruit, many high-impact home upgrades have a surprisingly low relative cost.

With the state gifting wildland urban interface dwellers discounts for the holidays, my hope is we can start giving ourselves and LA the safety we all deserve.