good morning america and univision deftly illustrate the ins and outs of wildfire prep

Updated February 2025: Looking to get the gist of preparing a property for wildfire? In under 30 minutes, these clips from Good Morning America, the Theodore Payne Foundation, and Univision can jumpstart your understanding.

January 2025 Notice: This article is designed to provide long-term guidance.
If you are navigating loss, consider waiting to read it.
If you have been asked to evacuate, Get Set and Go!

Why Fire Ignites Homes

See an Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) experiment that casts embers at two homes to discover how homes ignite – and what can keep them from doing so.
 

Learn about the retrofits, construction materials and strategies that can help homes defy flames via Univision’s tour of the Fire Resilient Home with LA County Fire Department’s Alex Villalta.

Protect Your Home with Defensive Landscape Strategies

Ginger Zee discusses the ins and outs of fire defensive landscaping with FormLA Landscaping President Cassy Aoyagi.

While no plant is fire proof, and a handful can raise LA’s wildfire risk, and some plants resist ignition. See University of Irvine experiments with “drought tolerant” arson grasses and the more fire resistant LA-indigenous White Sage.

Dive deeper into defensive strategies with Cassy Aoyagi and Theodore Payne Foundation.

How to Maintain Your Space

Cal Fire’s Landscaping tips focus on effective maintenance strategies. Learn about fire defensive behaviors from FormLA’s Oscar Ortega and Cassy Aoyagi in conversation with Univision.

Take Action

Each layer of wildfire preparation you create will protect you – and your neighbors. Get started here:

• Understand Your Choices: DefensibleSpace.org, FormLA Fire+Slide Resources
• Watch Wildfire Prepared Home Tours: Fire Defense Playlist
• Get a Custom Checklist: Cal Fire Fire Planner or IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home

Simultaneously Increase Fire Safety, Beauty and Home Value

Updated June 2024. By Cassy Aoyagi: California’s fire risk is intimately connected with how we landscape – just not in the way we usually think! While our landscapes can amplify fire danger on and beyond our properties, they can also make our homes less vulnerable to ignition, as well as safer and easier for fire fighters to defend. How?

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

Think Home First

The most critical step we can take to reduce the risk of losing our homes is to “harden” them… not the landscapes that surround them.

Understanding how fire moves is critical to understanding our homes’ vulnerabilities. In most settings, embers are more likely to ignite homes than a fire-front or radiant heat. Embers can look like swirling fire flies, or they may be more substantial – lit palm fronds can travel miles on the wind. Regardless of their size, embers do not walk to our homes – they fly, bounce and roll with the wind. Where there is nothing to inhibit their trajectory, they arrive at our doorsteps. Or eves.

Once embers reach our homes, they may enter through an open window or find dry, flammable materials they can ignite to gain strength. Are you picturing plants? Stop that! Outdoor cushions and toys, wood fences, shake shingles… many materials are ready to burn, unlike healthy, hydrated foliage.

Tip: Act here first. Surprisingly small, inexpensive changes to existing homes can greatly reduce fire risk. While funding lasts the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains now offers free home hardening assessments. There are also builders going the extra mile to create pre-hardened homes that work with a particular site’s risk profile.

take 3 actions now

While home hardening is the best way to prevent home ignition, there are a few low cost, relatively easy actions that can immediately add layers of protection as you think through architectural options.

 

Clean and Store

Keeping your landscape tidy and healthy helps your home resist fire. Cushions and curtains, un-stored tools, toys and furniture are often made of flammable materials. Often near homes, they offer embers fuel to build heat strong enough for home ignition. Pay particular attention to cleanliness and clutter at foundations, windowsills and in gutters. Ember resistance in the 5 feet closest to your home is critical. These fire defensive landscape maintenance practices both protect and improve home value – a reason to whistle while you work!

Tip: Readily accessible storage for flammable objects, for example, in-furniture storage for cushions, reduces these dangers and increases the likelihood that items will often be stored when not in active use. Here, your investment in native plants will save time and reduce waste, as they tend to produce less litter.

Hydrate!

Well-hydrated objects need to be dried before they can burn. Smart irrigation paired with the right mulch is a great way to ensure foliage and the soil itself maintain hydration through LA’s hot and dry months.

Rooftop sprinkling systems can make homes too wet to burn, although there are very effective, much less expensive solutions.

Tip: Check irrigation systems monthly to ensure proper functioning. Use compost-grade mulch to hold-in soil hydration – avoid combustible rubber mulches anywhere in the landscape and chip mulches within 5 feet of structures.

Protect Trees

Healthy tree canopy at a safe distance from rooftops can act as catchers mitts for flying embers, shielding a home. This is really lovely news, as tree-full landscapes provide so many other benefits, from decreasing energy costs and increasing home value to shading outdoor spaces and attracting birds.

Tip: When hydrating your landscape, prioritize tree care. Native trees, including Coast Live Oak, Palo Verde, and Western Redbuds are particularly beneficial as layered protection. As with native plants more generally, native trees have advantages in resisting infections, diseases, and maintaining hydration in drought.

Remove dangers

While well spaced, placed, and maintained plants can be defensive, there are a few that create danger in the best of circumstances.

Weed Arson Grasses

Several popular plants marketed as “drought tolerant” like Pampas, Feather, and Fountain grasses, and Pride of Madeira, are easily ignited. These plants travel from our gardens to wildspaces on the breeze and our hiking boots. As they are not well-adapted to our climate, they quickly dry out without supplemental water to increase our fire danger in the wild and in our landscapes.

Tip: Do not plant invasive foliage in home or community gardens. See the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC) for help removing dangerous non-native from public spaces. Visit Plant Right for lists of invasive plants and native foliage swaps with similar aesthetics.

Remove Palms, Junipers and Cypress

LA’s iconic palm trees greatly increase fire danger. They ignite easily, cast embers widely, and lit fronds can travel miles beyond a fire front. Similarly, Junipers and Cypress pose dangers, behaving “like little gas cans.”

Tip: Avoid planting new palms, cypress and junipers. Remove any in your space, especially within 5 feet of your home. Check to see if your municipality offers incentives for these actions. If you have a palm tree you simply can’t imagine taking down, invest in aggressive maintenance. Take great care with hydration, hand watering where necessary.

Reduce “Hardscapes”

Gravel and decomposed granite paths and patios provide fire breaks and space where fire-fighters can safely defend your home. Beyond that, large areas of hardened spaces invite embers to fly, bounce and roll right into homes. This is more dangerous than having low, well-hydrated foliage that may stop ember travel or even extinguish embers.

Tip: Maintain or plant low-growing, ideally native, foliage rather than gravel or hardscaping large areas in the 5 feet beyond your home. In addition to increasing your safety, it will save energy and therefore save money!

create defensive layers

Plants can be spaced and placed to intercept embers that might otherwise reach a home.

Plant Native Foliage

The same qualities that help native plants stay lush and leafy in drought serve us well in fire season. As they are well-adapted to our climate cycles, native plants retain hydration through our hot, dry summers. While no plant is fire-proof, well-hydrated plants have an advantage in resisting fire. As homebuyers seek low-maintenance, low-water landscapes, planting natives also delivers dividends at sale.

Tips: Here are some of our favorites native plants. While natives will consistently maintain hydration better than non-natives, there are a few that are particularly fire resilient.

The Calscape database is a wonderful resource for getting to know native flora. Native nurseries offer both foliage and abundant know-how and educational programs. See El Nativo Growers (Wholesale/Trade), Las Pilitas Nursery, and Theodore Payne Foundation Nursery. If you are hiring a landscaper, look for one with a Native Plant Landscaper Certification.

Space and Place Plants Carefully

All foliage, especially trees and shrubs, need room to grow to full, mature size. Effectively spacing and placing plants will increase fire safety, and also result in greater long-term design integrity. Most importantly, it will reduce maintenance needs, enabling year round fire readiness. Planting small and allowing foliage to mature makes for a healthier, less expensive landscape that will and appreciate in value as it grows.

Tip: Research the mature size of the foliage you intend to plant. The amount of space needed by a Coast Live Oak (82H x 35W) will be substantially bigger than that needed by a Western Redbud (20H x 20H). Create a design plan to ensure foliage has room to grow. As you plant, look up and around to ensure the full sized tree or shrub will be far from structures, wires and will complement other plants.
 

Inspire Your Community

Particularly at the Urban Wildland Interface, public and neighboring properties impact the safety of our homes. It is in our best interests to work together to reduce this danger. Communities that come together to reshape common ground, stabilizing slopes, and planting native foliage (like Sunland, La Crescenta, and Sierra Madre) increase their luck and resilience.

Tip: Resilience hubs and the California Fire Safe Council, supported by fire agencies, are great places to start and have incredible impacts. Other possible steps include encouraging local nurseries to carry more natives and to cease offering invasive foliage. Evaluate the condition of nearby open and vacant spaces. If you see problems, bring community together to improve the space.

Develop Outside Fire Path

While we’ve long thought locating within a city would protects us, the impact of recent fires on Santa Rosa and Paradise show the limits of that protection. The fact is that we have built communities within known fire pathways. Those homes are simply in greater danger than those located in areas that burn less frequently.

Tip: As we work to create more housing, policy makers, planners and developers must consider fire-safety as a criteria for assessing and locating new developments. As citizens, we can encourage them to do so.

Visit Examples

Examples of fire wise landscapes can be seen at LAFD Station 74, the Sunland Welcome Nature Garden, the Fire Station Garden in the Authentic Foothill Gardens at Sierra Madre City Hall, the Rosemont Preserve, , the Fire Defensive Demonstration Garden at Sierra Madre’s Louis Van Iersel Post Office, and the Fire Wise demonstration garden at Theodore Payne Foundation.

More Information

• See Our Firewise Playlist in Youtube
• Take Action When Fires Are Near
• Firewise Landscape Maintenance Practices
• CalFire: Home Hardening Tips
• Expect Resilience Post-Fire
• Prepare for Debris Flow
• Fight Fire with Smart Design
• Are You a Fire Fighter?
• Disaster Preventing Plant Palettes
• Plant Choice: Angels and Arsonists
• Palm Trees as Fire Hazards
• Combustibility of Landscape Mulches
• Why Your Artificial Turf is Burning