GOING WILD WITH NATIVES: Thoughts On The LA Fires And Native Fire-Scaping
- k-england
- May 1
- 7 min read
By Greg Rubin, edited by Susan Lewitt, for Let’s Talk Plants! May 2025. Credits: All photos for this article are by Greg Rubin of California's Own Native Landscape Design, Inc.
(A note from the editor: I hope those of you who by-passed native plants in the past, read this article and gain some insight into fire prevention from this individual who is, among other things, a very knowledgeable and thoughtful landscaper.)
“The following are my thoughts on the LA fires, and ways we can use native plants to create defensible spaces, rather than eradicate them, making the problem worse. We have nearly 30 years of experience with fire-involved properties in San Diego County, all without losing a home (knock on wood). I can't guarantee a home won't burn in a ferocious fire-storm, but at least we have ways to create extremely defensible space around our communities, without destroying our precious ecology in the process.” – Greg Rubin, President and Founder of California’s Own Native Landscape Design, Inc.
THOUGHTS ON THE 2025 LOS ANGELES FIRES
After witnessing the horror in LA earlier this year, I just want to share my condolences with anyone who was affected by this nightmare, including those who lost their homes, pets, or God forbid, friends and family. It truly was the “perfect (fire)storm”, and I/we can be better prepared for the next one which seems inevitable. I have some experience in this area, going back to around 1998, when some of my first clients were hit by wildfire. Since then, we’ve had about 20 or so homes that have experienced major fire events, such as Poomacha, Pines, Cedar, Witch Creek, and Harris fires. Thanking our lucky starts, we have yet to lose a home. While I could never guarantee a home won’t burn in a firestorm, especially as violent as these, there are numerous things we can do that will give us a much better chance of success and create defensibility without destroying our beloved natural environment.
My primary mentor was the late Bert Wilson, owner of Las Pilitas Native Nursery, who was also a CalFire firefighter for 14 years. He stressed the importance of fire safety since the beginning, some 30 years ago, how so much conventional wisdom about chaparral (not forest!) fire ecology is misguided, and that much of what we have been told can make the problem worse. Using his protocols along the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) has led to dramatically positive results. The response of the native landscapes to fire has played out pretty much as predicted.
Here is a summary of basic assumptions that prove to be a successful approach, later tested in a 4-year research study for the US Navy, with Dr. Jon Keeley and me as the Co-Principal Investigators:
• Hydration, not plant selection, generally determines flammability.
• It requires very little supplemental water to hydrate drought-tolerant native plants, equivalent to a summer thunderstorm, or fog drip 2-3 times per month during the warm season.
• Using light overhead irrigation, like MP-Rotators, is essential to watering the whole symbiotic mycorrhizal biome, and is key to matting down the shredded mulch, leaving it as a dense, low, poorly oxygenated fuel that burns (smolders?) with low flame height. Shredded mulch adheres to the soil in this process.
• Shredded redwood mulch enhances the ability of the plants to maintain hydration levels by promoting moisture retention in the soil and the mycorrhizal fungi.
• Lightly hydrated native vegetation can catch and cool embers, while providing obstacles to disturb the ferocious flow of windblown ignition sources before they hit your house, which would otherwise allow fire to spread to other houses.
• Many of the plants characterized as the worst “fire-bombs” benefit the most from light hydration, such as Buckwheat and Sages.
• While most of our clients had enough property to implement these defensible landscape principles individually, they can be applied at the community level as well.
• The zonal approach can be very helpful, especially Zone 0 (0-5’ from the house) and Zone 1 (subsequent 30-50’ or more).
• True fire resistance starts at the house outward, not the landscape inward.
The sad truth in both the Palisades and Eaton fires is that these communities were comprised of closely packed homes, most of which were constructed before fire-resistant architecture was the norm. These developments were wide open to wind-driven ember attack, virtually independent of home landscapes – so many of the trees still stood green after the devastation. The preceding 8 months of extreme drought certainly didn’t help.
The finger pointing is in full force, blaming politicians, agencies, and conservationists. Much of the response has been to turn the native plant communities into a boogeyman, reduced in description to “brush” or “fuel”. Many would have us strip the hillsides if they could. Certainly, many insurance companies agree with this. This is one of the problems with categorizing these burns as fuel-driven, instead of wind-driven. Removing the native shrublands only replaces one “fuel” with another – flashy non-native weeds and grasses. Erosion would be out of control, habitat would be eradicated, and the whole area would be well on its way to desertification. An unfortunate example of this is Riverside County.
How do we protect an entire community? For starters, create lightly irrigated greenbelts as buffers between the unmodified chaparral and houses, specifically around the perimeters of the community. Iceplant has been suggested as a good alternative; not in our experience. It would require 2-3 times the water to achieve the same level of fire-resistance as the native greenbelt; it is awful for erosion control; it has zero habitat value (except for snails or rats); and it burns (especially when it has been able to build an underlayer of woody growth). Red Apple and Ivy are just as bad.
Populate this greenbelt with a mix of taller trees right at the interface, laid out in a way that avoids groupings of more than 3, providing blockage in separate, but visually overlapping coverage, a bit downslope. Oaks, sycamores, cottonwoods, and Catalina cherry are some good examples. (Trees grown in groups are less likely to be blown over in a windstorm because they can support each other.) Here and there add large shrubs like toyon and lemonadeberry, again not in large masses, but in separated overlapping coverage. Finally, the plantings can be unified with native groundcovers, including Baccharis, Ceanothus, Manzanita, etc. A greenbelt like this would provide ember catching and cooling, and most importantly, disturb the otherwise unbroken flow of cinders blasting homes.
These plantings need to be lightly irrigated with overhead irrigation, as well as mulched with a shredded bark product, namely Redwood, which has proven to be highly fire resistant when matted down correctly. This last suggestion is controversial and not universally shared, mostly because burn tests are not representative of the landscape condition. In fact, many areas of the state have banned this fantastic product; I can tell you that despite my public outreach, in articles, books, and presentations, we were never contacted by any entity regarding this. They would have seen lots of documented photographic evidence of its true behavior in real fire events, exactly how Bert Wilson predicted 30 years ago.
Beyond these planted areas, the natural native shrubland should be maintained, not eliminated, at about 50-60% coverage without weeds, removing dead wood and some branches, which are then chipped and spread on site to encourage the ecology, and discourage weeds. Studies have shown that thinning more than this yields rapidly diminishing returns, or worse, creates more problems than it solves (weeds, unimpeded embers, etc.). We are even experimenting with providing very light irrigation to the modified native shrubland with excellent results, so far. This would be especially useful where there is no practical way to create a planted native greenbelt. One issue for many homes along the WUI was overgrowth of mostly non-native vegetation into people’s yards.
Turning to individual homes, in tight communities like these, you typically don’t have large enough yards to implement beyond Zone 1. However, the closer you get to your home with Zone 0 and Zone 1, the greater the payoff. Even before the concept of Zone 0 was official, we had been creating 5-10’ aprons around the foundations of our customers’ homes. Whether composed of DG (decomposed granite), gravel, concrete, or bare dirt (which supports native bees), they were very effective at preventing flames from reaching underneath the eaves, and possibly radiating heat against the walls. Zone 1, usually the next 30-50’, is the domain of hardscape and permanently irrigated plantings. Northern coastal manzanita, Ceanothus, Clinopodium, Erigeron, Epilobium, etc., do very well for this.
My last piece of advice would be GET RID OF PALMS!
Here is the link to find out more about participating in the California Native Plant Society’s 2026 Garden Tour: https://cnpssd.org/2026-garden-tour/ to:
"We would love to feature your native garden on the tour! We’re looking for inspiring gardens located south of I-8 and west of SR-125) to be featured in the 2026 CNPS San Diego Native Garden Tour, happening April 11 & 12, 2026."
The communities are: Hillcrest, University Heights, North Park, Lemon Grove, Spring Valley, Paradise Hills, National City, Chula Vista, Bonita, Imperial Beach, Otay Ranch, and East Lake.
To find out more about participating, go to: https://cnpssd.org/2026-garden-tour/
Greg Rubin of California's Own Native Landscape Design, Inc.
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