landscaping against fire

Linda lives in inland San Diego, although nowhere near the extreme east­ern fron­tiers of the county. Still, dur­ing the Octo­ber 2007 wild­fires, she was evac­u­ated for sev­eral days when the flames came close to her home.

Recently a book­let showed up at her house. Enti­tled Will You be Pre­pared for the Next Wild­fire?, it listed the steps you can fol­low to make your home more fire-resistant. Inter­est­ingly more than half of the pam­phlet was ded­i­cated to landscaping.

One of the main ideas the pub­li­ca­tion lays out is to develop “defen­si­ble space” around your house. The photo below shows the basic con­cept bet­ter than any words could [ source ].

Defensible space

The other land­scap­ing tips deal with select­ing the best plants to have near your house. Two pages of fire-resistant trees, shrubs, ground­cov­ers, vines and peren­ni­als round out the recommendations.

Being the plant expert that I am (yeah right…) I did notice a cou­ple of lit­tle proof­read­ing glitches with the pam­phlet. There’s a photo of some­thing labeled “coy­ote bush,” but the plant is some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. Also, there’s a typo in the plant lists that calls some­thing a “bush ger­i­man­der” instead of a “bush ger­man­der.” (It seems to be a typo some­how befit­ting a book­let pro­duced by a polit­i­cal entity: a plant that’s the lin­guis­tic hybrid of a ger­man­der and a polit­i­cal dis­trict drawn by ger­ry­man­der!) But those are minor quibbles.

Check out all the good infor­ma­tion at the San Diego County’s Office of Emer­gency Ser­vices. It might help you save your house next fire season.

November 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: • • | No Comments »