An Offering for the Commemoration

An Altadena landscape designer prepares to reseed her devastated town in the aftermath of the 2025 wildfires.

By Danielle VonLeheMarch 28, 2026

• Environment

• Memoir & Essay

IN THE MIDDLE of this soggy holiday season, between one rainstorm and another, a paper sign was taped to my front door: “Altagether Neighbors’ One Year Commemoration, Blessings and Gratitude Gathering. There will be Pan Dulce, Café de Olla, and a Blessings and Gratitude Tree where you can write your thoughts on a public or private message to hang on the tree.”

I moved to Altadena, California, in November 2024. On January 7, 2025, it disappeared. The Eaton Fire ravaged the community, spreading across 14,000 acres, destroying over 9,400 structures, killing 19 people, displacing tens of thousands, and leaving in its wake a mess of toxic soils and debris. A few unburnt houses stood within the fire perimeter like sentinels. The rest of the town was reduced to contorted metallic mounds, piles of ash with pieces of tile sticking out at odd angles, charred remains of animal-themed yard art and angel statues. I drove across town at least twice a week in those early days, watching as folks separated their surviving sculptures and birdbaths from the ruins. Once, the face of a plastic deer stared severely into my car, and then, as I passed slowly by, its wire frame appeared where the rest of the body had melted away.

At the time, I couldn’t bring myself to document what I was seeing. I didn’t take any photographs of the carnage or the long debris removal process that followed. I didn’t take a photograph of the child playing in the hole where his house used to be. Social media influencers had the documentation covered.

My house and street were spared. I live west of the avenue where the western spread of the fire was eventually contained. Now, one year later, I can finally meet the neighbors.

I cut parchment paper into squares, folded and taped each piece together to form a pouch, and distributed into them a mix of native sunflower, telegraphweed, and the quintessential California poppy, all phytoremediative seeds that sequester heavy metals in their roots when seeded with endomycorrhizal fungi. If these are planted and all goes well, in a few months, we’ll have yellow spires growing toward the sun above a soft blanket of orange blooms, spreading and swirling together. This is my offering for the commemoration. I’m not a soil scientist but have been researching soil bioremediation strategies in Altadena as part of my work as a landscape designer. Our soils now suffer from a layer of ash and soot that contains a confectionery mix of heavy metals and asbestos. My own soil, which I assume is similar to that of my neighbors, boasts lead, arsenic, cobalt, and antimony. The wind direction during the fire determined where the smoke plume spread the toxic contaminants created when homes and domestic items burned. According to the contamination maps released by Eaton Fire Residents United, 100 percent of tested homes came back positive for above–safe threshold quantities of heavy metals.

I sometimes imagine the neighborhood as a medieval alchemist’s lab, where the same metals were once ground down and manipulated to make the rich colors used in illuminated manuscripts. On our doorsteps and underneath our homes, the soil is glowing with color in a kind of subterranean painting.

It is a unique and terrifying privilege to offer professional guidance in your personal community. Recently, hiding my own anxiety and sadness, I stood with a client in her lot after the debris was cleared. There was now nothing between us and the scalded mountains. She showed me where she used to sit and read. She showed me where the chickens lived. The typical questions I ask as a landscape designer—Where are the existing trees? How does the sun move across the building? What views do you want to prioritize?—meant nothing. It felt like designing an undesired future according to the past. We resorted to silence.

Perhaps this silence is ultimately of value. Residents of Altadena and the Pacific Palisades have become the victims not only of one of California’s most devastating fires but also of a particular empathy-based branding of disaster capitalism. The services of contractors, suppliers, architects, and designers are desperately needed right now, and there is the logistical theory that production and design at a larger scale will be able to drive down prices at an individual level. The call is for quantity and speed. My inbox is full of well-meaning architects asking to join prefab home and landscape project teams, and my snail mailbox is full of advertisements selling rebuilding and tree-trimming services. When I visit a potential client’s property in my own neighborhood, I participate with backward complicity in an industry that profits from tragedy.

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The mountains that frame Altadena were barren for months, with strawberry lines of fire retardant running down the ridges. When it finally rained, mere weeks after the fire was contained, the water that rushed through the dry creek beds smelled of smoke. And yet, nature demonstrates unbelievable resilience. The arroyo toads still came out and sang their songs. I listened to them every night on my walks. The birds returned too. Only a month after the fire, I recorded the yellow-rumped warbler, Bewick’s wren, song sparrow, lesser goldfinch, California scrub jay, Anna’s hummingbird, American crow, black-throated gray warbler, common raven, and dark-eyed junco. There was one call that I tried repeatedly to record and identify during that time, and only later did I discover the source: on the corner of Glenrose and Altadena, a flock of peacocks congregating around an empty pool.

California’s native ecology has evolved with fire and been maintained by Indigenous fire stewardship practices for thousands of years. Our landscapes are both fire-resistant and resilient; as long as fires occur at intervals greater than 15 to 30 years apart, the vegetation can withstand the burn and renew itself after. Many large native shrubs like toyon, mountain mahogany, and California elderberry are “obligate resprouters,” which means that they can be completely burned and still sprout new growth at the base. Others, like California mountain lilacs and manzanitas, are obligate reseeders and have dormant seeds in the soil that require fire to germinate. Plants such as California sagebrush, chamise, and California sages can both resprout and reseed. I tell clients about ecological resilience to assuage the pain of seeing the barren mountain, and I remind myself too. This will be an exceptional spring to see rare fire-following flowers like mariposa lilies and Phlox—a genus whose name comes from the Greek word “phlóx,” meaning “flame”—emblazoning the hillsides in their vibrant colors.

We’ve also learned that the fire-resistant canopy of certain tree species, like the coast live oak, acted as a screen during the blaze, protecting homes from golf ball–sized embers that flew across the sky. The iconic deodar cedars that line Christmas Tree Lane protected the homes on either side of Santa Rosa Avenue despite the proliferation of fire around it. And yet, I watched homeowners cut down unburnt trees or top their branches in fear of insurance repercussions, or because they were told that vegetation was to blame for the severity of the fire’s spread. (It wasn’t. The Eaton Fire was a structure fire spread by hurricane-force winds hopscotching embers from building to building.)

The consequences for burned trees were more severe. When the Army Corps of Engineers came in for debris removal, the neighborhood was scouted, and any tree that was deemed “unsafe” was immediately removed, with little quality control. Of course, I get it—waiting to see if a struggling tree will survive contradicts our human impulse to fix what appears broken. Early on, I met with a client whose house was one of the only ones on the street to survive, and we discussed how to care for his burned but regrowing sycamore tree. A week or two later, to our dismay, the tree was gone. No notice was given. This is particularly tragic for obligate resprouters like the oaks who may look dead but simply need time.

Grassroots environmental organizations did form quickly. Altadena Green, a group of local arborists, empowered homeowners to tie ribbons around their trees in order to clearly communicate to the Army Corps which should be removed or remain. The Altadena Seed Library collected and distributed free seeds to homeowners to spread in their gardens. There were many community workshops and learning sessions regarding bioremediation methodologies—adding compost, seeding specific species, inoculating mushrooms.

And yet, I fear that the villainization of nature will continue by top-down bureaucrats who make decisions from a distance and in consultation with insurance agencies. Proposed Zone Zero rules would require all vegetation and wood chip mulch to be five feet away from all buildings to prevent embers from catching on woody material and igniting the structure. This blanket rule does not consider how good maintenance and proper irrigation can mitigate excess dryness. Stricter fuel modification regulations in Zone One (five to 30 feet from buildings) and Zone Two (30 to 100 feet) would control the type and amount of plants one can plant as well as the density with which they can be grouped. “Prohibited” plants are often the drought-tolerant native plants that grow most prolifically on the mountain, as they have evolved with fire and provide critical habitat for endangered and threatened species. What is a garden when it’s defined by “defense”? Who is the enemy? Are we defending against ecology? Natural atmospheric phenomena? Perhaps it would be wiser instead to pay attention to the electric transformer, situated in a chaparral landscape and not depowered during a windstorm. I resist the idea that the garden is a front line. It should instead be a place where we learn to work with nature and respect the powerful forces that govern our natural environments. How this idea translates to planting design at a neighborhood scale in the Southern California foothills is something we’re all still trying to figure out.

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I gathered the seed packets and bundled up in a rain jacket for the one-year commemoration. Across the street, neighbors clustered tightly under two tiki-themed umbrellas that sheltered the promised pan dulce and café de olla, along with a half bag of tortilla chips and someone’s leftover New Year’s champagne. I placed the seeds next to the chips and introduced myself to Dwayne and his son Dwayne Jr., whose house on the corner was the only one decorated with Christmas lights this year, along with two animated reindeer and an inflatable bear wearing a Santa hat. I met my other neighbors. Chris and Christie’s daughter Lucia is learning Latin. Barbara told me that on the night of the fire, she forced our 96-year-old neighbor Ms. Runnolds (who didn’t attend the commemoration) out of her house, jammed her into their tiny Fiat, and drove her to a relative’s home in a neighboring town: “I just got her out of there.” Another neighbor, Kat, wondered what to do with her yard: “Should I just remove the top couple inches of dirt? Can’t it be assumed there was arsenic in the soil before the fire? This all used to be an orchard, you know.” She floated her hand apathetically in acknowledgment of our street.

Seemingly simple questions like these are impossible to answer because there is rarely a baseline, and even if there is, perhaps the right answer for what to do after disaster doesn’t exist in the first place. That said, I’ve learned what feels like a lifetime of strange facts: the most common fire retardant used is called MVP-Fx, and it contains lead, chromium, cadmium, and arsenic; when car batteries burn, they release cobalt; non-native annual grasses and mustard act like kindling for wildfire; matilija poppy, looking like a fried egg when it blooms, follows fire. More importantly, though, I’ve learned that we must advocate for one another, that everyone has a right to inhabit clean and safe homes, and that we should support local businesses that remain open in burn zones.

As a community, Altadenans are learning the kind of ecological resilience that this landscape has known forever. We should keep our eyes toward the mountains come spring.

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Featured image: Photo by Danielle VonLehe.