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Wildfires and Wildscaping

© Mel. White

The news shots are dramatic, showing images of clouds of suffocating smoke that boil lazily toward the heavens as angry orange flames flicker below. El Nino has turned many areas of the world into a tinderbox - including areas of the United States. It takes only a bit of malice or carelessness or lightning to create the sudden, swift devastation called Wildfire.

Some areas such as California's fire coast in Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado are particularly fire-prone - but in a bad year no area is truly immune to wildfire. One frustrated Floridian wrote "Here in Florida, the smell of peat smoke means a wildfire in the swamps during the dry season. Locals call them "muck fires" because even the very ground seems to burn. All the "above-ground" plants - trees, shrubs, herbs - die because their roots have been burnt away."

Ecologists and wildscapers are aware that fire is one of those "good news-bad news" situations. Many ecological preserves (including some of the endangered prairie areas) actually rely on fire to survive. Fire thins out invading species and clears out dead plant material, allowing seeds to sprout. But uncontrolled fire - wildfire - costs millions of dollars in losses each year.

Even if you don't live in a wildfire prone area, you might still want to consider planning your wildscaping using these techniques. In 1995 some teenagers in our neighborhood decided to turn vandal for a night. They smashed car windows, broke into garages, and set our storage shed on fire. Flames from the shed spread to our house and started a fire in the attic. Bad landscaping and bad building practices caused some problems for the firefighters. The former owners had planted trees next to the house and had put the storage shed right next to the fence. Fortunately, it was a calm night and although flames spread to the wooden privacy fence, the fire was stopped before it spread to our neighbor's house as well.

While you can't guarantee that your home will never catch fire, if you live in a fire-prone area you can landscape to give your house a bit of an advantage in a disaster. Because terrain and other conditions vary from area to area, it's hard to come up with a set of rules that cover every place on Earth. However, from a general design standpoint, here are some things to consider when wildscaping around your yard:

- Don't plant evergreens (pines or junipers) or eucalyptus close to

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