Can wildflowers heal the toxic mess the L.A. fires left behind?

One gloomy day early last summer, my husband, our two children, and I put on our N95 masks and went “home.” The bulldozers had recently been through, clearing the charred wreckage of the house in Los Angeles’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood that we’d occupied for the better part of the kids’ childhoods. On January 7, 2025, a catastrophic wind-driven fire, which started in the Santa Monica Mountains, had obliterated Pacific Palisades and parts of Malibu; on the same day, a separate blaze, the Eaton Fire, tore through Altadena, a community in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, 30 miles to the east. Between the Palisades and Eaton fires, some 16,000 structures were destroyed, rendering tens of thousands of people temporarily homeless and turning the lush places where they had lived into wastelands.

My family had come back to the Palisades to witness the damage and, we hoped, make a small gesture toward repair. Around us, the neighborhood lay flat and blank and uncertain. Retaining walls, steps to nowhere, chimneys, stone Buddhas, and the odd structure (including our unaccountably extant garage) proved that there had been a world there. But the landscape was disordered, catastrophically transformed: Blackened trees were marked with ominous runes, portending future removal; others were singed at the crown, their trunks furred with determined new leaf growth. There were no dogs, hardly any birds. The people—not that there were many—drifted ghostlike down the middle of the vacant streets. Why shouldn’t they?

For my son, Rummy, who was 14, and my daughter, Willa, who was 12, the loss felt all-encompassing—not just our home and its contents but also the trees they’d climbed, the courts where they’d learned to play tennis and basketball, their favorite restaurants, their friends’ homes, the sense of where they would grow into young adults. The rousing talk of children’s inherent resilience was easy to invoke and difficult to envision. How would we ever get through this, much less get over it? There is no handbook for the victims of nature, no survivor’s guide for ways of weathering. No one to tell you what to do when everything is gone—broken, smashed, flattened, sunk, or burned, done in by a force of such enormity you would have to go to your old children’s mythology books (if only you still had them) to find its ancient yawning name: Chaos.

Not long after the fires, an unlikely image came into my mind. It was of bright orange poppies cascading down from the mountains, replacing the wall of flames that had wiped out life as we knew it. The image had a source deep in the region’s past. Spanish explorers, first viewing the coast of California from the sea five centuries ago, had declared it la tierra del fuego, the land of fire. They were referring, apparently, to the poppies, whose abundant orange-gold blossoms looked like flames lapping at the hillsides.

The explorers were on to something, whether they knew it or not. California is the land of fire; fire is the essential force shaping the mountains’ chaparral ecology. For certain native plants, periodic burns create conditions for survival. The fragile, fleeting fire poppy and the manzanita require the smoke and heat of wildfire to germinate; ecologists call them the “fire followers.” Other species, while not dependent on wildfire for their life cycles, have adapted to exploit the nutrients, sunlight, and visibility to pollinators that result from large blazes. This group includes the common sunflower, bush sunflower, yarrow, buckwheat, evening primrose, and even the ubiquitous California golden poppy, the bright orange state flower. “These are really opportunistic plants,” Tim Becker, a horticulturalist with the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants, told me recently. “They love disturbance. They’re excellent at capturing nutrients, preventing the soil erosion that is really common in postfire environments and creating habitat for wildlife.” Could we be like the plants, I wondered, and make a virtue of the loss?

My kids grew up with the classic bedtime book Miss Rumphius, the story of the so-called lupine lady who scattered seeds along the coast of Maine. I told them I knew what we needed to do: spread native seeds in the ruined places and help bring them back to life.

I have never been much of a gardener. I don’t have the patience, and I used to think I didn’t have the time. I appreciate gardens, but I don’t know how to make one. Obviously, we couldn’t go around digging in other people’s burned-out lots—too toxic, too dangerous, too illegal. I considered what Miss Rumphius would do and Googled a recipe for seed bombs: doughnut-hole-size balls of seeds, compost, and clay, used by urban guerrilla gardeners and habitat restorers to plant in tricky spots. The compost provides nutrients for the seeds, and the clay protects them from animal predation, giving seeds the best chance for survival while they wait for rain.

I bought compost and powdered clay and placed a large order for native wildflower seeds. In the backyard of one of the several rentals we occupied that year, the kids and I made our inaugural batch of seed bombs. Wetting the mixture and rolling the seedy slurry between our hands was surprisingly relaxing but also felt purposeful, like making bread. When the seed bombs dried, we started sharing them with friends and neighbors who had also lost their homes. Rummy and a friend made another batch for their eighth-grade service-learning project, then threw them in the Palisades. Then, in May, Rummy led a schoolwide workshop where his fellow students made thousands of seed bombs that he and I distributed to homeowners in Altadena and the Palisades. I began to picture a future spring: wildflower meadows blanketing both neighborhoods, a color-field painting in petals. We’d be graffiti artists, creating punky bursts of blooms throughout the burn scars.

Not long after, on that overcast summer day, we returned to our old address as a family. My kids stood on the brick threshold of our vanished home and hurled seed bombs into the void. Then we all climbed down into the pit and stood in what had been the living room. It was the place where we’d always spent Christmas, with a roaring fire. I thought about our last Christmas there, an especially sweet one, less than two weeks before the house burned down. We put a pile of seed bombs on the hard, scraped earth and, standing in a tight circle, crushed them with our boots, right where the hearth had been.

For the longest time, nothing happened. The summer was unrelentingly hot, and no rain fell. Rummy began to question if the seeds were duds—dead, like so much else. I didn’t blame him for feeling cynical, and I can’t explain why I did not. I just believed the seeds would work.

In mid-October, two days of heavy rain triggered mudslide warnings in the burn scars of the Palisades and Eaton fires, and I wondered if our seeds were washing out to sea. A couple of weeks later, Rummy and I had plans to meet a neighborhood beautification group to seed-bomb the parkway alongside Sunset Boulevard, which runs through the Palisades. On the way, we stopped by our lot. In the spot where our fireplace had been, there was a soft green mound made from a thousand poppy starts. Rummy’s face broke into a huge, involuntary smile. We had growth.

It rained heavily throughout December, January, and February. Our rental house leaked, but I did not care. The rain meant only one thing to me now: happy plants. Weekends, holidays, whenever possible, we made seed bombs. Rummy recruited his friends, his sister, her friends, friends of friends. We named our effort the Seed Bomb Project, and we reached out to everyone we could think of who would want to help or who might want seed bombs for their empty lots.We held workshops at elementary schools in Altadena and the Palisades, at school fairs and neighborhood gatherings, at a community center established to aid fire victims. A company donated 10 huge bags of organic compost (the founder had grown up in the Palisades and lost his childhood home). Gardeners and seed companies started sending seeds. With the help of hundreds of volunteers—many of them people who had lost their homes, schools, and communities—we churned out thousands of seed bombs.

Meanwhile, preliminary reports about the fires’ toxic aftermath began to come out. High levels of heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, were detected on lots in Altadena and the Palisades: So many cars, electronics, and plastics had burned, along with treated wood and leaded paint. As part of our insurance claim, we commissioned a report from a toxicity expert, who determined that our garage was irreparably contaminated with cyanide, lithium, lead, chromium, beryllium, cobalt, and arsenic, as well as various other carcinogens and toxins. When the toxicologist finished her assessment, she made my husband promise never to set foot in the garage again. We resigned ourselves to throwing away the few sentimental items we’d planned to salvage from inside.

In March, I visited our lot with yet another toxicologist, Danielle Stevenson, together with UCLA environmental soils engineer Sanjay Mohanty. Through her research, Stevenson has established protocols for phytoremediation, plant-based solutions to toxic cleanups. The wet winter had left our lot covered in a patchy blanket of growth; tufts of poppy plants lined the perimeter, and a small hedgerow of sunflowers was growing in what used to be our front entry, the spot where the kids always dumped their backpacks after school.

The day was bright and clear. A ladybug crawled up the long stem of one sunflower, and a bee dug around in the blossom of another. Stevenson peered at a delicate vine with tiny yellow flowers threading its way along the ground at the base of the sunflower stalks. “This is a non-native sweet yellow clover,” she said, “but in my studies we found that it accumulates lead.” The bush sunflower we’d planted, she noted, removes arsenic.

Stevenson turned her attention to the common sunflowers, those cheerful stalwarts of fall bouquets. They’re known as hyperextractors, proficient at sucking lead from soil. With lead contamination in the nearby garage, we figured there could be lead all over the lot. Maybe the sunflowers were doing more than feeding bees. Maybe they were cleaning our dirt.

Mohanty pulled out a handheld laser resembling a highway patrolman’s radar gun and pointed it at the soil, taking a quick reading. The lead was surprisingly low—16 parts per million—possibly because bulldozers had removed several feet of soil and debris. Below 80 parts per million does not require remediation. We walked two blocks to Sunset Boulevard, close to where Rummy and I had dispersed seed bombs in the fall. A friend had planted the parkway there with a grove of sunflowers and thrown in a couple of our seed bombs for fun. In that unscraped soil, the lead readings were shocking. “This is a crazy number,” Mohanty said, reading 414 from the screen on his laser gun. He moved over a few feet and got a finding of 643. “These are brownfield levels.”

Stevenson collected leaves from the sunflowers. Later, Mohanty would dry them, digest them in acid, and analyze the solution for lead using a mass spectrometer. Given the levels in the soil, they expected to find it in the leaves. Stevenson cautioned that phytoremediation is a slow, complex process and works best in conjunction with fungi that help metabolize metals. “When levels are high, you might only get one percent removed per year,” she said. “If you want it below 80, it will take a long time.”

The Palisades, until last year, had been green and lovely but filled mostly with imported plants, not drought-tolerant, fire-adapted natives. Unexpectedly, an opportunity had opened—to restore something that was lost long before the fires came. This has been the key to my family’s recovery.

The fire stole our sense of place and robbed us of our time. Restoring native plant communities to the Santa Monica Mountains feels like a way to reclaim our connection to our former home. And the waiting—for a speck of green, a shoot, the first extravagant bright bloom—has made time’s passage feel productive and loaded with meaning. By now, the Seed Bomb Project has made and distributed some 10,000 seed bombs. Though the community we had before the fires is gone, we have formed a new and more expansive one, spanning the city. For my kids, the meadow on our lot is the metaphor I don’t need to spell out. Chaos is the void where creativity is born. This is the fire’s surprising gift.

This spring, the growth in the Palisades and Altadena has been explosive. Between the burn and the rain and the lack of human interference, the neighborhoods have been transformed into a wild hodgepodge, with pomegranates alongside telegraph weeds and morning glories, blowsy fields of dandelions, and lot line to lot line sow thistle, bristly and unpleasant. On our lot, along with a few unwanted sprouts of invasive black mustard, we have bursts of poppies growing around the perimeter, their foliage extravagant as the ruffs of Tudor queens—wallflowers but for the lack of walls. Our home has never felt more chaotic, unruly, or delightful, a children’s book come to life, the way, when I was a kid, I always wished they would.

Already the first flowers that bloomed in our lot are starting to die, the sunflowers bowing their heads and the poppies shedding their bright petals. I am not sad. I celebrate their impermanence. I know it is the key to their resilience and the most critical knowledge they could impart. The 10,000 seed bombs and the flowers they grew are leaving new seeds in the ground, and when the conditions are right—enough water, enough sunlight, enough space—the flowers will come back.