Firescaping Your Home
A Manual For Readiness In Wildfire Country
Adrienne Edwards and Rachel Schleiger
Wildfires are burning over longer seasons and more intensely than ever before, and everyone living in a wildland-urban interface or wildland-adjacent area should take precautionary steps to mitigate the risk of property damage.
In Firescaping Your Home, we provide expert guidance and specific recommendations on how to harden your home against fire and create defensible space that is lush and attractive.
We also list hundreds of native plants to consider by size and growth characteristics that have evolved to coexist with fire in the West, and show how and why including these on your property sustains wildlife and should be part of your defensive space strategy.
Genres: Gardening, Nature, Fire Science
Publisher: Timber Press, 263 pages, June 20, 2023
ISBN 971-1-64326-135-5
Price: $29.99 paperback, $14.99 ebook, available in stores and online
CONTENTS
11 Introduction: Becoming Fire Resilient While Supporting Habitat
21 Habitat: Your Biotic Community and Ecoregion
39 The Nature and Behavior of Fire
63 Hardening Your Home Against Fire
79 Creating Defensible Space
99 What to Plant, Where, and When
121 A Native Plant Palette for Fire-Safe Gardens
195 Maintaining Plants for Fire Resilience
211 Recovery: Helping Land Heal After Fire
225 Our Fire Future
236 Resources for Further Reading
239 Source notes
248 Acknowledgements
249 Photography and Illustration Credits
251 Index
Destructive wildfires are becoming larger, hotter, and more frequent. Since 2000, an average of 7.1 million acres have burned across the US, more than double the average acreage that burned in the 1990s. In 2020, wildfires burned 10.3 million acres in the US, and roughly 60% was in California (> 4 million acres), Oregon (> 1 million acres), and Washington (> 700,000 acres). At the same time, more people are choosing to live adjacent to fire-prone wildlands. In California alone, at least 25% of our 11 million residents live in the Wildland / Urban Interface (WUI), where development meets or intermingles with undeveloped wildlands. One consequence of this development is an accelerating loss of native biodiversity through habitat fragmentation. The home hardening and defensible spaces that we need to create to live safely near wildlands can also lead to habitat fragmentation.
We can compensate for clearing and building in the WUI by including native plants and wildlife resources in our landscaping. Native plants and wildlife habitat in the human “built environment” effectively create wildlife bridges, or oases, to support pollinators and many of the species they interact with. In our book, we review home hardening and defensive space essentials for wildfire safety. Then we explore characteristics, installation, and maintenance of native plants (keeping fire safety/readiness in mind) to mitigate for the negative impacts of habitat fragmentation. Some of the wildfires in recent years have been traumatic; but we can use lessons learned to help communities become more wildfire ready and resilient, while supporting the native wildland habitats that we love.