Gardening Etcetera: Keeping wildfires at bay: Firewise landscaping

One of the many things we love about Flagstaff is being surrounded by forests and natural landscape. We live in a ramshackle wooden house perched on the edge of a small wooded canyon, connected to McMillan Mesa and from there to Buffalo Park. Our backyard is visited by deer, coyotes, foxes, and other wild critters, and the dense ponderosas, oaks, and brush in the canyon screen out the road below. It’s beautiful, but this woodsy setting comes with one major drawback: vulnerability to wildfires.

Fortunately, as gardeners, we can do a lot to lower the risk of wildfires reaching our homes and make our property easier to defend if a fire does approach. This involves three basic steps: creating a “defensible space” around your house, planning a landscape that slows down the spread of fire and reduces its intensity, and selecting plants that are naturally fire-resistant. This doesn’t mean cutting down all trees and paving the ground with gravel. There’s no need to destroy our green environment in order to save it!