We hear these catch-phrases all the time: Fire Safe, Fire Proof, Fire Wise, Firescape.
They all convey a sense of security – like if we just “landscape” the right way, everything will be ok. There’s almost a sense in these words that we can simply design landscapes to be fire wise, or firescaped, and ta-da! Added safety is achieved, everybody goes home happy.
The trouble is that while we love to use this language, to convey a feeling that we’re all doing the right thing, and that everything is going to be alright in the end, these terms don’t convey what they need to. They lack accuracy.
Fire “safe” is like deer “proof”. Those who have lived with deer know what that means. There’s no such thing. A young deer will sample just about every plant you have, leaving stubs in its’ wake. A hungry deer will eat pretty much everything on the “deer don’t eat this” lists. Then, if it likes the plants you so thoughtfully grew, it will come back repeatedly unless you lock your garden away in a fortress. Even then, I’d bet on the deer. Better to have plants the deer don’t like, and then hope every year is a good rain year so they won’t need to come for your supplemental garden foliage to enhance their banquet.
Likewise, I cannot design a garden to be safe from fire, and neither can anybody else. There’s no fortress for this. For every image of a garden left intact after a fire, there are countless others that burned, having done the same things. Just like there’s no such thing as a plant that is truly deer proof, there isn’t a landscape that is immune to fire. However, we can mitigate some of the risks by selecting less flammable building materials, laying hardscape in strategic places, avoiding the use of fire magnets, and so forth. We can reduce many of the risk factors in our gardens and we can harden our buildings so that they are less easily ignited, but let’s stop using words that suggest safety. The sooner we get super honest about how every little reduction in risk is a good thing, but no amount of them will ever make us “safe”, the better.
Instead, I like to point out all the many, many ways we can make a property easier to escape from, how to harden a building, how to avoid the majority of pitfalls and work to make and maintain the garden (and structures) more sustainably. Without sustainability at the core of the work, we aren’t helping to reduce the core reason things have gotten so bad and will continue to worsen. Without sustainability, we’re just making things worse, no matter what we install.
