The Fire Next TimeHow wildfire preparedness is turning California into Arizona.

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Of course any tree or plant will burn if the fire is strong enough, but well-watered plants do burn more slowly. So the advice is to keep your plants watered, get rid of debris, and lop off dead branches. All these steps are certainly reasonable (assuming there will be water for irrigation), but they underestimate the power of wind-driven smoldering wood. In November's Malibu fire, embers were flying horizontally in a 60-mph wind. With conditions like that, you could put a moat around your house and it would still catch fire.

The soon-to-be-mandatory vegetation whacking applies to what's in the homeowner's garden. But for years there has been a movement to have fire prevention extend farther into the wild, specifically to cut wide fire breaks through the native chaparral or initiate controlled burns of that native vegetation.

These are not great ideas. Like the bare yard space, the bare ground would sprout weedy grasses. And much would be lost. The chaparral plants, aside from being habitat for a lot of creatures, have deep roots that hold hillsides and cliffs in place, a useful trait in earthquake country. The plants catch the moisture of the winter rains and evaporate it back through their leaves into the atmosphere, beneficial in wildfire territory.

When you fly from San Francisco to San Diego, the olive-green velvet you see on the thinly populated hills below is chaparral. It's a dense, complex interweaving of low trees, shrubs, and plants, including scrub oak, ceanothus, manzanita, and sage. (The word chaparral is derived from a Basque word for a thicket of dwarf oaks.)

The same sort of mixture of vegetation, adapted to hot, dry summers and mild, rainy winters, grows in the south of France and is known as the maquis, a word with heroic connotations. The French resistance to the Nazi occupation was known as Le Maquis, from the phrase "prendre le maquis," to take to the hills.

Ronald Reagan clearing brushOne of the late Ronald Reagan's great pleasures when he took to the hills at his ranch above Santa Barbara was to attack the California maquis with a chain saw. Under the new state law, homeowners must be out there emulating the late president, or pay a $500 fine.

What makes that green velvet frightening to some is that many of the chaparral plants are combustible—it's the way they evolved to keep their species going in a fire-prone environment. For some of the plants, the strategy for weathering the dry summers is to become resinous, thus flammable, and to sprout back from the surviving crown within weeks after a fire. Others have seeds that actually require fire to germinate—either the heat causes the seed coat to split or the nitrogen dioxide in smoke sets off a reaction that causes the seed to crack and put out a green seedling the first time it rains.

Patches of the chaparral burned and renewed themselves for centuries. No one cared much until 40 or 50 years ago, when cities expanded. We've become frighteningly house-centric in our vision of how to manage the land.

One of the continuing and fascinating problems for all gardeners is how to learn to live with the power of natural forces. The chaparral plants adapted to live with drought and fire. Spacing out the trees and getting rid of dead wood seems for now to be our adaptation to the same fire-prone climate. Still, something will be lost if Southern California's hillsides turn into a mosaic of fire-retardant fortresses, with a landscape of isolated trees, stone terraces, and little flower beds mulched with colored pebbles rather than wood chips. These gardens will not blend gracefully into the natural surroundings. Homeowners may look up from their chain saw work and think, the groves of native oaks, the masses of blue-flowered ceanothus, the sage-scented air—weren't these a big part of why we wanted to live here?

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