What’s in garden soil after urban wildfires?

Yadira Flores is a former video editor for the Los Angeles Times who joined the newsroom through Metpro in November 2017. Flores graduated with a bachelor of science in filmmaking and has edited online content for Amazon, the American Cinema Editors, FilmLight, Emmy Primecuts and Moviola. She hails from El Paso, Texas.

Brittany Levine Beckman is the entertainment and features editor at the Los Angeles Times. Previously, she worked as managing editor at Mashable.

Jeanette Marantos started writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1999, doing Money Makeovers until 2002. She returned to write for The Times’ Homicide Report in 2015 and the Saturday garden section in 2016, a yin and yang that kept her perspective in balance. In early 2020, she moved full time into Features, with a focus on all things flora. In June of 2023 she began writing the monthly L.A. Times Plants newsletter, which included a calendar of upcoming plant-related events. Marantos was a SoCal native who spent more than 20 years in central Washington as a daily reporter, columnist, freelancer and mom before returning to the land of eucalyptus and sage. She died Feb. 7, 2026.