Living in the Desert : In the Thick of It

It is the heat of the day in the peak of summer in the hottest part of the San Fernando Valley. The chaparral covering the hilly ground of the Theodore Payne Foundation looks drained of its springtime vibrancy. If this horticultural retreat in Sun Valley, established to foster harmony between people and native plants, is not exactly alive in color, it’s bursting with aroma.

The scent, explains Kevin Connelly, board president of the foundation, issues from the “volatile oil” content of the shrubs, which are most fragrant when temperatures are high.

Volatile oils? High temperatures? Rolling topography? Is this incendiary botanical mix what we expect from one of the region’s premier landscape lobbyists?

Chaparral has a bad rap, Connelly insists. Actually, he says, caressing a Santa Cruz ironwood shrub, properly maintained chaparral is the best vegetation for repelling fire.

So, with the blessing of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, Connelly and fellow board member Scott Franklin are establishing fire-retardant demonstrationgardens at the Payne foundation, where property owners can view well-groomed chaparral. Generally used to describe all of the region’s wild, indigenous vegetation, chaparral accurately refers to what grows above 2,000 feet, and includes such plants as manzanita, toyon, sumac, ceanothus, sage and chamiso.

Franklin, a retired 37-year veteran of the L.A. Fire Department, served as the department’s vegetation management officer. “I view shrubbery differently from the typical firefighter,” he says, standing on a Topanga hilltop, where as a private consultant he is developing a vegetation plan. He has fought every majorfire in the Santa Monica Mountains since 1955 and says he’d rather battle flaming chaparral in Topanga Canyon than blazing poplars in a back yard provided the shrubs are trimmed of lower branches and dead material, spaced properly and relieved of the rats’ nests that accumulate in the crotches of some trees.

Maintaining native plants, he says, deprives a fire of “ladder fuel,” the kindling that feeds low flames and sends them, fat and hungry, upward and outward. He plucks two sprigs from a greasewood bush and compares them. One is green and plump with moisture-retaining oil, the other brown and wrinkled. Removing this dead matter, Franklin says, renders even chaparral with a high oilcontent significantly more fire-safe than the ornamental, or exotic, vegetation many homeowners favor. That’s because native vegetation, with its deep root structure and its miserly need for water, adapts to drought conditions by retaining moisture while ornamentals wither into tinder.

“In the worst-case scenario--say, Santa Ana winds of 30 miles per hour, in the height of the dry season [October and November], in an area of unmaintained chaparral--the flame length approaches 90 feet,” he says, referring to a fire’s vertical reach. “Ornamental vegetation would have the same flame length. But under the same conditions, well-maintained chaparral might have a flame length of less than two feet.”