With changing weather patterns, the new normal appears to include increased droughts and major wildfires, conditions that cry out for designing a fire-resistant garden. In wildfire-prone areas with low rainfall and dry vegetation, it's essential — and often enforced by local ordinances — to create more resilient landscapes with fire safety in mind.

Understanding Firescaping Fundamentals

Firescaping involves using fire-resistant designs and materials, along with carefully selecting fire-resistant plants, to strategically resist the spread of fire to your home. The two basic principles for designing a fire-safe garden are reducing fuel and creating defensible space to interrupt a fire's path.

Creating Defensible Spaces

Defensible space is the buffer or barrier created between a building on your property and the vegetation that surrounds it.

Fire-safe landscape design includes a defensible space from the house outward, with a no-fuel zone within the first 5 feet surrounding the house and other zones from that point out to 100 feet. The noncombustible area closest to the house shouldn't contain wood or composite decking, flammable furniture, planters or anything else that can burn, including dead vegetation and debris. Regular maintenance is the cornerstone of defensible space.

The Three R's of Defensible Space

1. Remove any debris that could catch fire from around and under decks, balconies and stairs. Eliminate low-lying and dead vegetation such as shrubs, tall grass and low-hanging branches. Keep shrubs and trees pruned, and generously cut back woody plants once a year.
2. Reduce the amount of flammable native vegetation, and break up areas of dense shrub and thick tree cover. Keep lawns and native grasses well irrigated and cut to 4 inches. Prune trees 6 to 10 feet from the ground.
3. Replace highly flammable plant material with well-spaced, fire-resistant, irrigated islands of annuals and perennials, ground covers and low shrubs. Instead of flammable organic mulch, use gravel, pebbles and rocks. Safely place well-pruned, thinned-out trees away from structures and other plants. Construct decking and fencing with noncombustible materials, and use only fire-safe outdoor furniture and planters. Create hardscaped paths, patios and rock gardens using stones, pavers, concrete, decomposed granite and gravel.

Planting a Fire-Resistant Garden

Several factors influence the fire-resistant characteristics of plants, including moisture content, age, total volume, dead material and chemical content. No plant is fireproof, but some are more fire-resistant than others.

Any plant can burn. Strategic placement, horizontal and vertical spacing, and careful maintenance are often more important than the individual plant's fire-safe classification. An unhealthy or poorly irrigated plant, or one with a buildup of dry or dead material, may ignite.

Characteristics of Combustible Plants

• Plants with a lot of wax, resin, oils, terpenes or fats may be more flammable, such as sagebrush and evergreen conifers. Juniper, commonly planted along pathways and driveways, can ignite in a wall of flames. Rows of tall-growing Italian cypress are so combustible that firefighters sometimes refer to them as "Roman candles."
• Plants that produce lots of dry leaf litter
• Trees and shrubs with dry, peeling bark or clusters of dead leaves, branches and fronds
• Dry grasses that turn yellow and brown in summer

Characteristics of Fire-Resistant Plants

• High-moisture plants with low sap or resin content grown close to the ground, like ice plants
• Deciduous (broadleaf) plants whose leaves are full of moisture, including those in vegetable gardens
• Drought-tolerant plants with succulent or small leaves
• Slow-growing plants
• Plants with thick, easily bent silver or gray leaves

Growing Fire-Resistant Trees and Shrubs

The smaller the leaf, the faster it burns. Deciduous trees and shrubs are relatively fire-resistant, as their broad, flat leaves have a higher moisture content and fewer volatile resins than conifers with tiny needles.

Fire-resistant trees and shrubs share these common traits:

• Their leaves are moist and supple.
• They have little dead wood and tend not to accumulate dry, dead material within the plant.
• Their water-like sap has low resin content.

Citrus trees with their evergreen foliage, sweet scent and delicious fruit are a good choice, as are other deciduous fruit trees, including peach.

Space large trees with a minimum of 18 feet between crowns (more if you're on a slope) and with the mature canopy no closer than 10 feet to the edge of any structure. Shrubs and bushes shouldn't sit within 10 feet of the home.

The following shrubs make for a great addition to a fire-resistant garden:

• Lonicera (aka honeysuckle)
• Lilac
• Raspberry
• Lavender
• Sage
• Oleander
• Penstemon

Adding Fire-Resistant Ground Covers

Low-growing or trailing ground covers that carpet the ground tend to have a high moisture content and are often difficult to ignite. Fire-resistant ground covers include:

• Ice Plant
• Lantana
• Ornamental strawberry
• Coreopsis
• Echinacea (aka coneflower)

Some native plants have developed characteristics that allow them to survive, or even thrive, after a fire. And many bulbs, including alliums, crocus and hyacinth, will emerge like a phoenix from below the scorched earth.

For more information on protecting your garden, check out Burpee's guide to green manure.