This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
7 min read
If you’ve been through a wildfire, you may never forget the torrid heat, the acrid smell of smoke and the threatening sight of flames closing in. On January 7, 2025, the Goodyear family joined 200,000 other Angelenos in grabbing emergency items and fleeing from raging wildfires that would devastate 37,000 acres and kill at least 31 people in Los Angeles, the Palisades, and Altadena, California. Along with 18,000 of their neighbors, the family of four lost their home.
The Pacific Palisades, a hilly neighborhood facing the ocean, where they had lived since 2019, was reduced to blackened trees and ruins. The once-lively streets were eerily empty, the neighborhood ghostly like a war zone.
To alleviate the devastation, Dana Goodyear and her then-14-year-old son Ramsey “Rummy” Goodyear came up with an idea: What if they sowed native seeds to revive the charred landscape?
“I was looking for ways to channel our pretty extreme disorientation and grief into something meaningful,” Dana Goodyear says. “We had been receiving so much, and we wanted to give back to the community and the land.” She thinks of the Pacific Palisades as a community, but also “an ecosystem that needs to thrive.”
“The fire wiped out the nature,” she says, “so we thought we’d try to restore some of that while bringing people from the community together.”
Goodyear, a poet and staff writer at the New Yorker, had a vision of the California state flower, the brilliant orange poppy, blanketing the devastated hills. Though she had never been particularly interested in gardening before, she called the Theodore Payne Foundation, a nonprofit nursery that specializes in native plants. Its experts created a mix of seeds specifically for the fire-scarred areas, each with a job to do: California poppies for fast-growing color, two kinds of native sunflowers to absorb lead and other toxic substances from the soil, buckwheat to help stabilize the soil, and Hooker’s evening primrose, whose deep taproots support rapid regrowth.
Goodyear googled a recipe for seed bombs, which are used in urban guerilla gardening and for hard-to-reach spots. The seeds are mixed into donut-hole size balls with compost and clay. This provides nourishment and protection for the seeds until they are ready to germinate. The family, including then-12-year-old daughter Willa, began making them.
By the following fall, the seed bombs had turned the Goodyears’ burnt-out lot into a meadow. “There were sunflowers and poppies everywhere,” Rummy Goodyear remembers. “It was really amazing to see.” He recalls how emotional it was to return to their former bungalow. “Seeing flowers popping up in what seemed like a wasteland made me so happy,” he says with a grin. “I remember feeling, ‘Wow, this really is doing something. I think this is really helping me.’” He found the act of returning to the burned neighborhood with a purpose cathartic. “You’re creating new happy memories in the Palisades instead of reliving old ones that have been tainted by the fire,” he says, “It gives you a purpose to know that you’re doing something good.”
His mother calls the seed bombing the key to the family’s recovery. “I’m not sure what my relationship would be to the Palisades right now if we didn’t have the Seed Bomb Project,” she says. “Probably just someplace we’d avoid going back to, to be honest.”
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What began as one family’s attempt to find hope and healing grew into a wider effort when Rummy’s school, Crossroads in Santa Monica, turned seed bomb making into a school-wide project, producing thousands of the small clay-and-compost balls. Other schools, local businesses and several nonprofits joined. Malibu Compost donated compost, Anawalt Lumber helped with in-kind donations and a “round up at the register” fundraising campaign; an employee from the Johnson Tree Company watered the Goodyears’ lot during the dry summer to help the first seeds grow. To date, the Seed Bomb Project has distributed 10,000 seed bombs to fire survivors in Altadena, the Palisades and Malibu.
Organically, the spontaneous effort became a broader initiative to restore community and sow beauty. “A big part of it is the healing experience of bringing back together these broken communities around a table, with your hands in the bowl of seeds and clay and compost and water and mud,” Dana Goodyear says. People share stories as they form balls, what they lost, what they remember, how they cope. “That gathering part is every bit — if not more — important than what happens with the seeds,” she says.
People of all ages participate, from elementary school kids to seniors. “It’s a crazy range, because the little kids like to put their hands in the mud; the older people are more interested in native flowers. It’s kind of meditative to make the seed bombs and you end up in really good conversations,” says Dana Goodyear.
Each seed bomb costs about $5, which the Goodyears initially paid for themselves. Attached to a nonprofit, Creative Visions, the tax-exempt status now allows the project to receive donations and grants. A similar effort in Altadena, led by fire survivor René Amy, who lost his home in the Eaton fire, aims to sow 130 million California poppy seeds in burn areas. Home owners in the area can sign up online to receive seeds.
The Goodyears learned important lessons about restoration: For one, not every burned landscape should be replanted. The Theodore Payne Foundation advised them not to introduce seeds into parks and preserves. Instead, the newly minted gardeners focused on urban spaces where they had the owners’ or the city’s permission, for instance parkways, but they mostly gave away seed bombs to fire survivors. “We wanted to make sure that we were not going to get in trouble or upset anyone because it’s sensitive after a fire,” Dana Goodyear explains. “You don’t want to seed bomb someone’s lot if they don’t want that.” Yet another advantage of the seed bombs is that fire survivors could throw them onto burnt lots, even when entering the area was too dangerous, for example, because of soil stability.
Initially, the Goodyears planned to rebuild their bungalow, but daunted by the long process, the family has recently decided to sell the lot where their home once stood and move to Santa Monica. Yet they want to continue the Seed Bomb Project, even expand it.
An additional benefit of native plants is that they are generally more fire resistant than non-natives. “It’s so frightening to feel so vulnerable to this force, and we know that bigger fires will become more common,” Dana Goodyear reflects. “There will be a lot of people who find themselves in the situation that we’re in where everything is gone, and I want to be able to help those people in the future. I want to keep this project going so that we can give to those people and give them a way to feel hope.”
For Goodyear, the flowers have become a lesson in how to live with a force that cannot be controlled. “What I was attracted to from the beginning is that the flowers are such a perfect symbol of resilience,” she says. “We’re living in this landscape, and we have to learn from the creatures who have been here longer what to do and how to cope.”
The post Reviving L.A.’s Burned Landscapes, One Seed Bomb at a Time appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
