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 Rumsey “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.

Read the full article about the Seed Bomb Project by Michaela Haas at Reasons to Be Cheerful.