Beyond the destruction of homes and loss of lives, the Eaton Fire that ravaged Los Angeles in the beginning of 2025 was merciless when it came to Altadena’s celebrated green spaces.
More than one year later, local advocates are scrambling to save the trees and plants that are still standing and restore what was lost.
Altadena only has three public parks. The smallest, the Altadena Triangle Park, sits in the heart of the burn zone.
Before it burned down, Amigos de los Rios, a nonprofit dedicated to creating and preserving Altadena’s green space, used to stand across the street — along with a gas station, a church, and the town’s fabled Bunny Museum.
But Triangle Park survived, thanks in part to an oasis of lush, shady, native plant and tree life planted by Amigos de los Rios about seven years ago.
“Altadena is so beautiful, like the biodiversity is off the charts,” said Claire Robinson, the nonprofit’s founder and managing director. “It had 49% tree canopy in certain areas, which is off the charts for Los Angeles County.”
Some Altadena neighborhoods had such thick canopies of trees that it made streets feel as if you were cocooned in a forest community, not in a community just 14 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Robinson said the fire changed all of that, consuming more than two-thirds of Altadena’s tree life.
“So now, we’re down 30% of what we had, and it’s become fever-pitch important,” Robinson said.
“We need the trees for the heat protection, we need the trees for the protection they provided for the fire, we need them for the sense of history and place. I’m determined that we save every last tree we can.”
The fire also destroyed Robinson’s home, just a short walk from the park. But none of that has slowed the group’s efforts on the ground. In recent months, Amigos de los Rios has adopted and is actively rehabilitating over 3,500 damaged trees across some four hundred Altadena properties. Plenty of other local advocates are also fighting to preserve surviving trees and restore those lost in the fire.
One mile north of Triangle Park, where the concrete gives way to the steep foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Wynne Wilson surveyed the rugged mix of urban and national forest land.
“We are literally right at the toe of the mountains, we have bear[s], we have wildlife coming through here,” Wilson said.
The handsome adobe home she shared with her husband for 30 years used to sit at the back of a roughly half-acre parcel filled with native trees and foliage, much of which withstood the flames. The house, however, did not.
Wilson has welcomed thousands of people to the property over the years. Some people come to learn about native plants, or to pick up new gardening strategies. Others simply enjoy the property’s serene, park-like setting.
After the fire, Wilson co-founded a nonprofit called Altadena Green and organized an intervention aimed at stopping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from removing native trees that were considered “in the way” – or misidentified as dead or dying.
“We went to meetings at 6:30 in the morning,” Wilson said. “They made it really challenging for us to intervene. But we didn’t stop, and then ultimately we created a following where hundreds of people were ready to march.”
“Kids were going to draw [pictures of] their trees and march with posters of their trees,” she said. “I told [U.S. Army Corps of Engineers] that this is where we’re at, so what are we going to do? How are we going to slow down the destruction of the tree canopy that is left?”
The effort worked, saving scores of trees which are now being rehydrated and rehabilitated so they can return to their full, pre-fire health.
“And it’s not just us,” Wilson said.
“It’s multiple groups working on this, so I really see positive change for the future. I’d like to also establish a protected tree list for Altadena. Pasadena has an extensive protected tree list; we only have the oak trees protected.”
Now, there’s a new fight brewing, one with SoCal Edison. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, sparking from the company’s equipment allegedly ignited the Eaton Fire.
The energy company plans to bury power lines to prevent future fires, but Wilson said the first leg of that work could damage the root systems of scores of Deodar cedars and other trees, some of which were compromised by the fire.
“Most of us up here love the community, we love nature, we love our trees. We are warriors for the trees,” Wilson said.
Cal State Northridge sustainability professor Crist Khachikian leads regular student field trips into the burn zone to learn about restoring lost trees and creating defensible spaces around homes. His department partnered with advocacy group Altadena Wild and other local environmental nonprofits to come up with an ambitious tree planting campaign.
“For example, the L.A. Conservation Corps. We reached out to them and said, ‘We have this project, would you be able to help us plant?’ And [they] said, ‘Absolutely,” Khachikian said.
“So, it’s all about partnerships and creating this ecosystem of people who are willing to help, and it galvanized after the fire, and now it’s taken off into a program that is interesting to lots of people.”
Late last year, Cal State Northridge held its first tree giveaway program in Altadena, distributing dozens of saplings to locals ready to plant. Later this spring, forestry students will conduct an updated field assessment of Altadena’s tree canopy while continuing to sponsor more tree giveaways.
There are also hyper-local, DIY efforts to “regreen” Altadena, plant by plant and seed by seed. After the Eaton Fire tore through Laurie Scott’s West Altadena neighborhood, taking the backyard garden she’d cultivated for years with it, she got the idea for Regrow Altadena, a free plant and seed giveaway program that she operates from her front yard in West Altadena.
“I wanted to fix everything, I wanted everything to be fixed. I wanted to make it all to be better, and I knew that I couldn’t,” Scott explained while standing alongside the large plant stand.
“But I thought that maybe I could make one thing better for some people, so I started picking up bits of succulents that I found and propagating everything that I can get my hands on,” Scott said.
“It’s been so hard for all of us. We all need home. We need comfort. And I’ve heard from a few folks that [a plant] really did make just all the difference.”
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