Reasons To Be Cheerful · 6 hours ago

Reviving L.A.'s Burned Landscapes, One Seed Bomb at a Time

After losing their home in the January 2025 Palisades Fire, Dana Goodyear and her teenage son Rummy didn't wait for recovery to come to them - they mixed seeds, clay, and compost into small balls and began throwing them into the ash. "I was looking for ways to channel our pretty extreme disorientation and grief into something meaningful," Dana explains, and what emerged was not just a garden but a gathering - thousands of seed bombs made by schoolchildren, neighbors, and strangers sitting together with their hands in the mud, sharing what they had lost. Rummy, who watched their burned lot slowly fill with sunflowers and poppies, describes the experience with quiet precision: "You're creating new happy memories in the Palisades instead of reliving old ones that have been tainted by the fire." The project has since distributed 10,000 seed bombs across fire-scarred communities, and Dana has named the native California poppy - fast-blooming, fire-adapted, brilliant orange - as her symbol of choice, because it already knows something humans are still learning: how to live inside a landscape that cannot be controlled, and grow anyway.