Pollinator gardens rise in the Rogue Valley from the ashes of the Almeda Fire

On the afternoon of Sept. 8, 2020, Fred and Korina Skaff were at their home in West Phoenix, Ore. when the city’s mayor knocked on their door and urged them to leave. The Almeda Fire had already burned through north Ashland and Talent, Ore. and it was headed their way. The Skaffs evacuated with Fred’s 90-year-old mother, but they didn’t pack anything.

“We thought we’d be okay,” says Fred Skaff. “They had the plane coming over and banking right over our house while we were leaving.”

The bottom part of the subdivision, including the Skaff’s house, burned, along with all of their vegetation, save for a single rosebush.

“We had 17 trees in this little yard; it was like a forest,” says Korina Skaff.

More than four years later, the family is getting ready to move back into the new home that Fred Skaff, a contractor, has been building. On an overcast day in late December, they are receiving a generous housewarming gift: a pollinator garden filled with native plants.

The garden is possible thanks to a program hosted by Pollinator Project Rogue Valley called From Fires to Flowers. It was conceived after the Almeda Fire left a path of destruction along the Bear Creek corridor between north Ashland and south Medford, Ore.

After the fire, Pollinator Project gave away native plants, but Kristina Lefever, president of the nonprofit, wanted to go further to restore pollinator habitat in the burn zone.

“Putting plants back in the ground and showing people how they can grow them in their own communities in their own front yards is just amazing to me,” says Lefever.

Each little pocket of habitat is helping to fill in the “Rogue Buzzway,” which Pollinator Project calls a “hyper-local map of self-certified pollinator gardens.” This ever growing patchwork of connected pollinator habitat includes gardens within and outside of the Almeda Fire scar. (Anyone can add their yard or commercial property using the self-reporting form on the map.)

The Skaffs’ is the third From Fires to Flowers garden to be installed in this Phoenix neighborhood, and the 16th since the program launched in November 2021. Designed by landscape designer Ben Ey, it spans the width of the yard: a rough oblong outlined in boulders, with a soil berm running along its length. Two native trees, California redbud and California lilac, anchor the garden at either end. A row of silk tassel and lilacs will eventually form a privacy hedge.

Ey worked with the Skaffs to select plants that they liked but that will also best serve pollinators throughout the year. The design includes a “bloom chart,” which graphs the time period each plant species is expected to flower.

“We’re trying to spread that bloom chart over the entirety of the year,” explains Ey. “From Jan 1 until Dec 31 you want some native plants to be blooming here in the yard.”

Bamba Skaff, who has been helping her father build their new house, is especially excited about ceanothus and silk tassel, a winter blooming evergreen shrub that produces long cascades of bluish flowers.

Korina Skaff says she cried when the first plant of their new garden went in. Now, she hopes their garden will inspire others to help pollinators, too.

“It was hard to receive. But now we’re going to be in a spot where we’re like, Yeah! Come. See.”

The plight of pollinators

Pollinators include bees, wasps, butterflies, moths and other insects, along with hummingbirds, bats, and other small mammals. When pollinators feed on flower nectar or pollen, they transfer the fine powder from male to female flowers or flower parts.

The monarch butterfly is arguably the pollinator poster child. The iconic orange-and-black butterfly has been declining sharply across its range, and in December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially recommended it be listed as Threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act. (In March, following a public comment period, the Service will make a final decision.)

Other pollinators, native bees in particular, are also in trouble, for many of the same reasons as the monarch: loss of habitat to development and mono-crop agriculture; pesticide use, and climate change, especially heat waves.

“More and more evidence is coming forward about the harm that these extreme spikes in heat are [causing] pollinators at the egg and larval stage,” says Lefever.

Climate change is also affecting when plants bloom, putting insects out of sync with the nectar and pollen producing flowers they depend upon.

“The plants have to either come out earlier or they die sooner because of extreme heat or too much rain or not enough rain,” says Lefever. “By the time the insect emerges it’s like, well, my dinner already died or it’s not bloomed yet.”

Most flowering plants rely on pollinators, as do more than two-thirds of food crops across the globe. The fruits, nuts and seeds that birds and wildlife eat also start out as flowers that must be pollinated.

Connecting pollinator habitat across the landscape allows for larger populations and helps support pollinators that migrate—monarchs, for instance—by ensuring they have food all along the way.

Awareness of the key role pollinators play—and the threats they face—is growing, thanks in part to local organizations like Pollinator Project Rogue Valley. The nonprofit “has grown by leaps and bounds,” says Robert Coffan, who serves on the nonprofit’s technical board. Education is a key part of their mission; they reached over 2,000 kids through the Pollinator Pals program last year.

Coffan also heads Southern Oregon Monarch Advocates, which is focused on monarch conservation and education. His organization also started Western Monarch Advocates, which hosted two large summits on the threatened butterfly in California in 2020 and 2023.

Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, Medford and Gold Hill are all Bee City USA affiliates. This initiative, hosted by the Xerces Society, encourages communities to support pollinators by creating habitat and protecting them from pesticides.

Anyone can carry out this mission, even if it just means growing a few native plants in containers on a balcony. A garden of native plants, a-buzz and blooming, is also effective advertising, says Ey, the landscape designer. “Hopefully it’s a trend that will keep going well beyond the borders of what the Pollinator Project is doing as an inspiration for homeowners and business owners—anyone who is stewarding a little chunk of land.”

Restoring community, one garden at a time

While the Skaffs’ garden rises in Phoenix, another one is taking shape in front of Christy Sloan’s her new manufactured home at the Bear Creek Mobile Home Park in north Ashland. Freezing fog has filled the valley, but the damp chill doesn’t seem to bother the small group of volunteers. Busy as bees, they dig holes, tamp earth and spread mulch, chatting as they anchor the new plants.

“This time of year is really a good time for planting,” says Vanessa Henson, co-coordinator for From Fires to Flowers. “Not a lot of people think about that because they want to be inside where it’s warm.”

This neighborhood was one of the first to burn in the Almeda Fire. When Sloan purchased her home nearly four months ago, the yard was a blank slate of gravel. Now, the small space is filling in with an array of native plants: mock orange, California fuschia, redbud and a manzanita that will eventually tower 15 to 20 feet.

“I love plants; I love gardening,” says Sloan, who is working alongside volunteers. “Eventually I’ll do more, but look—what a change it makes.”

The morning of Sept. 8, 2020, Mike Skinner drove to the park to remove two trees that had been knocked out by the unusually high winds. Skinner has owned the Bear Creek property for more than 30 years. He was on his way home when his manager called, warning him about the fire.

He turned around, but emergency personnel had already closed the road. Meanwhile, the fire was moving so quickly that some residents had to flee on foot.

The fire left scorched earth in its wake. A tractor trailer that its driver had abandoned melted into the street. Structures, vehicles, trees, shrubs, and grass turned to ash. Of the park’s 70 units, only two survived.

Jo Ann Haun was one of the first tenants to rebuild, and the first to install a pollinator garden with From Fires to Flowers.

“I was impressed,” says Skinner. “They’ve done my office; they’ve done multiple tenants throughout the park; they’re just a good outfit.”

The soil and mulch come from Plant Oregon, which also provides some of the native plants. Pollinator Project grows others in their own native plant nursery.

The gardens are free or nearly free, but homeowners are expected to take care of them once the volunteers leave. Henson will leave a garden guide with Sloan, and the program hosts workshops for homeowners in spring and fall.

In the four years since the Almeda Fire, 55 of the spaces at Skinner’s mobile home park have been filled.

“A lot of the tenants that are here are survivors that were here prior to the fire, so we’ve got a lot of people back,” says Skinner. “They just like the community.”

The gardens are reinforcing old bonds and helping create new ones, says Henson.

“Being in a community like this where there’s already so many other gardens, it’s awesome because people can swap seeds, they can take little plant babies, they can share, and it just helps to share all the love,” she says. “We’re connecting people and pollinators.”

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