That is absolutely horrible what Beth is going through. I am hoping for rain for California it goes without saying. That is so sad about the chickens and I presume roses in pots that may not survive until Beth is allowed back in to her property.

So sad, but like everyone else I am happy she got out herself with her family. Sad about the chickens. Re the roses, if any of them were in the ground, they may survive, especially if we get the rain promised for Nor Cal in a couple of weeks. My DH and I drove through large areas (because that's where the road goes) of the just mostly out horrid Carr fire in late Oct, a couple of weeks after 2 inches of rain. Low and behold, at least 50% of the very burned to nothing tree stumps I saw had 2 ft. of new growth already coming up a the base. Some of these fires go so fast, they burn up everything, but not roots under the ground. One can only hope..

Jackie

Today's LATimes has a front page story about Paradise

.It's gone. Paradise is gone.

The scale of the devastation is terrible. Reading that and Beth's word on TOS , I can simply be thankful for her and her family's survival.

It's so awful I don't know what to say... I've no idea how you cope with something like that... but at the least, very best wishes to everyone...

So sad. It will be a journey to start over again. I am thankful too for Beth and her family being safe. Hope her rose collection is still there. How soon will the home owners insurance kick in to rebuild homes in Paradise? I hope some of the contractors from other states will go there to help.

I hope everyone in town has homeowners or renters insurance. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/09/take-these-steps-if-youre-preparing-to-file-a-wildfire-insurance-claim.html

I am happy to know they are safe. I know Beth will be so worried about her chickens. I hope they are okay. I worry about mine during bad weather and hurricanes here. They are pets to me just like a cat or dog or our parrots. Praying for all those in the fire's path.

~Sjn

I have relatives near San Francisco, they tell me people have been wearing face masks. So sorry that Beth lost her home. My thoughts are with everyone in the paths of these fires, the devastation is heart- wrenching.

" I have the horrible feeling that before too long there will not be enough fire fighters to fight the ever-increasing and ever-larger fires, especially since the government has cut funding for them."

My sister said: "There's not much of Ventura County left to burn."

And, sadly, she's right.

I hope California receives much-needed rain and a lot of it. I watched a video of the fire raging in Paradise. It appeared surreal, and at the same time, extremely menacing. The resulting loss is heartbreaking...

Glad to read that Beth and her family of people and pets are safe.

Now, here's Irony for you . . .

With such broad acreage completely denuded by fire ... and given the nature of the soils in many parts of California ... heavy winter rains (should we get any of them) are going to bring us a different, but associated, horror. Mudslides.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Southern_California_mudflows

It's becoming difficult to think of any scenarios in large parts of California that don't pose an immediate or long-term threat. We can only hope that in the future more funding will be available so that fires can be fought as efficiently as possible and that more controlled burning can be undertaken in the vast tracts of chaparral. The uncontrolled building in areas close to very flammable areas is another factor, and for that I blame greedy builders with no consideration for anything but gain, gobbling up large tracts of land that would have been better left wild. I need to get off my soapbox, sorry.

Why were there so many eucalyptus trees in the area of the fire? Have they gone feral and are they self-seeding everywhere? All gum trees explode into flames because of the oils they contain. Many also require fire to make the seed viable so there will be saplings growing everywhere within a year. I hope there is a policy in place to eradicate eucalyptus trees that have become invasive.

I don’t know why they don’t take them all down. It’s the cost, perhaps. They are everywhere! They pose a danger, even without fire. My cousin was driving today, and one came crashing down on his truck. He’s fine, the truck not so much. They are so brittle and shallow rooted. They should have been eradicated as soon as it was realized they weren’t suitable for what they were brought here for. Of course, they thought even less of such things then, than they do now. I’m sure no one gave them a thought at all, back then. They are dangerous and messy trees, IMO. Lisa

My husband says the monarch butterflies love eucalyptus trees. Why were they brought here?

Without looking it up to make sure I’m right, I always thought they’d been brought here as a quick growing source of wood to build the railroads. Then it turned out the wood was unsuitable for some reason. I’m going to goggle it a minute, to make sure I’m not mistaken. Lisa

Ok, I wasn’t totally off. They were brought over to produce a quick source of wood and fuel. They were planted in huge groves in San Diego County by a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railway in 1906, 3 million seedlings were raised. They were meant to be used as railway ties. THEN they found that the soft wood split from the spikes being driven into them, and tended to throw the tracks. Oops, and here they are! Lisa

I’m just not a fan. Our family’s dairy had a terrible fire in 1993. Watching those eucalyptus trees literally explode into fire was horrific. They caused the fire to spread, and the damage was millions of dollars. My home was about 1000F from the burn. Just a year or so before that, one fell on our roof during the night. I’ve hated and feared the eucalyptus ever since. Here’s a shot from my backyard this morning. That tree is hundreds of feet high.

Lisa, many years ago, when I was in junior college, I worked for a SoCal membership department store. We had customers who relocated from there to Australia. They would return to visit several times a year and often take cases of bath tissue home with them. I frequently waited on them and finally asked why. The mother responded, "the only trees we have there are eucalyptus..." Enough said!

The trees were also planted by the many thousands to provide wind breaks and they have gone feral. South-west of the airport here, there is a massive forest of them where they have germinated by the many thousands.

And, up in Nipomo, over the river north, there are many areas like this, with rather expensive homes nestled among them. We saw a number of lovely homes when we were looking to buy, but any one anywhere near one of these monstrosities was off the table. They drop massive limbs for the h3!! of it. After rains, the winds come up and they fall over for FUN. They drop tonnage of litter, which burns out pretty much anything you want to plant under it and it smells like "cat box" to me (I HATE them). And, as has been explained, they explode in fires. They look pretty, but other than that, there is nothing to love.

Kim, Gemco? Just curious:). The trees planted by the railroad in San Diego County were planted in what is now, Rancho Sante Fe. All those million dollar homes are in the thick of them. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

The HOA did remove the three eucalyptus trees that were growing right up against my fence. I’m SO glad they’re gone. I feel safer, the mess is less, and my roses don’t have to compete with their shallow roots for water. Still, I can see 6 of them from my kitchen window. The two in the above photo are close enough that they would cover my entire house, were they to fall in my direction. I’m with you, Kim. I can’t stand them. Obviously, they make great firewood, though! Lisa

Yes ma'am, good old Gemco, Lisa! They were good to work for at the time. There are many monstrous eucs through the HOAs in Orcutt, too, many like the ones in your photo. I worked at The Outdoor Room in Pacific Palisades for several years. It was two blocks from Gladstone's on Sunset and PCH. There were MANY, ENORMOUS eucs around that building. One slow Sunday afternoon, there was one customer in the place and a huge limb fell off the tree closest to the building, crushing several plant tables and a large section of the overhead trellis. Fortunately, no one was injured. The customer happened to be a neurosurgeon who had a sixteen year old young lady as a patient. She and her mother were visiting The Arboretum and a "Blue Gum", like the one which shed the limb at the nursery, dropped a limb on the young lady and her mother. The sixteen year old was left quadriplegic and he said The Arboretum lost the lawsuit because even in Australia where they are indigenous, it's illegal to plant them anywhere people can be expect to walk. They are known as "widow makers" due to the huge limbs which fall off without rain, without wind, but just for FUN.

I don't doubt they can't extinguish the landscape timbers and palms, Kippy. Both are dense and can feed coals for quite a long time, much like an oak tree can.

Thanks, Trish. Interesting. What that doctor said was Blue Gums were illegal there to plant. Reportedly, that was one of the reasons the victim prevailed. The County Arboretum should have done their homework to insure they weren't creating dangerous conditions.

My house used to be surrounded by eucalypts over 150ft tall. There is a piece of crown land (an unmade, unused bit that was going to be a road when the village was mapped out, but it was never built) that runs right beside my house. A government official came one day and said he would be having them all taken down because they were a danger to my house. One tree had actually fallen on my house before I bought it which is why the owner was selling up. All the trees at the side of the house, including my own trees, were removed by a contractor free of charge because he was getting the firewood in exchange.

I have about an acre of eucalypts left up in a corner of my property which shed limbs randomly and sometimes in high winds they fall across the road we share with a neighbour. I have to get the chainsaw out at first light to enable the neighbour to get his grandkids to the school bus.

We were made to leave the house when the man took this tree down because he couldn't be sure it wouldn't fall on the house as it was a bit twisted. The trees behind the house will reach it if they fall but they are leaning away from us so we don't consider them a threat.

This is the tree that fell through the house. The tree roots behind it are from the last tree to fall and it fell away from the house.

Very much off topic: a neighbor in New Orleans had a Euc in her back yard. it was visible from the back of our house and stood out because the color of the foliage was so drfferent from our yellow-green plants. We were in that house for almost ten year. That tree just didn't grow.

This was in a rich delta soil a block from the Mississippi River. It never got much larger than the dogwood that grew beside it. It never grew enough to support bird or squirrel nests.

Here in rainfall central, we have some magnificent stand alone trees. They do just fine until the soil gets extremely wet and then they fall over. This year, so far, excluding this week, we've had 96" of rain on our acreage. Our fire season is winter because of low humidity then, and some foresters are quietly worried because our understory was lush and the leaf fall and dead weeds are so much more vulnerable than usual.

How do Mediterranean countries with winds that have names not have these fires?

Or are we too young a country to have evolved the knowledge to handle these conditions?

Lola, how fortunate you were, not only to have them removed - but for free! Decades ago, I was taken by a converted schoolhouse that was for sale in the country. It was on about half an acre, and surrounded by those firs they used to plant as windbreaks. There were about 80 of them, and they were around 80' to 100' tall. In the end, I decided I'd never manage to sleep a wink on windy nights, if I bought it. To have them removed (if it had been allowed) was more than the price of the property.

Kim, I didn't realise till now that blue gums were worse culprits than other gums, but on looking them up, it says they've given other gums a bad name!

Blue Gum foliage is gorgeous, Trish. I love seeing it (from a distance great enough to prevent smelling it) but not enough to want to be near it. The only smell worse than the foliage and wood are the flowers. That sticky, skunky-sweet stench permeates everything when they flower.

Trish - you were wise not to buy a place that scares you every time you hear a tree creaking in the wind. We used to sleep downstairs on windy nights when the trees were still there but now the sound of the wind is lovely. Well, mostly lovely - the roaring forties from the SW scare the bejesus out of me when I can hear them coming up the valley like a freight train and they slam into the house. The entire upper floor moves and paintings rattle on the walls. When I lived in Sydney the only winds we got were the southerly busters in the afternoons.

Lola, you live in a lovely place. I can almost feel the air when I look at your photos. I've never experienced the roaring forties, but I ended up by buying an old cottage on top of a rise in the Hunter Valley. When the southerly blew I thought the roof would come off. I had a kayak stored under the house that would lift up and bang against the floor. Scared my poor dog no end. The south facing verandah had already gone, and the house had been lifted off its frame. It was a bit like the Ettamogah Pub!

Trish, the Hunter is a lovely place. We used to have 40 acres at Gungal but the neighbours were pretty scary so we sold up.

We occasionally get hot winds from the mainland and standing outside of a warm summer evening takes me back to my childhood at Tamarama. I close my eyes and I can almost hear the surf. The winds here can be brutal but they seem to be seasonal. August used to be our windy month but now it is our snowy month and October is windy. I suppose most weather patterns are changing and we will all have to adapt.

Lola, I had an 'odd' neighbour there too. Well, I actually lived in the middle of their property. She once shot her own dog because it wouldn't come when she called it. During one thunderstorm, my dog took off, and I was terrified she would shoot her.

I hate neighbors like that.

I know a physician whose sister-in-law was killed by an 800-pound branch from a eucalyptus tree. We unfortunately have some on our property, but fortunately they're skinny and far from the house. They're the most useless trees I can think of and I don't find them beautiful either. Trees that were planted in the twenties and thirties, thousands and thousands of them, are now close to the age when they die, and the cleanup will be horrendous.

I remember reading years ago Norman Douglas's unforgettable rant about eucalyptus trees his book of travel essays "In Old Calabria", and now, thanks to the magic of the internet, I can share it. Here is what he said:

"Detesting, as I do, the whole tribe of gum trees, I never lose an opportunity of saying exactly what I think about this particularly odious representative of the brood, this eyesore, this grey-haired scarecrow, this reptile of a growth with which a pack of misguided enthusiasts have disfigured the entire Mediterranean basin.

They have now realized that it is useless as a protection against malaria. Soon enough they will learn that instead of preventing the disease, it actually fosters it, by harboring clouds of mosquitoes under its scraggy so-called foliage. These abominations may look better on their native heath: I sincerely hope they do. Judging by the “Dead Heart of Australia”–a book which gave me a nightmare from which I shall never recover– I should say that a varnished hop-pole would be an artistic godsend out there.

But from here the intruder should be expelled without mercy. A single eucalyptus will ruin the fairest landscape. No plant on earth rustles in such a horribly metallic fashion when the wind blows through those everlastingly withered branches; the noise chills one to the marrow; it is like the sibilant chattering of ghosts. Its oil is called “medicinal” only because it happens to smell rather nasty; it is worthless as timber, objectionable in form and hue–objectionable, above all things, in its perverse, anti-human habits. What other tree would have the effrontery to turn the sharp edges of its leaves–as if these were not narrow enough already!–towards the sun, so as to be sure of giving at all hours of the day the minimum of shade and maximum of discomfort to mankind?
But I confess that this avenue of Policoro [in Calabria] almost reconciled me to the existence of the anaemic Antipodeans. Almost; since for some reason or other (perhaps on account of the insufferably foul nature of the soil) their foliage is here thickly tufted; it glows like burnished bronze in the sunshine, like enameled scales of green and gold. These eucalypti are unique in Italy. Gazing upon them, my
heart softened and I almost forgave the gums their manifold iniquities, their diabolical thirst, their demoralizing aspect of precocious senility and vice, their peeling bark suggestive of unmentionable skin diseases, and that system of radication which is nothing short of a scandal on this side of the globe…” heart softened and I almost forgave the gums their manifold iniquities, their diabolical thirst, their demoralizing aspect of precocious senil

Fantastic, monarda.

There's lots of these in Sicily, near Enna, my DH's home town. I, too, find them ugly. They were planted as part of a re-foresting scheme. Yet I do have a beautiful memory of them. When we were young, visiting my DH's parents,my then future DH and I were driving around one late afternoon around sunset, in a eucaliptus wood. We became aware of an intense colour all around us, came to a high place, and saw, on one side, a gloriously dramatic sunset. Turning around, we saw Etna sending out a huge mushroom cloud of smoke that went way up into the sky and reflected the colours of the sunset...I get shivers as I even write about it. An incredible,unforgettable experience!

Wow, this is a learning experience here, every day. Beautiful, Bart.

Norman Douglas said it best by far. bart, you on the other hand painted a beautiful picture for us.

Notwithstanding the tragedies that have occurred in N. California... I feel I must say something in defence of Eucalyptus trees, at least the ones we grow here, and which many of us love and put to good use...

...There are I think 3 varieties that have been popular for a long time... Eucalyptus gunnii, Eucalyptus dalrympleana and perhaps the most attractive of all Eucalyptus pauciflora ssp. niphophila [Snow Gum]....

...you can see any of these pop up in gardens all over the place... I've grown 2 of the 3... We now also have 2 dwarf versions, Eucalyptus gunnii 'Azura' and 'France Bleu'...

..'Azura' is very dwarf, almost a miniature... 'FB' is larger but very slow growing, a dwarf gunnii.. I would love to have 'Azura' and might be on my shopping list...

The way to use gunnii I think is to give screening to a garden where you are overlooked by a neighbouring property that is on higher ground. A single specimen tree will do, it grows 6 foot a year, so within 2 years or so you start to have cover.

It's crucial with this plant to cut 6 foot off the top with one incision every year in April, when it has reached just beyond the height you need for screening... if you miss a year it gets away from you and you have lost control....

I also used my plant to support a rambling rose... I grew 'Leontine Gervais' up it right to the top, where it would then cascade downwards, more so after the annual prune... the light pink and the blue foliage I found very attractive..

..I also planted Cistus purpureus around the base and a tree lupin... gardeners here don't make enough use of these trees like this.. they plant them, neglect them, and before you know it, you've got a 40 foot tall tree on your hands.. there is one in a garden near me, it's about the tallest tree around here, perhaps 60 foot or more, that is just not the way to do it in my opinion.. used to best effect as single specimens, these are superlative trees, and I absolutely love them... I do not like to see them planted en masse, like a small wood [there are some here like that]...

I'm so sorry, and was not aware, they had been over planted in California and that they have contributed to the fires..

Marlorena -- I see your point -- and frankly, I love the way the eucalyptus look in the landscape.

All that said . . .

While they may not be hazardous in England, they are the wrong plant for California, where years of drought and increasing hot, dry, winds make them a horror in a wildfire.

I would frankly discourage ANYONE to plant them in this area.

As beautiful as this stretch of road looks, it would be a death trap in a wildfire.

I have just been reading that the 20 years of shared equipment and resources, including 6 adapted helicopters and 2 Hercules water bombers, between the US and Australia may have to come to an end. Our fire seasons have been extended so that we both need the equipment and personnel at the same time. Last year Australia sent 240 personnel but this year only 188. These are mainly specialist co-ordinators but there were some firefighters as well. If there is to be no 'fire season', just year round dangerous conditions, then we are all in trouble.

..absolutely Jeri, and I can see that very clearly from your photo... wrong plant, wrong place...

That is scary, indeed, Lola! Jeri, your photo looks very much like the area all around the airport here as well as many of the "upscale" housing areas in Nipomo. Marlorena, over planting has previously been a problem here. What's made it worse is the blamed things LIKE it here and have "naturalized". We don't have any near where we live, yet I pull up seedlings from both front and rear yards regularly.

Beth answered my Face Book message. She's exploring what to put in the replacement house and considering a tiny house to live in while it's being constructed. She's still in shock and figures the PTSD hasn't kicked in yet. She reports she's only slept about ten hours in a week. She is remarkably upbeat, all things considered. Tremendously more so than I would expect myself to be in her situation.

I don't think I could manage that, myself.

John (figinsanity) has emailed me. He wanted to set up a gofundme page for her. I put them in touch with each other and she's thanked him and said her cousin has one already. She has insurance, but she's lost her home, four cars, her craft shop and likely her chickens. He's asked her for the address of the gofundme page and asked me to post here he will send it to me to be posted here once he receives it. So, should anyone wish to help, that information will be forthcoming.

I am so very sorry. It is terrible.

Beth's cousin has started a Go Fund Me page to help the family. This is it, should you be lead to contribute.

She has given us so much through all her photos - unusual roses, roses by alphabet, roses by color, all year after year. I felt I really wanted to give a little back so I just made a small contribution. Wishing her and MIchael all the best going forward.