By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Photos by Fred Ashtiani

When Fred Ashtiani bought his home in the dry, chaparral-covered hills above Santa Barbara two years ago, he knew that in the end, fire could be a catastrophic problem. His strategy: plant a beautiful, Persian-style garden that’s also fire retardant. 

Last week his house and garden got the ultimate test: the Tea Fire that swept through the Montecito Hills, burning 33 houses on his street, and leaving only two residences standing. One was his. Yes, his Ford pickup was burned to a shell (below) when the fire rushed down the hill to where it was parked, and structures all around him were razed, but his house and most of the garden are intact.

An avid horticulturist, Ashtiani said the best trees for fire protection proved to be mature avocados. When a wall of flames reached them, their leaves would smolder, but as soon as the fire subsided, the leaves stopped burning. At the end of the day, the avocado foliage was singed and wilted, but life remains in the trees.

His list of protective plants is long: it fills a spreadsheet, in fact. Some highlights include a variety of succulents like aloe, sedum, and Aptenia cordifolia (an ice-plant relative); evergreen fruit trees such as citrus, loquat, and sapote; tropicals like angels trumpet, banana, and bird of paradise; and succulent-leaved perennials such as agapanthus, pelargonium, and clivia.

His main problem was the wood-chip and ground-bark mulch he used to retain soil moisture and suppress weeds under garden trees and shrubs. That mulch all caught fire, and carried ground-level flames right up to shrubs and tree trunks.

This garden has a modified Persian garden style, whose roots go back six millennia. Such gardens are usually defined by walls, water features, pavement, and an array of fruiting and flowering plants. It's a look that works well in Santa Barbara, whose climate is very similar to that which is found in parts of Ashtiani's native Iran. But instead of having a walled-in garden, he has fireproof masonry walls throughout the garden. Instead of having runnels crossing the garden, he has two hand-built fountains that turn out to be precious resources for the birds, insects, and small animals who live in these dry hills. And paved paths go throughout the landscape, so fire had no easy path across the garden. The paths became de facto fire breaks.

Taken together, the design elements that Ashtiani used supply the basics of every great Persian garden: "They give you a restful sense of seclusion," says Ashtiani, "but also protection."

A week after the Tea Fire swept through, nobody would argue that point.