When Julianna and Mark Hayes decided to overhaul the landscaping at their home in Northern California's Marin County, they weren't legally required to clear a 5-foot perimeter surrounding their house. Still, the couple is spending around $100,000 to replace nearly all of their lush Japanese garden's foundation plants with rocks, turf and pavers.
"In the back of my husband's mind is, 'Let's just get ahead of it,'" Juliana says.
"It" is Zone 0: the 0-to-5-foot buffer surrounding a structure that fire scientists call a critical defense against wildfire destruction. Best practices for this zone require keeping the area free of flammable materials, from plants and bark mulch to wooden fences, wooden patio furniture and even jute doormats.
The Hayes family represents a broader shift across California, where the 5-foot buffer is rapidly morphing from an afterthought into a sought-after home feature. Driven by mounting climate threats, shrinking insurance options and modern fire science, landscaping in the nation's most populous state is being redefined from the ground up.
At national landscape design and build platform Yardzen, demand for fire-resilient design has more than tripled since 2024. "Nothing can keep a house from burning, but there are decisions that can be made to increase the house's resilience," says Yardzen CEO Allison Messner, who founded the company after her home survived a 2017 wildfire in Sonoma County. "Zone 0 is one decision."
Regulators are following suit. In August, the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection approved a statewide Zone 0 mandate for high-risk wildfire areas. Although the Board withdrew the rules package in September to make clarity edits, it expects to resubmit it to the Office of Administrative Law in November, a Board spokesperson said. If approved, the mandate could reshape landscaping requirements for roughly 2 million structures.
Even so, a shift is under way. Zone 0 started gaining statewide momentum after the 2017-2018 fire season. Some local fire codes, home insurers and communities have already adopted various best practices associated with Zone 0 and broader defensible space, which spans up to 100 feet from a structure across distinct zones.
While there has been community pushback to Zone 0 mandates, it's mostly from a vocal minority, says Todd Lando, a battalion chief and wildfire hazard mitigation specialist with Central Marin Fire. "I think the vast majority of residents understand this is the world we're living in," he says.
In 2018, Lando helped establish a 5-foot buffer requirement for new construction and major home remodels in Marin County. That local mandate stemmed from research by the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety showing that wind-driven embers -- not direct flame contact -- cause 60% to 90% of structural ignitions.
"What 135,000 destroyed structures across the West have taught us over 30 years is that most ignitions happen when tiny embers land right against the house," says Lando, who also serves as president of wildfire resilience nonprofit Fire Safe Marin.
That science drove Debra and Paul Smith to act. After losing their Solano County home to wildfire in 2020, the couple rebuilt with a steel fence, an aluminum patio pergola and a roughly 10-foot concrete and rock buffer around their new house. Fire prevention is a mindset the Smiths live out every day. "We think about what we can do to prevent any possibility of a recurrence," Paul said. "And that goes for how we built our house."
For other homeowners, a primary driver is staying insured. In the front yard of Ryan Elam's Mediterranean-inspired home in San Diego County, a ring of drought-tolerant bushes is bedded in roughly $6,000 worth of fresh mulch. It's a quintessential slice of Southern California suburbia that is now being reassessed for its fire implications.
Elam, a retired software developer, is moving between two properties in San Diego County, both located in Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones, according to the state's Fire Hazard Severity Zone map. He said his longtime insurer has refused to cover his new home due to high wildfire risk, forcing him to shop for coverage that he expects will require clearing landscaping -- including two birch trees framing the front entrance.
For his current home, he plans to make whatever modifications the eventual buyer's insurer demands and is already letting the plants near the exterior die off for easier removal. He said the mulch will certainly have to go, too.
Home insurers and government fire agencies operate independently, but their Zone 0 guidelines align closely because both draw from the same scientific research, said Janet Ruiz of the Insurance Information Institute. A statewide Zone 0 mandate would give home insurers a more consistent way to assess the safety of homes in high-risk areas, she said
The price for Zone 0 compliance depends entirely on how a homeowner chooses to tackle it. Simple shrub clearing and mulch raking can cost next to nothing, but at Yardzen, an average full landscape redesign is around $50,000. Lando says a fire-safe perimeter doesn't require turning properties into desolate gravel pits. "It changes what sits directly against the house, not the whole landscape," he says.
Designers are bridging the gap with non-combustable materials such as composite decking, concrete, porcelain pavers and river rock within the 5-foot zone. Scott Lawn, founder of Greenway Landscape Design & Build in Southern California, is using metal plants.
He recently won three beautification awards for a Rancho Santa Fe home where he replaced foundation plants with boulders, gravel, cement pots and flameproof steel plant sculptures with internal lighting. The homeowner, Lawn said, relandscaped specifically to comply with Zone Zero guidelines that are enforced locally by the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District and approximate the state's framework.
Joe Raboine is the vice president of design at Belgard, a manufacturer of pavers, retaining walls and outdoor living products. He expects innovation across the industry, such as manufacturers exploring movable landscape elements like planters, which could be relocated quickly during periods of elevated wildfire risk.
As fire safety redefines California landscaping, homeowners like Elam see a permanent shift ahead. "Real lawns won't exist," he says. "Why have a lawn if the only thing I'm irrigating is a tiny patch of grass? Then I just won't have grass."