On EMBER in Berkeley: Grieving Your Garden Is Okay. Here Is What to Do Next.
Updated: May 11
A Berkeley Hills Resident, Chemist, and Habitat Gardener on the EMBER Ordinance
This post grew out of an Amplify piece I wrote for Berkeleyside. You can read the published article here.
The Berkeley Hills are beautiful because of their gardens. Wisteria climbing over a fence. A Japanese maple gone fiery in the fall. Decades-old camellias, heavy with blooms, that a family has tended for decades. This landscape is ours. It is personal. It carries memory.
So when I say that I support the EMBER ordinance, I want to hold both truths at once: this is hard, and it is right.
What Is EMBER?
EMBER stands for Effective Mitigations for Berkeley Ember Resilience. It is a wildfire risk reduction ordinance passed unanimously by the Berkeley City Council and adopted into law on January 1, 2026. In its first phase, it applies to just under 900 homes in the Grizzly Peak and Panoramic Hill mitigation areas.
When Does Enforcement Start?
The law already took effect on January 1, 2026. Inspections begin in May 2026. If a violation is identified during inspection, homeowners receive a minimum of 60 days to come into compliance before fines can be issued. While fines may escalate up to $500 per day for repeat or ongoing violations, importantly, the ordinance states homeowners who have work in progress will not be penalized. The city's stated emphasis is education and support, not punishment, and the city has provided a simple application for assistance through the Resident Assistance Program for those who meet any one of the following criteria: are age 65 or older, have a physical disability, or meet the household income eligibility limit. To learn more about Berkeley Fire Department's Defensible Space Inspection Program and to schedule your inspection, click here.
What the Law Requires
The ordinance is structured around defensible space zones:
Zone 0 (mandatory, 5 feet from the structure): All combustible materials must be removed from the immediate perimeter of your home, deck, and outbuildings. This includes plants, mulch, stored firewood, wooden fences that attach directly to the home, and certain plastics and decorative items. Essentially, if it burns and it is within five feet of your house, it goes. This is the non-negotiable enforcement zone. In the final ordinance, exceptions are made for fences (gates are not excepted) and mature trees.
Zone 1 (strongly recommended, 5 to 30 feet): Vegetation should be managed to reduce ladder fuels. This means spacing plants so fire cannot easily climb from ground cover to shrubs to trees, keeping grasses cut short, and removing dead material regularly. Berkeley Fire Department (BFD) provides a list, courtesy of Kathy Kramer, of regionally native and fire-resilient landscaping plants.
Zone 2 (strongly recommended, 30 to 100 feet): Further fuel reduction to slow the spread of fire and limit the production of embers. BFD recommends maintaining native vegetation that is both drought-resistant and water-efficient, keeping grass in this zone at a maximum height of four inches, and spacing plants appropriately.
BFD provides a Self-inspection Checklist to help you prepare.
The science behind the Zone 0 five-foot non-combustible space is well established. In the wind-driven fires we have seen devastate communities in California, including those that forced our neighbors in Los Angeles out of their homes for weeks this past January, it is not usually a wall of flame that first ignites a structure. It is embers. Tiny, airborne sparks that travel hundreds of feet and land in the mulch under your deck, in a planter touching your siding, in the leaves caught against your foundation. Zone 0 eliminates the fuel that allows those embers to do their worst.
The city has financial assistance available for income-qualified homeowners through a $1 million Cal Fire grant and Measure FF funding. For those who do not qualify, the average cost of compliance is estimated between $2,000 and $5,000. For our own home, that estimate ended up being mostly accurate, with the largest single expense being the replacement of our existing wooden gates with non-combustible wrought iron. Wooden fences within the five foot zone do not need to be removed, per the ordinance, and although the Zone Zero science would suggest that they should be, we chose to keep our existing redwood fencing in place and we expect all or most of our neighbors in the mitigation zones will do the same with their wooden fencing.
Why I Support This, Even Though It Hurts
The LA fires were a wake-up call for our family. Our parents were evacuated from their home for over a week. Standing in the Berkeley Hills and looking at what we have here, the steep grades, the dense canopy, the narrow roads, the adjacency to wildland, I recognized the parallels immediately. So did my husband.
We made the decision, ahead of the ordinance, to assess our own property. We removed non-native trees that were crowding the canopy or had grown in poor locations: camellias that had become leggy over the years, Japanese maples nearing the end of their lives, an orange tree planted too close to the house to ever thrive. Taking down a tree has an emotional impact, even when it is the right thing to do. I will not minimize that.
But we kept our western azaleas, our California bay laurel, and our beloved coast live oaks. And we replaced what we removed with plants that belong here: ceanothus, manzanita, mountain mahogany, flannel bush, wax myrtle, coffeeberry, huckleberry, thimbleberry, osoberry, California hazelnut, red-flowering currant, chaparral currant, canyon gooseberry... the list goes on. The result is a garden that is even more beautiful, textural, and richly layered than what we had before. And unlike our previous landscape, it now provides rich habitat, improves fire resilience, and produces food for our family.
Our new landscape meets both the mandatory Zone 0 requirements and the Zone 1 through 3 recommendations. And since we made these changes, I have seen birds on this property that I have never encountered even in our local parks.
I tell this story not to suggest the transition is easy, but to tell you honestly that the grief does not have to be the end of the story.
Who I Am, and Why I Am Here
I am a PhD chemist and I have spent the past fifteen-plus years working on technologies that address climate change: more efficient lighting, transparent solar cells, and longer-lasting, more sustainably made batteries for electric vehicles and the grid. Climate change mitigation has been my professional north star. But lab work takes time. A technology that leaves the research bench today may take a decade to reach full-scale commercialization, and even longer to meaningfully affect atmosphere. That gap has always driven me to spend time on actions that create an immediate, visible, tangible impact.
That is how I came to habitat restoration.
My efforts started with beach cleanups along California's Central Coast, then invasive ice plant removal in Alameda, then container-based pollinator gardens for my neighbors struggling to provide habitat in Los Angeles's concrete jungle. I've volunteered with the East Bay Regional Park District and the East Bay Chapter of the California Native Plant Society on native installations, invasive removal, and nursery management.
When I moved back to the Bay Area about ten years ago to join a research team at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, I started working with the property managers I rented from to convert their properties to native habitat. That work grew organically. Friends, colleagues, and eventually friends of friends asked me to design their landscapes. I designed a commercial landscape at Marina Village Research Park in Alameda, and the response from the surrounding neighborhood led to additional installations there.
From there I expanded my design work across the Bay Area, and eventually to Orange County, Los Angeles, and the Sacramento region. Later, I formalized this project under the name Golden Aura Gardens.
My philosophy is straightforward: I create landscapes that belong. Not just a list of California natives dropped into whatever configuration is convenient, but curated spaces developed in genuine partnership with my clients. I start by understanding what the land means to you, how you want to feel in your garden, what your goals are, what your microclimate and soil look like, and what the property already provides. From there I synthesize a design that is uniquely yours. These gardens become alive in a way that surprises people. It usually starts with bees and butterflies. Then birds arrive, foraging in the ground cover. Turn over a log placed just so and you might find a salamander, or a clutch of eggs. This is not a fantasy of wild places. This is happening in the middle of Oakland's Lake Merritt neighborhood. Nature returns if we give it somewhere to go.
And the gardens are beautiful. Neighbors stop, they take photographs, children stop to smell the flowers. There is something deeply communal about a garden that is alive. The twentieth-century ideal of the manicured lawn and the wide setback and the white picket fence has isolated us from one another as much as it has isolated us from the rest of the living world. It has brought loneliness along with ecological damage. And the thing is, it became so normalized that we forgot what we had given up, which is the felt sense of being part of a community that extends beyond our own species.
Bringing that back is what I care about, one garden at a time.
I am a Bay Area native, born in Oakland and raised in South Berkeley and Alameda. The Berkeley Hills were my dream neighborhood from childhood. I would look up from the flatlands at the homes tucked into the trees and imagine a future where I could live there too. Two years ago, my husband Jordan and I bought a 1926 cottage in the Grizzly Peak mitigation area. Our property was steep, clay-heavy, and seasonally prone to erosion. It also was overflowing with Bermuda buttercup, slender oat grass, and other invasives. But it had natives too: western sword fern, woodland strawberry, common rush, turkey tangle. Over the past two seasons, we have converted the entire garden to represent the plant community that evolved here. We now have over 100 species on the property, and we restored a decades-old water feature that draws wildlife year-round. Access to Tilden on foot has changed our life in ways that are hard to fully articulate.
This is my neighborhood. This is personal.
Where I Come In
The ordinance tells you what has to go. It does not tell you much about what comes next or how to achieve it. That is where I can help.
I am providing free on-site consultation and written design recommendations for all residents in the Grizzly Peak and Panoramic Hill mitigation areas. Residents outside of these areas but in high risk zones can reach out to me about a discounted rate while I work to prioritize free support for those in the mitigation areas.
I will work with you one-on-one to develop a landscape design plan that meets all EMBER requirements and meets your personal needs, from your planting budget to your aesthetic and ecological goals. These plans come with instructions to DIY the work, hire your own contractor, or to inform a request for help from the city via the Resident Assistance Program grant. There is no reason the landscape you end up with after this transition should feel like a loss, and my hope is to relieve as much of the burden of compliance as possible for those in my community. This is a free service to anyone in the EMBER-impacted regions, based on my experience as a homeowner in this neighborhood and as a gardener, landscape designer, and volunteer in local habitat restoration.
With inspections beginning in May, I know a lot of us are carrying a mix of grief, anxiety, and frustration. Our homes are deeply personal to us. The idea of losing plants we love, some of them old and irreplaceable, does not feel neutral. I am not asking you to pretend otherwise. But I am asking you to let me help you navigate this transition in a way that honors what you love about your property while building a landscape that protects your home and your community and brings genuine life back to this hillside.
I am here to be a resource. Please reach out.
Golden Aura Gardens jessica@goldenauragardens.com
209-679-4645 goldenauragardens.com
Jessica holds a PhD in chemistry from USC and has spent over 15 years working in climate-relevant research and technology development. She is the founder of Golden Aura Gardens, a Berkeley-based native habitat landscape design project serving the Bay Area and beyond. She is also a longtime member of the California Native Plant Society and the CNPS East Bay chapter.
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