L.A. Family Turns Fire Grief Into 10,000 Wildflower Seed Bombs

When 14-year-old Rummy Goodyear returned to his burned-out neighborhood in Pacific Palisades, he wanted to create something beautiful where everything had turned to ash.

In January 2025, his family joined 200,000 Angelenos fleeing wildfires that destroyed 37,000 acres and killed 31 people. The Goodyears were among 18,000 families who lost their homes, watching their neighborhood transform into a ghostly war zone of blackened trees and ruins.

But instead of staying away, Rummy and his mother Dana turned their grief into action. They partnered with the Theodore Payne Foundation to create special seed bombs filled with native California plants, each chosen for a specific purpose.

The recipe was simple but powerful. California poppies provided fast-growing color, native sunflowers absorbed toxic substances from contaminated soil, buckwheat stabilized the earth, and evening primrose sent deep roots to support rapid regrowth.

The family mixed seeds with compost and clay into donut-hole sized balls that protected the seeds until they were ready to sprout. Then they started throwing them across their burned lot.

By fall, their former property had transformed into a meadow bursting with sunflowers and orange poppies. "Seeing flowers popping up in what seemed like a wasteland made me so happy," Rummy says with a grin.

The healing went deeper than the soil. Rummy found that returning to the burned neighborhood with a purpose helped him process the trauma differently.

"You're creating new happy memories in the Palisades instead of reliving old ones that have been tainted by the fire," he explains. "It gives you a purpose to know that you're doing something good."

The Ripple Effect

What started as one family's therapy project quickly grew into something much bigger. Other survivors heard about the seed bombs and wanted to help restore their own burned lots.

Dana, a poet and New Yorker staff writer who had never been particularly interested in gardening, found herself leading community seed bomb making sessions. She saw the project as a way to restore not just the landscape, but the social fabric torn apart by disaster.

To date, the Seed Bomb Project has distributed 10,000 seed bombs to fire survivors across the affected areas. Each ball contains the promise of renewal, carrying native seeds that will stabilize soil, clean toxins, and blanket devastated hills with brilliant orange poppies.

The Goodyears discovered that sometimes the best way to heal a broken heart is to help heal broken land, one seed bomb at a time.