Looking back at the “fire season” which only now seems to have “ended,” I’m remembering a trip I took out to Las Virgenes deep in the San Fernando Valley near Calabasas late last year, while the Woolsey Fire was still raging in all directions. Looking around, the oaks were the obvious subject of the story of burned hillsides.

As I wrote a journalist friend at the time, on many hillsides:

“the oaks sit alone in a newly desolate landscape. Their survival seems unlikely, but what few humans — even local ones — seem to know is that if healthy, the California live oak is resilient to fire; in fact it thrives in a landscape cleared periodically this way. So they stand still, alive, moist, in fields of ash, seeming to know exactly what they are doing… the trees have held their own.”

Construction had resumed in a new development on the site of a former ranch in Liberty Canyon, even as fires burned on adjacent hillsides and fire units patrolled within sight for flare-ups. The flames had burned right up to to the new buildings, where their lawns by now have probably already been rolled.

I met a rancher who had been able to evacuate his horses very early, and had lost no livestock and just one small building. He asked that I not photograph that building — “it’s all traumatic enough already.” His land was now dominated by the oaks, and we admired them together for a while. He said they had lost more trees than usual this time, though. “Fires come and go,” he said, but the drought has been persistent, and the drought-stressed groves were gone.

The University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources hosts UC Oaks, a comprehensive resource on California’s oaks, including numerous planning and policy projects designed in particular to reduce the pressure of development on the oaks’ numbers.

But these trees live hundreds of years, and the reality is if we’re going to learn lessons from oaks as well as for them, we had better take things a step further than preserving existing oaks — and get planting.