The Mill Valley City Council outlawed a list of plants and trees last week that it deemed potential fire spreaders. The city’s powers that be declared that most residents must remove offending vegetation by mid-2021, but stopped short of an aggressive measure that would have further slashed gardens across the bucolic Marin County enclave.
The city’s “hazardous fuel reduction” measure is meant to diminish the vulnerability of residential homes in the case of catastrophic wildfire.
One of the provisions require the removal of the following plants from Milly Valley properties: acacia, bamboo, arborvitae, cypress, junipers, French broom, Portuguese broom, Scotch broom, Spanish broom, and gorse.
The new rules don’t apply to the entire city, but only to homes within the wilderness urban interface (WUI—sometimes pronounced “wooey”), which is firefighting jargon that refers to metro areas surrounded and interlaced with greenery to the point that wildfires pose a particular threat.