Altadena nurse plants sunflowers on fire-razed lot, rebuilds home a year after Eaton Fire

ALTADENA, Calif. — Missi Dowd-Figueroa, a 44-year-old registered nurse and mother of three, lost her 1898 farm-style house when the Eaton Fire swept through this Los Angeles-area suburb in January 2025. A year later, she planted roughly 500 sunflowers on the empty lot where her home once stood — and broke ground on a new one.

The Eaton Fire was one of two deadly wildfires that obliterated entire neighborhoods across the Los Angeles area in January 2025, displacing tens of thousands of people, according to the Associated Press. A year on, many survivors are still grappling with grief and few have been able to rebuild. Dowd-Figueroa is among the few whose construction is already underway, with completion estimated as soon as mid-June.

A house full of a decade of life

Dowd-Figueroa and her family had lived in the four-bedroom, three-bath house for 10 years — the longest she had ever stayed in one place, she told the AP. The fire took her grandmother’s artwork, her father’s ashes, and nearly all family photographs.

“I spent several days digging through the ashes just looking for his little urn, and I never found it,” she said.

The only photos that survived were those saved to her iPad.

“That was like a second grief, too. I was like, ‘Well, great.’ Now, if my dad knew, he’d be so disappointed because he was such a family lineage type of person,” she said. “I have nothing from my father. You know, I’ll never touch anything that he touched ever again.”

Seeds on a barren lot

For months, Dowd-Figueroa drove to the empty 2,000-square-foot lot and cried. After cleanup crews removed the last debris, she brought flower seeds — mostly sunflowers, but also zinnias and cosmos — and planted them in the soil.

“I was already going there every day crying, so I was like, ‘Why am I just sitting here?’ I might as well do something that keeps me busy, and I enjoy, because the house I’m in now, I can’t have a garden,” she said.

The garden grew to roughly 500 flowers: bright orange, red, and yellow sunflowers with giant heads, alongside the other varieties. Butterflies and other wildlife began to appear on the otherwise empty lot.

“I felt like I was helping nature come back a little bit,” Dowd-Figueroa said.

Sunflowers can absorb cadmium and other heavy metals that wildfires leave behind in the soil, though experts debate their effectiveness in post-wildfire conditions, the AP reported. Dowd-Figueroa pulled the plants out by the roots when they died and discarded them, taking care not to leave seeds behind.

“It was really healing just to come back and tend the space where I lived for the longest time in my life,” she said.

Construction begins

Construction on a new home began in late September, funded in part by approximately $100,000 raised through a fundraising site. The project is estimated to be completed as soon as mid-June, and its progress has shifted Dowd-Figueroa’s outlook.

“Prior to this, I was just so depressed, like literally sobbed every day,” she said. “It just feels like now there’s a place that exists. It will happen. We can do this.”

The recovery has not closed the distance between the neighborhood Dowd-Figueroa knew and the one that remains.

“The Altadena I know and love is gone,” she said. “Everything burned down — my dentist, my pharmacy — all of it’s gone. But there’s still something about Altadena that feels like Altadena now, even though there are no homes.”