VENTURA, Calif. — It can take years for communities to recover after the California wildfires, but out of the ashes, there can be hope and renewal. The Ventura Botanical Gardens, north of Los Angeles, was wiped out by wildfires, but the devastation sparked a faster expansion.

There is plenty of green and colors beginning to spring, but there are also clear signs of the Thomas Fire, which lasted 40 days and burned more than 200,000 acres of land, swept through the botanical garden in December 2017.

The Garden debuted in 2015, and the flames ravaged everything.

“To know that we were one step forward and ten steps back, that was hard, said Barbra Brown, former Ventura Botanical Gardens president. “I watched it burn all night, it was terrifying. And it was painful to see because we had already put so much time and energy into building the gardens, and to have it burn, it was heartbreaking.”

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The fire also destroyed her family’s Ventura home, but Brown’s botanical family got right back to work.

Nature rebounded within weeks of the flames clearing out; things that looked to be killed off by fire rose from the ashes in vivid color.

 “After the fire, it looked like you would imagine the surface of the moon, just a thick layer of ash everywhere, so just a complete, gray landscape,” said Ventura Botanical Gardens Executive Director Joe Cahill.

As a botanist, Cahill knew even this endangered Chilean Wine Palm would come back. He also knew hope was beneath that gray landscape.

“From that, different grasses started to come up, and then shrubs started to send up little shoots,” Cahill said.

Some history stone terraces, which date back to the mission era of the late-1700s, were revealed due to the fire burning away all of the overgrown brush. They became a template.

“The fire cleared out that space and the kinds of things we’re putting into the California native area are really adding a lot more diversity, so we’re able to create a habitat for many different types of plants and animals,” Cahill said.

With every passing day, there is continued growth at the botanical garden, and the number of plantings along the two-mile walkway are now into the tens of thousands.

“We were approved in 2015, then in 2017 we had to shut down due to the Thomas Fire, and then this year we had to shut down due to COVID, so we really haven’t gotten the word out too much about what we have here,” Brown said.