“People don’t care how much you know
until they know that you care.”
-Theodore Roosevelt.
Your client may be one of those who were directly impacted by a wildfire or maybe they know someone who was. Whether this is your current clientele or not, it still seems important to take the extra few seconds to make sure that your client can see and hear that you care about mitigating the threat to them from wildfires.
Rather than say ‘let’s create a defensible zone’, take a moment to explain what that particular zone is for, how it works, and what kinds of things will need to happen to keep it defensible. A defensible zone isn’t just “created”, anyway – to suggest you can make one and walk away is irresponsible. However, to some clients this may come across as sounding like defensible zones are more expensive and require all sorts of additional upkeep they don’t want to pay for. They’re not, but by making a big deal about them, you run the risk of making it sound like an extra thing. Doing work that results in spaces that are defensible needs to be just part of the process of making the right decisions for our clients’ properties, not something additional. Something integral. Share that point with them and I hope you’ll avoid the pitfalls.
Likewise, when we discuss the flammability or “fire resistance” of plants, we need to be very careful. No plant is inflammable, and fire resistance has multiple meanings. Your client deserves the truth and they deserve to be able to trust that you understand the attributes of the plants you are proposing and what that means in the context of fire. They should be able to trust that you aren’t just picking plant materials from some list without evaluating the appropriateness of those plants for the site, specific conditions around the site, and the changes that will happen over time.
Show them that you care enough to help them keep their landscape responsibly long-term and why that matters, and I bet you’ve got a start at something worth defending.
