The first flower, from 250 million seeds.
Amy, the founder of The Great Altadena Poppy Project, said he spent months sowing a quarter-billion California poppy seeds across more than 750 fire-damaged properties in the Eaton Fire burn scar — an effort he executed largely alone, largely at his own expense, using a portable hand-crank seed spreader on each property.
His project has no office and no staff. Whether those seeds produce anything close to a quarter-billion blooms depends on rain and conditions he cannot control. But more flowers have opened since that first one, he said — on his property and across Altadena.
“The whole idea — especially what was driving me to get it done — was to bring a little bit of hope and joy and beauty to my neighbors,” Amy said in an interview. “Unfortunately, I can literally feel for them, because we’re all in the same boat.”
Amy lost his home when the Eaton Fire swept through the community on January 7. The blaze destroyed more than 9,400 structures and killed 19 people. Amy is currently living in temporary housing near Altadena.
The project traces back to a wildflower seed and native milkweed seed giveaway Amy had planned before the conflagration, for January 27 at Altadena Grocery Outlet — an event the fire prevented from happening.
Amy operates Altadena Maid, a micro-business he describes as a “passion project” built around native wildflowers and their role in supporting pollinators such as monarch butterflies. He said he has spent “pushing 15 years” building a sense of community in Altadena, including founding a local Nextdoor neighborhood.
When the project’s initial goal of 100 million seeds was announced November 19, 2025, Amy said he expected 200 to 300 property signups. But community interest far outpaced that.
“It proved to be far more popular than I anticipated,” he said, “ultimately having upwards of 750 property signups.”
By January 13, 2026 — six days after the one-year anniversary of the fire — the seed count had more than doubled to 250 million. Amy said he also distributed more than 8,000 hand-packed seed packets locally, regionally, nationally, and, to some degree, internationally.
He considered cheaper seed varieties — some running as many as 20 million seeds per pound — before deciding to use California poppies despite the cost.
“I don’t care if I have to eat cardboard for a few months,” Amy said. “I’m going to get this done and I’m going to use the California poppies and hopefully funding to help support will come in as it is actually starting to, and I won’t have to eat cardboard.”
Amy told ABC7 in January that most of the funding came “out of my own almost-completely-empty pocket,” according to the station’s report. The Altadena Rotary Club also contributed financially to the seed purchase, Amy said.
Volunteer support was minimal, Amy said. He had one organized day with six members of the California Climate Action Corps, facilitated through the environmental nonprofit Amigos de los Rios, and approximately five individual community volunteers who showed up on various days.
“As the seeds hit the ground,” Amy said, “it was pretty much just me.”
Through the fall, Amy had been running field operations for Amigos de los Rios and its tree-watering program in the fire zone, moving through a landscape he described as “dry, dusty, desolate.” What he saw there, he said, pushed him to see the poppy project through.
The largest single property Amy seeded was Nuccio’s Nurseries, which he estimated at 10 to 15 acres. That property alone received tens of millions of seeds, he said. A hillside he called “the star of Palow” received another tens of millions. Amy said ArtCenter College of Design’s 160-acre campus was also seeded as what he called a local extension of the project.
Some of those blooms may never be visible from any road. Many seeded properties are far back into the hills, Amy said, their poppies seen only by their owners. In other cases, Army Corps of Engineers clearing operations left seeded areas below surrounding grade — blooms that may be visible, he said, only from the air.
“For me, losing damn near everything I had ever acquired, made, appreciated, everything in my life was one thing,” Amy said. “Losing the homes on the street I lived, experiencing that was another, but the major aspect of the devastation to me was the loss of community.”
The California poppy — the state flower, and what Amy and local officials describe as Los Angeles County’s designated flower — has been associated with Altadena for more than a century. A famous 1907 photograph, taken and then hand-colored, shows tourists picking poppies in Altadena. The poppies in that image are depicted as red, not the golden orange of California poppies. Amy said the poppies were colored red because the wealthy East Coast visitors of the day were more familiar with European red poppies — “in the fields of Flanders, poppies are red,” as he put it — and marketers colored them to appeal to that audience.
Early promotional materials referred to Altadena as the “Altar Cloth of San Pasqual” because of the dense poppy fields that once defined the landscape. The California poppy appears in the Altadena Town Council seal, according to Amy, and Altadena has a street called Poppy Fields Street.
Veronica Jones, president of the Altadena Historical Society — which assisted with packing and distributing seed packets — said the community’s tie to poppies runs deep.
“There’s good reason why Altadena has streets named Poppyfields and Las Flores,” Jones said. “Our area was actually a tourist destination before it was fully developed.”
Val Zavala, president of Altadena Heritage, called the California poppy “the perfect metaphor for Altadena’s recovery.”
Brad Roeber, president of the Altadena Rotary Club, described the project as an example of community in action.
“Rotary is all about service above self, and it’s projects like René’s that remind us how a simple idea — along with some elbow grease and can-do attitude — can make a huge difference,” Roeber said.
The project also reached beyond Altadena. Amy said he distributed nearly 1,000 seed packets to incoming Rotary International club presidents from across the Southwest United States at an LAX Marriott training event for ShelterBox, a disaster-relief organization. The intent, he said, was for those presidents to distribute seeds to their members worldwide for what he calls “solidarity sowings.”
Amy said he can see the project evolving into what he calls “the great Altadena pollinator project” — a more personalized effort, in collaboration with the Xerces Society, where he said he serves as a volunteer ambassador, to help residents build pollinator-friendly gardens using native plants and wildflowers. He also hopes to see a Great Altadena Poppy Festival in the future.
“The original idea was, and hopefully we’ll see a quarter billion California poppy plants,” Amy said. “That should get some attention.”
“If all the poppies and all the poppy seeds somehow instantly disappeared from Altadena,” he said, “the net result would still be a win because it helped to make people feel good, feel that someone actually cares and that someone is actually taking positive steps to get it done.”
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