Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
White forsythia is rated fire resistant, though the case for it rests on regional lists rather than a wide body of testing.
A joint extension service run by Oregon State University, Washington State University and the University of Idaho places the shrub on its fire-resistant list for the Pacific Northwest. Oregon State's own extension office repeats that recommendation in a separate plant profile gallery, and the gallery itself points back to the joint list for the underlying detail.
The only field number attached to white forsythia comes from Idaho Firewise, a southern Idaho database built on planting-distance trials. It scores the shrub 6 out of 10, where a 10 is treated as safe as close as ten feet from a house and a 1 calls for more than a hundred feet of clearance. The database's own thresholds count eight through ten as a recommend and four through seven as mixed; a 6 falls in the mixed band, not the recommend band.
White forsythia is a shrub in the olive family, hardy across USDA zones 5a to 8b. Two Pacific Northwest extension programs are comfortable listing it as fire resistant, but the one source that measured the plant directly, rather than simply listing it, does not reach that same comfort.
For anyone deciding whether to plant it near a wall, that gap is worth carrying into the decision. The extension recommendation is genuine and repeated, but the only trial number behind it falls in the mixed band of its own scale, and the two kinds of evidence have not been reconciled.
Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08
The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.
The October 2023 joint Pacific Northwest Extension publication explicitly names Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and publishes more than 150 plant profiles. FireApproved has normalized 155 exact plant records from the source; publication scope does not assert that every listed plant suits every site within the three states.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in ID, OR, WA.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5–8.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
Broader regional context
Federal context
How to read this page
The status above is computed from the cited rows below: independent recommendations can support a fire-resistant result, an avoid row can produce keep-away, and disagreement stays visible as conflict. Placement notes preserve each source’s own scheme rather than translating unlike rules into one scale. This is evidence about a plant, not permission to plant it in every part of the defensible space; Zone 0 remains noncombustible.
Plant hardiness evidence
These values describe the plant source. Your ZIP zone comes from the separate 2023 USDA
Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Whole-zone values stay whole-zone, and a single unresolved value
is not treated as a tolerance range. Different source boundaries stay separate: overlapping
statements are compared independently, while only ranges with no shared zone are called a conflict.
Source location: White forsythia profile, USDA hardiness zones field.
Where its sources say to plant it
Placement rules below use each source's own distances or named zones, tied to its rating.
They are not interchangeable with the directory's current Zone 0 guidance.
Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database: plantable at 50' from home [Idaho minimum planting distance] (mid-scale rating)
Fire-resistant plant profile galleries: White forsythia — Abeliophyllum distichum [osu-2023-shrubs-gallery] (with its recommendation)
The evidence
Grouped by what each source concluded. Primary evidence rated the plant itself
(a lab, field program, or original curation); corroboration compiled or
republished another source's rating and resolves to its root lineage.
