Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Coastal wattle’s measured ignition time does not establish that it is fire resistant.
The 75.86-second delay before flaming catalogued by FLAMITS was measured for predried branches tested on a grill. The measurement comes from Msweli and colleagues’ 2020 study of fire weather and plant flammability in coastal fynbos and thicket shrublands in the Cape Floristic Region.
Time to flaming measures the delay before the material begins to flame under the experimental conditions. FLAMITS retains each measurement’s experimental context without imposing a common fire-resistance threshold across unlike measurements.
With moderate water needs and a mature height of about 12 feet, coastal wattle (Acacia cyclops) is a tree in the Fabaceae family. For someone considering it near a home, the distinction matters: the experiment describes ignition of prepared branches under test conditions. It leaves the broader question of the living tree’s suitability for a fire-resistant planting unresolved.
Form
tree
Mature height
~12 ft
Water need
moderate
Rated in
Global
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Global
Maintenance
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CA.
Native range
Introduced / established
1 sourced range or established record. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 8a; no upper limit is documented.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
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.
Native and introduced range evidence
These are exact U.S. botanical-area records from the cited range source. Native and
introduced describe biogeographic relationship, not fire performance or planting approval.
Doubtful and extinct rows stay visible but do not count as current presence.
The lossless worldwide derivative is retained once in the research corpus; object pages repeat only exact U.S. areas needed by the local lens. The JSON twin carries the same page assertions.
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: PlantCharacteristics record 76633, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
Listed without a rating (6)Corroboration (6 rows from 1 source)
6 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Msweli2020: Msweli, S. T., Potts, A. J., Fritz, H., & Kraaij, T. (2020). Fire weather effects on flammability of indigenous and invasive alien plants in coastal fynbos and thicket shrublands (Cape Floristic Region). PeerJ, 8, e10161.
Shared row context: plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Msweli2020-1; sampling february to november.