Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Colonial bentgrass has been tested for ignition, but the result does not establish that it is fire resistant.
The FLAMITS database, published through Dryad and Global Ecology and Biogeography, reports an ignition frequency of 25% for predried whole plants tested on a grill. That percentage describes how often ignition occurred under those experimental conditions. It is not a prediction of the chance that colonial bentgrass will catch fire in a garden.
The distinction matters because ignition is only one part of flammability. Measuring whether a plant catches fire does not, by itself, measure how much heat it releases once burning. FLAMITS preserves the experimental context of its measurements and does not apply a single recommendation threshold across unlike tests. The grill result therefore cannot simply be translated into a resistant or hazardous rating.
Colonial bentgrass, Agrostis capillaris, is a grass in the Poaceae family, grows to about two feet at maturity, and has high water needs. Those needs matter for garden planning, but they do not turn the ignition measurement into a finding about irrigated plants. Someone choosing it for fire resistance would be asking the test to settle more than it measures.
Form
grass
Mature height
~2 ft
Water need
high
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 AK, AL, AR, CA, CT, DC, HI, ID, IL, IN, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, TN, UT, VA, VT, WA, WV, WY.
Native range
Introduced / established
38 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 4b; 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 20104, 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 (8)Corroboration (8 rows from 1 source)
8 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
Shared row context: plant part whole plant; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND.
“ignition frequency (%): 25”
FLAMITS record 1328; Ignitability measurement.
“maximum sample temperature (°C): 207.1”
FLAMITS record 1522; Combustibility measurement.
“burning duration (s): 2.6”
FLAMITS record 1716; Sustainability measurement.
“estimated burnt biomass (%): 22.5”
FLAMITS record 1910; Consumability measurement.
Primary study Padulles2018: Padullés-Cubino, J., Buckley, H. L., Day, N. J., Pieper, R., & Curran, T. J. (2018). Community-level flammability declines over 25 years of plant invasion in grasslands. Journal of Ecology, 106, 1582-1594.
Shared row context: plant part whole plant; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Padulles2018-1; sampling 1982 to 2007.
