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United States / Grow / rough bentgrass

rough bentgrass

Agrostis scabra · Poaceae · all Agrostis records · also called Agrostis scabra · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Rough bentgrass has a measured ignition time, but that does not establish that it is fire resistant.

A live whole plant, tested without drying on a burning bench, had a time to flaming of 1.932 seconds. That number measures how long flaming took to begin under those experimental conditions. It does not measure how long the plant could survive a fire or how much heat it would release once burning.

The FLAMITS database from Dryad and Global Ecology and Biogeography preserves measurements alongside their experimental context. It does not apply a single threshold across different variables, devices and plant parts to turn those measurements into fire-resistance ratings. Calling rough bentgrass resistant or especially flammable from that figure alone would require an interpretation the database does not supply.

Rough bentgrass, Agrostis scabra, belongs to the grass family Poaceae. It needs moderate water and grows to about 2.5 feet at maturity.

Form
grass
Mature height
~2.5 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.
Evidence regions
Global

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Native range
Current cited native range in AK, AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 3a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

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.

Current native

46

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

46 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04
  • Alaska (AK)
  • Alabama (AL)
  • Arkansas (AR)
  • Arizona (AZ)
  • California (CA)
  • Colorado (CO)
  • Connecticut (CT)
  • Delaware (DE)
  • Florida (FL)
  • Georgia (GA)
  • Iowa (IA)
  • Idaho (ID)
  • Illinois (IL)
  • Indiana (IN)
  • Kentucky (KY)
  • Louisiana (LA)
  • Massachusetts (MA)
  • Maryland (MD)
  • Maine (ME)
  • Michigan (MI)
  • Minnesota (MN)
  • Mississippi (MS)
  • Montana (MT)
  • North Carolina (NC)
  • North Dakota (ND)
  • Nebraska (NE)
  • New Hampshire (NH)
  • New Jersey (NJ)
  • New Mexico (NM)
  • Nevada (NV)
  • New York (NY)
  • Ohio (OH)
  • Oregon (OR)
  • Pennsylvania (PA)
  • Rhode I. (RI)
  • South Carolina (SC)
  • South Dakota (SD)
  • Tennessee (TN)
  • Texas (TX)
  • Utah (UT)
  • Virginia (VA)
  • Vermont (VT)
  • Washington (WA)
  • Wisconsin (WI)
  • West Virginia (WV)
  • Wyoming (WY)

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.

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)

  • FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

    8 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.

    • Primary study Gao2022: Gao, X., & Schwilk, D. W. (2022). Burn hot or tolerate trees: flammability decreases with shade tolerance in grasses. Oikos, 4, e08930.

      Shared row context: plant part whole plant; fuel live; predrying no; device burning bench; site Gao2022-1; sampling spring 2019.

      • Shared measurement context: Ignitability measurement.

        • “time to flaming (s): 1.932”

          FLAMITS record 15869.

        • “time to flaming (s): 1.45”

          FLAMITS record 15873.

      • Shared measurement context: Sustainability measurement.

        • “flaming duration (s): 54.946”

          FLAMITS record 15870.

        • “smouldering duration (s): 20.772”

          FLAMITS record 15871.

        • “flaming duration (s): 13.9175”

          FLAMITS record 15874.

        • “smouldering duration (s): 23.425”

          FLAMITS record 15875.

      • Shared measurement context: Combustibility measurement.

        • “flame height (cm): 24.2”

          FLAMITS record 15872.

        • “flame height (cm): 19”

          FLAMITS record 15876.

Fire-resistant grasss instead

fox sedge
Carex vulpinoidea tall fescue
Festuca arundinacea tall fescue
Lolium arundinaceum longhair sedge
Carex comosa woolgrass
Scirpus cyperinus green bulrush
Scirpus atrovirens
Same genus in the directory · the Agrostis group page

Last verified 2026-08-25. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · Wikipedia · ITIS

Agrostis scabra (Agrostis scabra). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/agrostis-scabra/. Last verified 2026-08-25.