Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Allocasuarina cunninghamiana carries an avoid recommendation. It remains limited evidence in the evidence table, with Cape Town 2021 supplying the selected fire-study lineage for river sheoak.
The record also carries 2 ecological invasive reports and cites same-form alternatives under related plants. The hardiness evidence section remains available, while the genus page provides taxonomic navigation without adding support to cunninghamiana. Those separate routes preserve the difference between the avoid direction, ecological reports, and comparison set around this limited source pack. This exact fact combination belongs only to the cunninghamiana record itself.
Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa; Tasmania, Australia
Maintenance
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in FL, PR.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 9a; no upper limit is documented.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
2 ecological invasive reports.
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: PlantCharacteristics record 69889, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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 Resisting Garden Plants for the Urban Fringe and Rur…: remove from the Building Protection Zone; avoid in the Fuel Modified Zone [Texas Building Protection Zone] (with its avoid rating)
Time to extinguish the exotic flame: Lessons from the 202…: Urban zone; Table 1 and deposited raw workbook [macalister-2025-leaf-flammability] (mid-scale rating)
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.
