Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Cabbagebark tree has a measured ignition time, but that result does not establish that it is fire resistant.
The FLAMITS database, published by Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography, reports a time to flaming of 12.29 seconds for dead, predried wood tested on a burning bench. The measurement comes from a 2017 study by Sotomayor-Castellanos and Carrillo-Gómez. It describes how long the tested material took to produce flames under those experimental conditions.
The conditions matter as much as the number. A test of dead, dried wood is not a prediction that a living cabbagebark tree will ignite after the same interval. Nor does time to flaming measure how much heat the wood releases once burning or whether a tree survives a fire. FLAMITS retains experimental context and does not apply a single resistance threshold across different kinds of measurements and tests. A precise result is therefore useful without amounting to a recommendation.
Cabbagebark tree, Andira inermis, belongs to the Fabaceae family and reaches about 90 feet at maturity. Its low water needs describe a separate consideration for a gardener. Choosing it for that characteristic is a different decision from choosing it for fire resistance, which this wood ignition measurement does not settle.
Form
tree
Mature height
~90 ft
Water need
low
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 FL, PR, VI.
Native range
Current cited native range in FL, PR.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 10a; no upper limit is documented.
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.
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 76925, 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 (2)Corroboration (2 rows from 1 source)
2 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Sotomayor2017: Sotomayor-Castellanos, J., & Carrillo-Gómez, M. (2017). Comportamiento al fuego de cinco especies mexicanas. Estudio comparativo. Investigación e Ingeniería de la Madera, 13, 4-38.
Shared row context: plant part wood; fuel dead; predrying yes; device burning bench; site Sotomayor2017-1; sampling ND.
