Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Bushy bluestem is not fire resistant; North Carolina authorities rate it highly flammable and advise keeping it away from structures.
NC State University, NC Cooperative Extension, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service gave the grass an extreme flammability rating in 2005, the highest level on their four-part scale. A 2025 revision rates it high rather than extreme, but that does not show an improvement in the plant. The newer system dropped the extreme category and uses only low, medium, and high, with high still meaning avoid.
The current Plant Toolbox reinforces that judgment by placing “Anatherum glomeratum,” an exact synonym for Andropogon glomeratus, under its high-flammability tag. The change in botanical name does not identify a different plant, and the current rating agrees with the revised list.
Bushy bluestem is a grass in the Poaceae family, reaching about 6.3 feet at maturity. It has high water needs and is hardy to USDA zone 4b, but neither fact cancels the repeated flammability warning. For landscaping near a house or other structure, the practical conclusion is straightforward: choose another plant and keep bushy bluestem out of the immediate surroundings.
The complete three-table AG-874 plant list is explicitly for North Carolina and contains 202 low-, medium-, or high-flammability rows. FireApproved accounts for all source rows under its strict taxonomy and lineage rules; source scope does not establish local suitability at a particular North Carolina site.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, AZ, CA, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IL, KY, LA, MA, MD, MS, NC, NJ, NM, NV, NY, OH, OK, PA, PR, RI, SC, TN, TX, UT, VA, VI, WV.
Native range
The legacy compatibility field lists NC in native range; its field-level source was not retained.
Introduced / established
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
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 20324, 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.
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: anatherum-glomeratum [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (with its avoid 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.
