Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
No, pineland threeawn is highly flammable.
NC State University, North Carolina Cooperative Extension, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rated this grass extreme in 2005, the top of their four-level flammability scale. NC State Extension’s 2025 revision rates it high, the highest category after the extreme class was removed. Its live Plant Toolbox also tags pineland threeawn as highly flammable. The change in wording reflects a revised scale, not a finding that the grass became safer.
FLAMITS reports a time to flaming of 1.5 seconds for live leaves tested without drying. That measurement describes leaf ignition under the test conditions; it cannot by itself predict how quickly an entire plant will ignite outdoors or how fire will behave around a home.
Pineland threeawn is a low-water grass native to the Southeastern United States. USDA zone 7b marks its hardiness limit. Mature plants reach about 3.9 feet. None of those facts changes the consistent high or extreme ratings. For landscaping near a building, the published guidance is clear: keep pineland threeawn away from the structure.
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 NC, SC.
Native range
Current cited native range in FL, NC, SC.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 7b; 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 20521, 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: aristida-stricta [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.
3 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
“time to flaming (s): 1.5”
FLAMITS record 17484; Ignitability measurement; plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; device burning bench; site McAllister2014-5; sampling ND. Primary study McAllister2014: McAllister S., & Finney, M. (2014). Convection Ignition of Live Forest Fuels. Fire Safety Science - Proceedings of the eleventh International Symposium 11th conference. Christchurch, New Zealand.
Primary study Safdari2018: Safdari, M.-S., Rahmati, M., Amini, E., Howarth, J. E., Berryhill, J. P., Dietenberger, M., Fletcher, T. H. (2018). Characterization of pyrolysis products from fast pyrolysis of live and dead vegetation native to the Southern United States. Fuel, 229, 151166.
Shared row context: Combustibility measurement; plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; device flat flame burner; site Safdari2018-1; sampling ND.
