Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Wild ginger (Asarum caudatum) is listed as fire resistant, while FireSmart BC leaves its appropriate planting zone unresolved.
FireSmart BC places wild ginger among plants generally considered fire-resistant that still need research to determine where they belong in the landscape. It calls for caution because plants in that group can differ in risk. That is a qualified listing, without a settled zone recommendation for wild ginger.
Fire Safe Marin's list includes the same species, with irrigation and maintenance required for its listed plants. Its guidance also makes selection, placement and spacing part of resisting fire spread. A plant name on that list is therefore one part of a maintained landscape.
The University of California Forest Products Laboratory's older compilation records favorable recommendations for wild ginger from earlier references. Its authors found weak scientific foundations and unclear selection criteria in many of the lists they collected. That history supports the existence of recommendations without converting them into new burning tests. For a planting decision, retain the care requirements and FireSmart's unresolved placement caution together with the favorable list entries.
Form
perennial
Rated in
British Columbia; California; Marin County, California; Montana / Northern Rockies +1
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
The guide presents itself as fire performance ratings for common landscape plants in a fire-prone California setting. FireApproved publishes 104 exact owners as republished California context. It is not an independent rating, a current endorsement, or parcel suitability.
Marin County (CA footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2019-01-01
The publication is explicitly limited to plants common to Marin County. FireApproved publishes 104 exact owners as Marin regional context while retaining its placement, spacing, irrigation, and maintenance boundary. It is not statewide California guidance or parcel suitability.
The UC Forest Products Laboratory says the guide covers properties of common California landscaping plants and was prepared for California fire agencies. FireApproved publishes 130 exact owners at historical California publication scope. The report is a 1997 compilation, not a current endorsement, site rating, or independent test of every row.
The April 2022 MontGuide explicitly presents fire-resistant species adapted to Montana. FireApproved publishes 92 exact plant records from the source while retaining excluded genus, family, and unresolved rows; the guide itself says not every listed species grows in every part of the state.
Willamette Valley (OR footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-02-01
OSU Extension says EM 9103 highlights fire-resistant plants that thrive under Willamette Valley growing conditions. FireApproved publishes 172 exact owners only as valley context. The guide shares the PNW 590 lineage and is not a second independent vote or statewide site clearance.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CA, ID, MT, OR, WA.
Native range
Current cited native range in CA, ID, MT, OR, WA.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 4–6.
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.
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-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Wild Ginger profile (PDF page 25) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
Defensible Space Landscaping in the Urban/Wildland Interf…: Chapter 4, Landscape Vegetation Database [ucfpl-1997] (with its recommendation)
Fire Performance of Common Plants: Table 1 (favorable in 3 or more references) [diablo-guide-to-plants-three-reference-vote] (with its recommendation)
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.
Fire Performance of Common Plants (Guide to Plants) — Diablo Firesafe Council · live page captured 2026-08-29 · original sourceCorroborationMirrorlineage: ucfpl-berkeley resolves to Defensible Space Landscaping in the Urban/Wildland Interface: A Compilation of Fire Performance Ratings of Residential Landscape Plants
“Table 1: favorable fire performance rating in 3 or more references (refs 11,15,40,41)”
The Diablo Firesafe Council Guide to Plants lists Asarum caudatum (Wild ginger) as shrub, perennial, in Table 1: plants with a favorable fire performance rating in 3 or more references. The guide cites 4 of its 57 numbered references for this row (11,15,40,41). The guide states the ranking terms in its underlying references were mostly undefined and makes no attempt to rank within the list, and that fire performance is compromised without maintenance.
