Home / Plants / Grow / Shadscale Saltbush

Shadscale Saltbush

Atriplex confertilfolia (accepted: Atriplex confertifolia) · Amaranthaceae · all Atriplex records

Your local evidence lens

Separate evidence questions, never one approval badge

Set a ZIP to compare this record with state distribution, native range, USDA hardiness, and invasive records.

A genus split is not a placement verdict. Set a ZIP to read the local documented split.

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence: Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions: No test or rating condition is normalized.
Fire ecology context: No section-reviewed fire-ecology context is normalized.
Placement evidence: 2 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: California; southern Idaho / Intermountain
Maintenance: No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source

Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database · Official scoped edition
- Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08
  The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, ND, NM, NV, OR, TX, UT, WY.
Native range: No current cited or legacy state native range is normalized.
Introduced / established: No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
USDA hardiness: Documented minimum 3a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status: Set a location for an exact legal-list result; source silence is not clearance.
Seed-list status: Set a location to compare the separate state noxious-weed seed layer.
Reported invasive here: No ecological invasive report is normalized; that does not prove noninvasiveness.
Broader regional context: Aggregate AK, HI, and L48 evidence is shown only as regional context, never as an exact-state finding.
Federal context: Federal designations remain separate from state legal-list results.

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.

Shadscale Saltbush (Atriplex confertilfolia) — Photo: (c) Steve Matson, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: shrub
USDA hardiness: Minimum 3a; upper limit not documented
Mature height: ~3 ft
Water need: moderate
Grows in: AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, ND, NM, NV +4
Rated in: California; southern Idaho / Intermountain
Family: Amaranthaceae
Evidence: 2 cited sources

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.

USDA PLANTS Database — Plant Characteristics · record ATCO · PLANTS Help Document 2022; characteristics cache retrieved 2026-08-23 · as of 2026-08-26

Minimum 3a · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band

Exact source measurement: -38°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.

Source taxon: Atriplex confertilfolia · source identifier match.

Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 58615, 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 Resistance of Plants Master Database: plantable at 60' from home [Idaho minimum planting distance] (mid-scale rating)
Low-volume and slow-burning vegetation for planting on cl…: Table 4: Fair performance [nord-green-brushland-clearing-performance] (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.

Mid-scale / conditional (2)

Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database — Idaho Firewise (BLM + College of Western Idaho + Idaho Botanical Garden) · original source Primary evidence Field program lineage: idaho-tree

“fire-resistance score 5 of 10” · score 5 (idaho-0-10)
Low-volume and slow-burning vegetation for planting on clearings in California chaparral — USDA Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station · PSW-124 · original source Primary evidence Field program

“Fair performance”

Shadscale saltbush is printed in Table 4's “Fair performance” section.

Fire-resistant shrubs instead

Creeping holly
Berberis repens

Wood’s rose
Rosa woodsii

Four-wing Saltbush
Atriplex canescens

Sumac
Rhus trilobata

Winterfat
Krascheninnikovia lanata

Kinnikinnick
Arctostaphylos uva-ursi

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · ITIS

Atriplex confertilfolia (Shadscale Saltbush). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/atriplex-confertilfolia/. Last verified 2026-08-23.