Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Goldentuft is rated fire resistant, but the support comes from extension guidance rather than a direct flammability score.
Oregon State University Extension Service includes Aurinia species, called Basket of Gold in its profile, among fire-resistant plants suited to Willamette Valley growing conditions. It is a perennial in the Brassicaceae family, with a reported hardiness span of USDA zones 3a to 7b. Oregon State’s recommendation is useful for landscaping in a comparable climate, but it is an expert-curated selection rather than a measured ignition rating.
University of Nevada Cooperative Extension also recommends goldentuft. Its compilation admits plants reported as fire resistant, firewise, or favorably rated by at least two of seven named western sources. Goldentuft qualified through favorable marks from Colorado State and Oregon State. This adds regional agreement, although the Nevada source is summarizing other recommendations rather than conducting a separate burn test.
Taken together, the extension guidance supports treating goldentuft as a fire-resistant perennial, especially under growing conditions similar to those considered by the western sources. The conclusion is favorable but limited: it rests on informed plant selections, not a published scale showing how quickly goldentuft ignites or how intensely it burns.
Form
perennial
Rated in
Nevada / Great Basin; Oregon (Willamette Valley)
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
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.
University of Nevada Cooperative Extension compiled plants suited to Nevada climate zones and reported favorably by at least two upstream firewise lists. FireApproved publishes 126 exact source owners at Nevada publication scope. The source explicitly makes no independent flammability determination, so these rows remain corroborative.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in NV.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 3–7.
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.
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: Basket of Gold profile (PDF page 30) [osu-em-9103-profile] (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.
