Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
No, eastern baccharis is rated highly flammable, and the guidance says to keep it away from structures.
The USDA Forest Service’s Northeastern Area and participating state Firewise programs place eastern baccharis in the least favorable category on their four-point scale. Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia Tech assign it an H flammability rating; on their three-part scale of forest-fire proneness, H maps to avoid. Two regional sources use different systems but reach the same practical judgment.
The plant is a shrub in the aster family, grows to about 12 feet at maturity, and has high water needs. It is hardy to USDA zone 6a and native in the Southeastern, Northeastern, North-Central, and South-Central United States. It also tolerates poor soils and salt and carries clusters of showy white seed in winter.
These findings leave little room to treat eastern baccharis as a fire-resistant landscaping choice. Its placement in the worst Firewise category and the H rating in Virginia point to the same action: keep the shrub away from structures.
Virginia Cooperative Extension's publication opens with Virginia wildfire conditions, identifies its Virginia Firewise Landscaping Task Force, and labels plants native to Virginia. FireApproved publishes 306 exact source owners. Publication scope does not establish parcel suitability or current endorsement of this archived 2009 list.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, LA, MA, MD, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV.
Native range
Current cited native range in AL, AR, CT, DE, FL, GA, LA, MA, MD, MS, NJ, NY, OK, PA, RI, SC, TX, VA.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 6b; 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: Cold Hardiness Zone field in the recovered selector record.
Not used for comparison: The recovered selector prints one Cold Hardiness Zone value but does not define it as a minimum threshold or a one-zone range.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 32491, 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.
Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector: Landscape Zone 2 — 5–10 ft from the structure; maintained lawn or fuel breaks, with easily ignited evergreens avoided [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (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.
