Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
No, Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia Tech rate paper mulberry highly flammable.
The USDA Forest Service and state Firewise programs give paper mulberry their worst rating: 4, “Not Firewise.” Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia Tech reach the same practical conclusion, giving paper mulberry an H flammability rating. On Virginia’s three-point scale, H means avoid. One assessment covers the eastern United States, while the other focuses on Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic, so two regional programs arrive at the same warning.
Paper mulberry is a tree in the Moraceae family; it grows in full sun and matures at about 40 feet. It is hardy to USDA zone 6a and has been introduced in 28 states, including Alabama, Arkansas and Connecticut. The Firewise assessment calls it extremely invasive. The Virginia source describes it as weedy and tolerant of most soil conditions, heat and drought. It has also been flagged as invasive in one jurisdiction.
The two rating systems differ in structure, but both put paper mulberry in their category for plants homeowners should avoid. Its broad tolerance does not soften that judgment. For landscaping around a home, the published guidance is clear: choose another tree and keep paper mulberry 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, HI, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, MO, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
29 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Only uncertain or inapplicable hardiness rows are cited; no primary zone is projected.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
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.
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 4 — beyond 30 ft; outside the selector's recommendation area [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.
