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Bottlebrush sedge

Carex comosa · Cyperaceae · all Carex 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: Fire-resistant — 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: 0 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: Wisconsin / western Great Lakes
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

Firewise Landscaping — A Guide to Protecting Your Home from Wildfire · Official scoped edition
- WI; partial normalized coverage · 2009-02-01
  Wisconsin DNR and UW-Extension co-published this Wisconsin guide, which the current DNR property-preparation page still links. FireApproved publishes 21 exact owners from the profiles and shoreland table. The co-publication is one lineage and does not establish site suitability.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AL, AR, CA, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, NE, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV.
Native range: Current cited native range in AL, AR, CA, CT, IA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT, WI.
Introduced / established: No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
USDA hardiness: Documented minimum 4a; 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.

Bottlebrush sedge (Carex comosa) — Photo: no rights reserved (CC0), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: grass
USDA hardiness: Minimum 4a; upper limit not documented
Mature height: ~5 ft
Water need: high
Current cited native range: AL, AR, CA, CT, IA, ID, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT, WI
Grows in: AL, AR, CA, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA +32
Rated in: Wisconsin / western Great Lakes
Family: Cyperaceae
Evidence: 1 cited source

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.

Current native

25

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

25 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

Alabama (AL)
Arkansas (AR)
California (CA)
Connecticut (CT)
Iowa (IA)
Idaho (ID)
Illinois (IL)
Indiana (IN)
Massachusetts (MA)
Maryland (MD)
Maine (ME)
Michigan (MI)
Minnesota (MN)
Mississippi (MS)
North Carolina (NC)
New Jersey (NJ)
New York (NY)
Ohio (OH)
Pennsylvania (PA)
South Carolina (SC)
Tennessee (TN)
Texas (TX)
Virginia (VA)
Vermont (VT)
Wisconsin (WI)

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.

USDA PLANTS Database — Plant Characteristics · record CACO8 · PLANTS Help Document 2022; characteristics cache retrieved 2026-08-23 · as of 2026-08-26

Minimum 4a · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band

Exact source measurement: -28°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.

Source taxon: Carex comosa · source identifier match.

Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 18321, Temperature, Minimum (°F).

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.

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

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

Carex comosa (Bottlebrush sedge). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/carex-comosa/. Last verified 2026-08-23.