United States / Grow / Oriental bittersweet

Oriental bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculata)
Photo: (c) Sam Leininger, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Oriental bittersweet

Celastrus orbiculata (accepted: Celastrus orbiculatus) · Celastraceae · all Celastrus records · also called Bittersweet · Wikipedia

View Saved

Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Celastrus orbiculata appears in eight legal-list rows, covering DE, IN, ME, MA, NY, OH, WA, and VA. Its recommendation is avoid in the evidence table, and the pack remains limited evidence.

The experimental lineage is a north-eastern vegetation combustion study using a cone calorimeter. The tested material was cured, with that boundary retained under performance conditions.

One ecological invasive report accompanies the regulatory and fire sources. Two climate assertions keep their individual citations under hardiness evidence.

Same-form alternatives are linked under related plants, allowing comparison without carrying this vine's legal listings, avoid recommendation, or cured-material result onto another record.

Fire-resistant vines instead

Form
vine
Mature height
~50 ft
Light
Full sun
Water need
high
Rated in
Global; eastern US; north-eastern and mid-Atlantic United States
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Highly flammable — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
1 condition stated in cited fire-evidence rows.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
Global; eastern US; north-eastern and mid-Atlantic United States
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
  • Combustion characteristics of north-eastern USA vegetation tested in the cone calorimeter · Official scoped edition
    • Northeastern and mid-Atlantic study sites (ME, MD, MA, NY, VA footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2007-08-20

      The authors collected foliage and twigs across study sites in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, then conditioned and tested the samples in a cone calorimeter. FireApproved publishes 37 exact source owners only as multi-state laboratory context. The source does not establish that every taxon was sampled in every named state, whole-plant behavior, landscape suitability, or state planting guidance.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AR, CT, DC, DE, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, VA, VT, WI, WV.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 3a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status
8 legal-list records; the Place chip matches exact scope.
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
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.

Conditions in the fire evidence

These describe tested or rated plant material. They are not horticultural maintenance instructions.

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.

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.

Avoids (1)

Mid-scale / conditional (1)

Listed without a rating (1)
Corroboration (1 rows from 1 source)
  • FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

    “calorific value (kcal/kg): 3081.11”

    FLAMITS record 2865; Combustibility measurement; plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying yes; device calorimeter; site Dibble2007-1; sampling ND. Primary study Dibble2007: Dibble, A. C., White, R. H., & Lebow, P. K. (2007). Combustion characteristics of north-eastern USA vegetation tested in the cone calorimeter: invasive versus non-invasive plants. International journal of wildland fire, 16, 426-443.

Fire-resistant vines instead

Fire-resistant vines listed above

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

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

Celastrus orbiculata (Bittersweet). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/celastrus-orbiculata/. Last verified 2026-08-23.