United States / Grow / Harrington's Plum Yew

Harrington's Plum Yew (Cephalotaxus harringtonii)
Photo: (c) Cheng-Te Hsu, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Harrington's Plum Yew

Cephalotaxus harringtonii · Cephalotaxaceae · also called Plum yew

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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.

Plum yew carries an avoid result in the evidence table. The only directional row marks Cephalotaxus harringtonii not Firewise and places it in landscape zone LZ2.

That source also describes the shrub as a very dense evergreen. Its recovered selector prints a hardiness value of 7, but does not define whether this is a minimum threshold or a one-zone range; the uncertain interpretation remains in hardiness evidence.

A single fire row leaves the page limited evidence. related plants holds the existing same-form alternatives, while the source table preserves the original spelling and placement.

Fire-resistant shrubs instead

Form
shrub
Mature height
~10 ft
Rated in
eastern US
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Highly flammable — location does not change the cited classification.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
eastern US

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in DC, DE, MD, NJ, OH, PA, WV.
USDA hardiness
Only uncertain or inapplicable hardiness rows are cited; no primary zone is projected.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

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.

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)

Fire-resistant shrubs instead

Fire-resistant shrubs listed above

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

Profiles: GBIF ·

Cephalotaxus harringtonii (Plum yew). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/cephalotaxus-harringtonii/. Last verified 2026-08-23.