Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Desert willow has mixed fire guidance, combining favorable regional lists with a more distant Idaho planting recommendation.
Yavapai County's extension bulletin includes Chilopsis linearis among fire-resistant plants. Its recommendation depends on irrigation and frequent maintenance. New Mexico's Forestry Division likewise lists desert willow, with low-to-moderate water needs and a preference for sun or partial sun.
Elevation narrows the New Mexico advice. The table recommends the tree at 4,000, 5,000 and 6,000 feet. At 7,000 and 8,000 feet it records unknown or doubtful suitability; the 9,000-plus column is not recommended. Those uncertain entries should remain uncertain when matching the tree to a site.
Idaho gives a fire-resistance score of 7 to the named forms Art's Seedless, Bubba and Monhews. Its placement chart connects that score with a suggested minimum distance of 40 feet from a home. The score belongs to those selections and the distance is the guide's planting advice. A homeowner can use the regional lists to consider desert willow, then retain the exact form, local elevation advice and maintenance conditions when deciding where it belongs.
Form
tree
Mature height
~25 ft
Water need
low
Rated in
New Mexico; Yavapai County, Arizona; southern Idaho / Intermountain
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08
The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.
New Mexico Forestry Division publishes this as its FireWise Plant List for New Mexico. FireApproved accounts for all 140 printed rows and publishes 95 exact same-rank owners already represented in the directory; 29 exact taxa without an existing record, 14 unresolved spellings or higher-rank matches, one compound taxon cell, and one species row whose only apparent owner has an infraspecific printed identity remain held. Every published row retains the source's Y, N, ?, or blank elevation cells. Publication scope does not erase those elevation limits or establish suitability for every New Mexico site.
Yavapai County (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2025-03-14
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension authors Bulletin 34 for Yavapai County. FireApproved publishes 198 exact source owners from its resistant and prone tables and keeps the county boundary visible. County publication scope is regional Arizona context, never statewide scope.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, GA, ID, KS, NM, NV, OK, TX, UT.
Native range
Current cited native range in AZ, CA, NM, NV, TX, UT.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 4b; 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: PlantCharacteristics record 49196, 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.
Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database: plantable at 40' from home [Idaho minimum planting distance] (mid-scale rating)
FireWise Plant List for New Mexico: PDF page 3, Trees and Large Shrubs, p3-r10 [nm-emnrd-firewise-table-row] (with its recommendation)
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.
Listed as Desert willow — Chilopsis linearis. The bulletin says fire-resistant plants tend to resist ignition when irrigated and maintained, while fire-prone plants may ignite readily and burn intensely.
FireWise Plant List for New Mexico — New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, Forestry Division · 2003 Forestry Division PDF · original sourceCorroborationCompilationlineage: csu-nmsu-firewise
“FireWise Plant List for New Mexico”
Listed as Chilopsis linearis (Desert willow) in Trees and Large Shrubs. Printed elevation cells: 4,000 ft=Y, 5,000 ft=Y, 6,000 ft=Y, 7,000 ft=?, 8,000 ft=?, 9,000+ ft=N. Water need: L-M; sun/shade: S/PS; mature height: 6-20’; approximate bloom: May- Aug.
