Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Winter daphne does not belong near structures despite conflicting fire-safety ratings.
Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia Tech rate it H, the highest of their three flammability bands and a rating that calls for avoidance. Their scale sorts plants as high, medium, or low in flammability for Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic.
The ACT Government reaches the opposite conclusion for the Australian Capital Territory, marking Daphne odora “Fire Retardant: Yes” in its Canberra plant selector. A USDA Forest Service and state Firewise program for the eastern United States takes a third position, rating the plant in the second and moderately favorable category on a four-level scale running from Firewise to Not Firewise. These labels come from distinct rating schemes and cannot be averaged into a single score.
Winter daphne is a part-sun shrub in the Thymelaeaceae family, reaching about five feet at maturity and hardy to USDA zone 6a. The favorable Canberra classification and the moderately Firewise rating show why the issue is disputed, but Virginia’s H rating remains an explicit high-flammability warning. For placement around a home, the safer conclusion is to treat winter daphne as highly flammable and keep it 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 DC, DE, MD, NJ, OH, PA, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
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
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.
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 prints 6 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Daphne odora · exact match.
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 2 — 5–10 ft from the structure; maintained lawn or fuel breaks, with easily ignited evergreens avoided [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (mid-scale rating)
Canberra Plant Selector: filtered result page 5 [canberra-selector] (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.
