Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Woodvamp belongs on the avoid side of North Carolina's fire guidance.
The vine, Decumaria barbara, receives an extreme rating in the 2005 list and a high rating in the 2025 revision.
Reading those words as a demonstrated improvement would be misleading. The older publication offers four flammability categories, ending in extreme. The successor uses three, with high at the top. Both entries consequently occupy the most severe band available in their respective publications and support keeping woodvamp away from structures.
NC State Extension's Plant Toolbox adds corroboration under another name: its captured high-flammability facet lists Hydrangea barbara. That named entry agrees with the two published assessments rather than offering a favorable exception for the vine.
For a homeowner considering woodvamp, the useful result survives the change in terminology. The successive North Carolina lists both give an adverse assessment, and the Toolbox's high tag points in the same direction.
The complete three-table AG-874 plant list is explicitly for North Carolina and contains 202 low-, medium-, or high-flammability rows. FireApproved accounts for all source rows under its strict taxonomy and lineage rules; source scope does not establish local suitability at a particular North Carolina site.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, DE, FL, GA, LA, MS, NC, NY, SC, TN, VA.
Native range
The legacy compatibility field lists NC in native range; its field-level source was not retained.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 6a–8b.
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.
6a–8b explicit range · half zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Hydrangea barbara · accepted name match.
Source location: Hydrangea barbara profile, USDA Plant Hardiness Zone field.
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.
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: hydrangea-barbara [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (with its avoid rating)
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.
