Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Pacific bleeding heart is rated fire resistant, with four regional sources pointing in the same direction.
The extension services of Oregon State, Washington State, and the University of Idaho list Dicentra formosa as fire resistant. Fire Safe Marin also includes it among fire-resistant plants common to Marin County, while Oregon State’s educational gallery recommends it for fire-resistant landscaping. A Nevada forestry and extension guide rates its fire hazard “low,” the safest of that guide’s named hazard levels.
The agreement is useful but rests mainly on expert-curated plant lists. The Nevada guide expressly calls its ratings rough estimates of potential flammability rather than results of scientific trials. Fire Safe Marin also warns that a resistant rating does not replace suitable placement, spacing, irrigation, and removal of dead material. In other words, the plant is a supported choice, not a promise that it cannot burn.
Pacific bleeding heart is a low-water perennial in the poppy family, reaching about 1.5 feet at maturity. It is native to the Southwestern and Northwestern United States and is listed for USDA zones 4a through 8b. For a homeowner choosing among landscape plants, the consistent regional guidance favors treating Pacific bleeding heart as fire resistant while still maintaining it to limit dry, dead growth.
Form
perennial
Mature height
~1.5 ft
Water need
low
Rated in
Lake Tahoe Basin, Nevada and California; Marin County, California; OR/WA/ID; Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho)
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Marin County (CA footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2019-01-01
The publication is explicitly limited to plants common to Marin County. FireApproved publishes 104 exact owners as Marin regional context while retaining its placement, spacing, irrigation, and maintenance boundary. It is not statewide California guidance or parcel suitability.
Nevada Division of Forestry and University of Nevada Cooperative Extension publish Bulletin 06-01 for the Lake Tahoe Basin and vicinity. FireApproved publishes 83 exact rated owners as basin context across Nevada and California. Rough estimates are not statewide or site ratings.
The October 2023 joint Pacific Northwest Extension publication explicitly names Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and publishes more than 150 plant profiles. FireApproved has normalized 155 exact plant records from the source; publication scope does not assert that every listed plant suits every site within the three states.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CA, ID, MA, OR, WA.
Native range
Current cited native range in CA, OR, WA.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
2 applicable cited hardiness statements overlap but have different boundaries; compare each complete source row.
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.
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.
Home Landscaping Guide for Lake Tahoe and Vicinity: Fire Hazard column: low [tahoe-guide-2006] (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.
“low — Bleeding heart, western — Dicentra formosa”
Table 1's Fire Hazard column prints “low” for this taxon. The guide calls the rating a rough estimate of potential flammability, not a result of scientific trials. Its footnote says plants that turn brown often become high fire hazards and tells readers to mow grasses and forbs when they begin to turn brown.
