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Pacific bleeding heart

Dicentra formosa · Papaveraceae · all Dicentra records

Your local evidence lens

Separate evidence questions, never one approval badge

Set a ZIP to compare this record with state distribution, native range, USDA hardiness, and invasive records.

A genus split is not a placement verdict. Set a ZIP to read the local documented split.

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence: Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions: 1 condition stated in cited fire-evidence rows.
Fire ecology context: No section-reviewed fire-ecology context is normalized.
Placement evidence: 2 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: Lake Tahoe Basin, Nevada and California; Marin County, California; OR/WA/ID; Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho)
Maintenance: No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

Typed publication scope: 3 scopes across 3 cited fire sources

Fire-Resistant Plants Common to Marin County · Official scoped edition
- 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.
Home Landscaping Guide for Lake Tahoe and Vicinity (Ed. Bulletin 06-01) · Official scoped edition
- Lake Tahoe Basin (CA, NV footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2006-01-01
  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.
Fire-Resistant Plants for Home Landscapes (PNW 590) · Official scoped edition
- ID, OR, WA; partial normalized coverage · 2023-10-01
  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: No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
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: Set a location for an exact legal-list result; source silence is not clearance.
Seed-list status: Set a location to compare the separate state noxious-weed seed layer.
Reported invasive here: No ecological invasive report is normalized; that does not prove noninvasiveness.
Broader regional context: Aggregate AK, HI, and L48 evidence is shown only as regional context, never as an exact-state finding.
Federal context: Federal designations remain separate from state legal-list results.

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.

Pacific bleeding heart (Dicentra formosa) — Photo: (c) giantcicada, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: perennial
USDA hardiness: Applicable source statements overlap but have different boundaries; compare each source
Mature height: ~1.5 ft
Water need: low
Current cited native range: CA, OR, WA
Grows in: CA, ID, MA, OR, WA
Rated in: Lake Tahoe Basin, Nevada and California; Marin County, California; OR/WA/ID; Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho)
Family: Papaveraceae
Evidence: 4 cited sources

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.

Current native

3

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

3 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

California (CA)
Oregon (OR)
Washington (WA)

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.

Fire-Resistant Plants for Home Landscapes (PNW 590) · record perennials:Pacific bleeding heart · 2023-10 · as of 2026-08-26

4–8 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated

Source taxon: Dicentra formosa · exact match.

Source location: Pacific bleeding heart profile, USDA hardiness zones field.
USDA PLANTS Database — Plant Characteristics · record DIFO · PLANTS Help Document 2022; characteristics cache retrieved 2026-08-23 · as of 2026-08-26

Minimum 4b · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band

Exact source measurement: -23°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.

Source taxon: Dicentra formosa · source identifier match.

Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 71838, Temperature, Minimum (°F).

Conditions in the fire evidence

These describe tested or rated plant material. They are not horticultural maintenance instructions.

irrigated: Fire-Resistant Plants Common to Marin County evidence row

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-resistant plant profile galleries: Pacific bleeding heart — Dicentra formosa [osu-2023-perennials-gallery] (with its recommendation)
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.

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

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · ITIS

Dicentra formosa (Pacific bleeding heart). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/dicentra-formosa/. Last verified 2026-08-23.