Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Rowdy Lamb Herb is fire resistant, with Ohio State and Michigan State extension services both recommending Epimedium species.
Ohio State places the perennial in the low-flammability band of its five-point scale, where low ratings support a recommendation. That judgment comes from the authors’ expert experience with landscape plants in Ohio and the Midwest. The same source says Rowdy Lamb Herb tolerates mass planting beneath trees and is drought tolerant and pest resistant. Those traits may matter to a gardener, but its fire-resistant verdict comes from the flammability rating itself.
Michigan State independently includes Epimedium species, also called barrenwort, among the wildfire-resistant plants recommended for Michigan’s climate. Its guidance uses a simpler yes-or-no list rather than Ohio State’s graduated scale, so the two services reach the same practical conclusion by different systems and for neighboring regions.
Rowdy Lamb Herb is a member of the barberry family, Berberidaceae. For a homeowner choosing a perennial, the agreement between the two extension services provides a solid basis for treating it as a fire-resistant landscape option.
Form
perennial
Rated in
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources
Michigan State University Extension Bulletin E2948 is explicitly a list of wildfire-resistant landscape plants for Michigan and includes a Michigan-native field. FireApproved publishes 221 exact GBIF owners from 226 represented source rows and holds 15 complex or non-exact rows. This dated publication scope is not a current site-suitability determination.
Ohio State University Extension Bulletin 921 is an Ohio publication that describes Ohio fire seasons and landscape conditions and labels nativity to Ohio. FireApproved publishes 352 exact source-owning plant records from its eight rated tables. This historical publication scope does not assert current extension endorsement or that a listed plant suits every Ohio site.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in OH.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5–8.
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.
5–8 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Epimedium spp. · exact match.
Source location: Table 1, groundcover row.
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.
