Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Yes, hard fescue is rated fire resistant, but the rating rests on limited primary evidence.
For hard fescue, the University of Nevada Cooperative Extension reports favorable ratings from at least two cited sources in its compilation of plant choices. Michigan State University Extension lists Festuca cinerea as wildfire resistant and recommends it for Michigan’s climate. One source compiles agreement among named western lists, while the other is an expert-curated list for Michigan.
Hard fescue is a low-water grass in the Poaceae family and reaches about half a foot at maturity. Michigan State gives it a hardiness span of USDA zones 5a through 9b. That span describes the climates in which the grass is hardy; the fire-resistance judgment comes from its placement on the two extension sources’ lists.
The two extension services therefore point in the same direction across Nevada and the Great Basin and Michigan and the Great Lakes. Their agreement supports treating hard fescue as a fire-resistant landscape plant, while the limited primary evidence calls for keeping the conclusion at that practical level.
Form
grass
Mature height
~0.5 ft
Water need
low
Rated in
Michigan / Great Lakes; Nevada / Great Basin
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; Nevada / Great Basin
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.
University of Nevada Cooperative Extension compiled plants suited to Nevada climate zones and reported favorably by at least two upstream firewise lists. FireApproved publishes 126 exact source owners at Nevada publication scope. The source explicitly makes no independent flammability determination, so these rows remain corroborative.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, CA, CT, DC, GA, IA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, TN, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Native range
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.
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 location: PlantCharacteristics record 23030, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
