Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Salal is rated fire resistant, with Pacific Northwest planting guidance and a continuing FireSmart BC research qualification.
Summer care is a practical part of the Oregon recommendation. Oregon State's Forest Resource Note 6 lists Gaultheria shallon for Southern and Western Oregon. It says most of its recommended plants need some irrigation in the dry summer and should be kept healthy. That advice accompanies salal's place among broadleaf evergreen shrubs.
The Willamette Valley guide also profiles salal as a fire-resistant choice suited to local growing conditions. King County includes the shrub in its Puget Sound Basin landscape list, while the joint Oregon, Washington and Idaho extension guide gives another favorable recommendation.
FireSmart BC adds a different detail: salal is on its favorable chart but marked as needing further research. This is a qualified listing, not a contrary flammability grade. Taken with the Oregon care guidance, it supports considering salal for a fire-resistant landscape while keeping the stated regional conditions and research uncertainty visible.
Form
shrub
Mature height
~6 ft
Water need
high
Rated in
British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Oregon; Oregon (Willamette Valley) +2
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
King County's current wildfire page links this list for the Puget Sound Basin. FireApproved publishes 82 exact source owners as basin context, not statewide Washington guidance or a site-specific recommendation.
Willamette Valley (OR footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-02-01
OSU Extension says EM 9103 highlights fire-resistant plants that thrive under Willamette Valley growing conditions. FireApproved publishes 172 exact owners only as valley context. The guide shares the PNW 590 lineage and is not a second independent vote or statewide site clearance.
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 AK, CA, ID, OR, WA.
Native range
Current cited native range in AK, CA, OR, WA.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
3 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.
Fire-Resistant Plants for Oregon Home Landscapes: Southern and Western Oregon [osu-frn6-oregon-regions] (with its recommendation)
Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Salal profile (PDF page 151) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
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.
“Fire-Resistant Plant Materials for Oregon”
· condition: green
Gaultheria shallon (Salal) is listed under “Shrubs—broadleaf evergreen” for Southern and Western Oregon. The guide says most listed plants require some irrigation during Oregon's dry summer months and must be maintained in a healthy condition.
