Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Dakota mock vervain is rated fire resistant by two expert-curated sources.
The agreement is straightforward: both place this groundcover on their fire-resistant plant lists.
The King County Forestry Program includes it among fire-resistant, non-succulent groundcovers for western Washington, under the spelling “Verbenia bipinnatifida.” Michigan State University Extension lists Glandularia bipinnatifida by the common name Dakota mock vervain and considers it wildfire resistant and recommended for Michigan’s climate. These are binary recommendations based on inclusion in curated plant tables, so neither source assigns it a numerical score or a finer degree of resistance.
Dakota mock vervain is a groundcover in the family Verbenaceae. Michigan State gives it a hardiness range of USDA zones 5a through 8b. That range describes where the source places its cold hardiness; the fire-resistant verdict comes from its inclusion in the wildfire-resistant list. With both institutions reaching the same classification, Dakota mock vervain is a supported fire-resistant groundcover choice within its stated hardiness range.
Form
groundcover
Rated in
Michigan / Great Lakes; western WA
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; western WA
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources
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.
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.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, GA, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, MI, MO, MS, NE, NM, OK, PR, SD, TN, TX, WI, WY.
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.
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.
