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Crapemyrtle is fire resistant, with six independent guides recommending it or rating its flammability low.
The agreement spans several methods and climates. The USDA Forest Service and state Firewise programs give it a Firewise rating of 1. Virginia Cooperative Extension assigns its lowest flammability rating, while the University of Tennessee includes it among Firewise plants. Catalonia’s fire service and Girona government call it recommended after considering fire research, fuel structure, maintenance, invasiveness, and professional experience.
The University of Arizona also lists crapemyrtle among fire-resistant plants, provided it is irrigated and maintained. Its bulletin cautions that resistant plants are not fireproof. A Texas Firewise group reaches a similar conclusion from a narrower angle, rating the tree low for the ease with which it can burn at high temperatures for a prolonged period.
Crapemyrtle is a roughly 15-foot tree in the Lythraceae family, suited to full sun and low water and hardy to USDA zone 7a. It has also been flagged as invasive in one jurisdiction, so local planting rules still matter. For fire behavior alone, however, the sources consistently place a maintained crapemyrtle on the resistant side.
Form
tree
Mature height
~15 ft
Light
Full sun
Water need
low
Rated in
Alabama; Australian Capital Territory, Australia; Catalonia, Spain; Georgetown, Texas +6
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Alabama; Australian Capital Territory, Australia; Catalonia, Spain; Georgetown, Texas; Japan; Maryland, New Jersey, and West Virginia; Tennessee; Virginia / Mid-Atlantic; Yavapai County, Arizona; eastern US
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 8 scopes across 6 cited fire sources
The Alabama Forestry Commission's five-page AFC-FP-04 booklet is an Alabama publication and contains 31 printed suggested or fire-prone plant occurrences. FireApproved publishes 27 exact species or genus owners and holds one infraspecific form plus two named cultivars; this historical source scope does not establish current site suitability for a particular Alabama property.
Maryland Forest Service says the list contains plants that can be grown in Maryland and identifies Maryland natives. FireApproved publishes 169 exact source owners from the 180 printed rows; an unrepresentable form and duplicate-owner rows are not broadened. The list calls itself non-comprehensive and does not establish suitability for every Maryland site.
NJ; partial normalized coverage
New Jersey DEP publishes a state edition saying the listed plants can be grown in New Jersey and are relatively resistant to fire. Its same 180 printed taxon occurrences map to the 169 conservative owners already normalized for the template family. The list is non-comprehensive and does not establish suitability for every New Jersey site or override the Pinelands Commission's separate placement and fuel-break rules.
WV; partial normalized coverage · 2026-08-26
West Virginia Division of Forestry publishes a state edition saying the listed plants can be grown in West Virginia and are relatively resistant to fire. Its same 180 printed taxon occurrences map to the 169 conservative owners already normalized for the template family. The list is non-comprehensive and provides no comparative or site-specific rating.
Sun City Texas, Georgetown (TX footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-01-14
The guide is authored for the Sun City Texas community in Georgetown. FireApproved publishes 142 exact owners only as community-level context. It is an archived HOA exhibit with unknown rating lineage, not a current statewide Texas source or an independent Tier 1 determination.
University of Tennessee Extension SP685 is Tennessee landscape guidance and publishes 78 represented plant owners. Most table rows are a carrier of Virginia Firescapes rather than an independent rating; Tennessee source scope does not change that lineage or establish site suitability.
Virginia Cooperative Extension's publication opens with Virginia wildfire conditions, identifies its Virginia Firewise Landscaping Task Force, and labels plants native to Virginia. FireApproved publishes 306 exact source owners. Publication scope does not establish parcel suitability or current endorsement of this archived 2009 list.
Yavapai County (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2025-03-14
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension authors Bulletin 34 for Yavapai County. FireApproved publishes 198 exact source owners from its resistant and prone tables and keeps the county boundary visible. County publication scope is regional Arizona context, never statewide scope.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, DC, DE, FL, GA, IN, KY, LA, MD, MS, NC, NJ, OH, PA, PR, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
16 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 6b; no upper limit is documented.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
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.
Source prints 7 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Lagerstroemia indica · exact match.
Source location: Cold Hardiness Zone field in the recovered selector record.
Not used for comparison: The recovered selector prints one Cold Hardiness Zone value but does not define it as a minimum threshold or a one-zone range.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 84391, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector: Landscape Zone 3 — 10–30 ft from the structure; thin vegetation, remove debris, and minimize plant massing [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (with its recommendation)
Guía de pirojardinería: suitable inside or outside the 25-metre maximum-risk zone [girona-2020-iuf-25m-suitability] (with its recommendation)
Tree fire-protection classification in Hito to Shinrin: サルスベリ — Table 10-2 [tadaki-kira-1982-fire-protection-power] (mid-scale rating)
Firewise Plant Guide: Small Trees [Sun City plant-table sections] (with its recommendation)
Canberra Plant Selector: filtered result page 4 [canberra-selector] (with its recommendation)
Firewise Landscaping for Woodland Homes: Medium sized hardwoods [Alabama Forestry Commission booklet section] (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.
Lagerstroemia indica is rated “RECOMENDADA” by the guide's qualitative IUF garden-suitability method. The method assumes species-specific care and integrates fire evidence with fuel structure, maintenance, origin, invasiveness, and expert fire-service experience.
Listed as Crape myrtle — Lagerstroemia indica. The bulletin says fire-resistant plants tend to resist ignition when irrigated and maintained, while fire-prone plants may ignite readily and burn intensely.
The table rates Crape Myrtle — Lagerstroemia indica low for flammability hazard, defined as the ease a plant can burn at high temperatures for a prolonged time.
Listed as Lagerstroemia indica (Crapemyrtle). The source says listed species exhibit stronger resistance to ignition by wildfires. Source comments: Tolerant of drought and urban conditions. Not cold tolerant
“Medium sized hardwoods: Common Crape Myrtle — Lagerstroemia indica”
The booklet explicitly places this row in one or more suggested-plant sections.
Mid-scale / conditional (1)
Tree fire-protection classification in Hito to Shinrin (人と森林) — Kyoritsu Shuppan; table reproduced by Kagoshima Prefecture · Hito to Shinrin (1982), Table 10-2; Kagoshima web reproduction · original sourcePrimary evidenceExpert-curatedlineage: independent (root of Japanese municipal fire-protection tree lists)
Table 10-2 prints サルスベリ in the small fire-protection-power class. The Kagoshima reproduction says highly fire-protective trees can slow spread, promote upward dispersal of heat and smoke, and intercept flying embers.
