Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
European larch is highly flammable and does not belong near structures.
“Very discouraged” is the verdict for European larch from the Diputació de Girona and Catalonia’s fire service on their five-level garden-suitability scale. Their method weighs fire research and firefighter experience alongside fuel structure, maintenance, origin, and invasiveness. With appropriate placement and maintenance, Alaska’s forestry program considers European larch an option for firewise landscapes in Alaska.
The Alaska listing therefore does not amount to an unconditional finding that the tree resists fire. The USDA Forest Service and state Firewise programs add another warning by rating European larch “At Risk (3)” on their four-point scale, where 4 is “Not Firewise.”
A laboratory measurement found a calorific value of 4,608 kilocalories per kilogram in leaves dried before testing. Heat release from those leaves is a different question from how readily a whole tree ignites or how it behaves beside a home. With a strong negative suitability rating, an at-risk rating, and only a conditional recommendation in Alaska, the practical conclusion is to treat European larch as highly flammable and avoid it near structures.
Alaska Division of Forestry opens with the wildfire threat to Alaskans and publishes Alaska firewise-landscape examples. FireApproved publishes 58 exact source owners from its 60 taxon entries and holds the taxon-free fern label. State publication scope does not establish suitability for every Alaska climate, site, or home-ignition-zone placement.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CT, DC, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VA, VT, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
4 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 3a; 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 4 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Larix decidua · 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 15355, 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] (mid-scale rating)
Guía de pirojardinería: not suitable inside or outside the 25-metre maximum-risk zone [girona-2020-iuf-25m-suitability] (with its avoid rating)
Protect Your Home from Wildfire: Trees [Alaska DNR brochure sections] (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.
Larix decidua is rated “MUY DESACONSEJADA” 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.
3 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Hough1969: Hough, W. A. (1969). Caloric Value of Some Forest Fuels of the Southern United States. Res. Note SE-120. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southeastern Forest Experiment Station.
FLAMITS record 17333; Ignitability measurement; plant part wood; fuel dead; predrying yes; device radiant panel; site Simms1967-1; sampling ND. Primary study Simms1967: Simms, D.L., & Law, M. (1967). The ignition of wet and dry wood by radiation. Combustion and Flame, 11, 377388.
