United States / Grow / tamarack

tamarack (Larix laricina)
Photo: (c) Brandon Corder, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

tamarack

Larix laricina · Pinaceae · all Larix records · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Form
tree
Mature height
~50 ft
Light
Full sun
Water need
moderate
Rated in
Alaska; Global; eastern US; southern Idaho / Intermountain
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Placement evidence
3 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
Alaska; Global; eastern US; southern Idaho / Intermountain
Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources
  • Protect Your Home from Wildfire — Fire Resistant Vegetation and Landscaping · Official scoped edition
    • AK; partial normalized coverage · 2005-04-27

      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.

  • Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database · Official scoped edition
    • Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08

      The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AK, CT, DC, DE, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VT, WI, WV.
Native range
Current cited native range in AK, CT, IL, IN, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, VT, WI, WV.
USDA hardiness
An exact source temperature is retained below the published zone scale; no zone is invented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

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.

Current native

18

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

18 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04
  • Alaska (AK)
  • Connecticut (CT)
  • Illinois (IL)
  • Indiana (IN)
  • Massachusetts (MA)
  • Maryland (MD)
  • Maine (ME)
  • Michigan (MI)
  • Minnesota (MN)
  • New Hampshire (NH)
  • New Jersey (NJ)
  • New York (NY)
  • Ohio (OH)
  • Pennsylvania (PA)
  • Rhode I. (RI)
  • Vermont (VT)
  • Wisconsin (WI)
  • West Virginia (WV)

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.

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.

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.

Recommends (1)

Corroboration (1 rows from 1 source)
  • Protect Your Home from Wildfire — Fire Resistant Vegetation and Landscaping — Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Division of Forestry, Community Forestry Program · April 2005 · original source Corroboration Expert-curated lineage: unknown

    “Following are a few of the plants that may be used in firewise landscapes in Alaska if placed and maintained appropriately.”

    Listed as Larch — L. laricina; the source conditions these examples on appropriate placement and maintenance.

Mid-scale / conditional (2)

Listed without a rating (1)
Corroboration (1 rows from 1 source)
  • FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

    “calorific value (kcal/kg): 4637”

    FLAMITS record 5019; Combustibility measurement; plant part leaves; fuel all; predrying yes; device calorimeter; site Hough1969-4; sampling october. 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.

Fire-resistant trees instead

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · Wikipedia · ITIS

Larix laricina (Tamarack). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/larix-laricina/. Last verified 2026-08-23.