United States / Grow / green sprangletop

green sprangletop (Leptochloa dubia)
Photo: (c) Douglas Goldman, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), uploaded by Douglas Goldman (CC BY-SA), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

green sprangletop

Leptochloa dubia (accepted: Disakisperma dubium) · Poaceae

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

Form
grass
Mature height
~3 ft
Water need
moderate
Rated in
Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Evidence regions
Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
  • FIREWISE Plant Materials for 3,000 ft. and Higher Elevations (AZ1289) · Official scoped edition
    • Arizona at or above 3,000 feet (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2011-12-01

      AZ1289 is explicitly limited to Arizona elevations of 3,000 feet and higher. FireApproved publishes 69 exact owners as regional Arizona context, retaining every water and elevation condition. It is never promoted to statewide low-desert guidance or an independent Tier 1 vote.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, CO, FL, KS, MD, MO, MS, NC, NM, OK, SC, TX.
Introduced / established
1 sourced range or established record. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 5b; no upper limit is documented.

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.

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.

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)

Fire-resistant grasss instead

Last verified 2026-08-24. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · Wikidata ·

Leptochloa dubia (green sprangletop). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/leptochloa-dubia/. Last verified 2026-08-24.