Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
FENZ encourages removing Himalayan honeysuckle (Leycesteria formosa), a moderate/high-flammability environmental weed in New Zealand.
The directory entry identifies an exotic ornamental shrub. Its moderate/high grade appears in a separate environmental-weeds table: FENZ says these plants also have more than a minor impact on natural ecosystems, drawing on the Department of Conservation's weed list. Both ecological impact and fire risk underlie the agency's advice to remove and dispose of them appropriately.
Before removing or modifying vegetation, FENZ tells property owners to check with their local and regional council and the Department of Conservation. For vegetation that remains, its maintenance guidance includes pruning plants apart, clearing dead or dry material and watering during dry periods. It also describes using less flammable plants between or around more flammable plantings. Those measures address the retained vegetation; the weeds table still encourages removal.
FENZ presents its directory as a guide, with rankings informed by plant-flammability testing. Growing conditions, age, health and management can affect how a plant burns. The species name matters: this warning belongs to Leycesteria formosa.
Highly flammable — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Global; New Zealand
Maintenance
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CA.
Native range
Introduced / established
1 sourced range or established record. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
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.
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.
Avoids (1)
Low Flammability Plants directory — Fire and Emergency New Zealand (plant flammability testing at Lincoln University) · 2026 · original sourcePrimary evidenceLab-testedlineage: lincoln-nz-tree
“Moderate/high flammability”
Moderate/high flammability classification. On FENZ's high-flammability environmental weeds list (2024 DOC list).
Listed without a rating (4)Corroboration (4 rows from 1 source)
4 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
Shared row context: plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND.
