Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Beardless wildrye has a favorable Lake Tahoe fire-hazard rating, with insufficient evidence for a general fire-resistance verdict.
The Home Landscaping Guide for Lake Tahoe and Vicinity lists this grass as creeping wildrye, Elymus triticoides, and puts “low” in its Fire Hazard column. This is an estimate assembled from other sources, rather than a result established through scientific trials. The favorable entry therefore answers a regional landscaping question without proving how the plant will behave in a fire.
Its advice also changes with plant condition. Brown vegetation can become a high fire hazard; the guide tells readers to mow grasses and forbs as browning begins. That instruction matters when considering beardless wildrye, whose recorded water requirement is high. Leaving browning growth standing would miss the maintenance advice that accompanies the table.
A mature height of about three feet and USDA zone 2b hardiness help describe where this grass may fit. Neither characteristic supplies the missing fire-test evidence. For a Lake Tahoe planting, the useful combination is the favorable estimate and the instruction to mow at the onset of browning.
Form
grass
Mature height
~3 ft
Water need
high
Rated in
Lake Tahoe Basin, Nevada and California
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Nevada Division of Forestry and University of Nevada Cooperative Extension publish Bulletin 06-01 for the Lake Tahoe Basin and vicinity. FireApproved publishes 83 exact rated owners as basin context across Nevada and California. Rough estimates are not statewide or site ratings.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, TX, UT, WA, WY.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 2b; no upper limit is documented.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
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.
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 location: PlantCharacteristics record 23785, 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.
Home Landscaping Guide for Lake Tahoe and Vicinity: Fire Hazard column: low [tahoe-guide-2006] (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.
Table 1's Fire Hazard column prints “low” for this taxon. The guide calls the rating a rough estimate of potential flammability, not a result of scientific trials. Its footnote says plants that turn brown often become high fire hazards and tells readers to mow grasses and forbs when they begin to turn brown.
