Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Goldflame honeysuckle is rated fire resistant overall, but one of three extension services places it in a high-flammability band.
Ohio State’s extension service rates the vine H, the second-highest band on its five-point flammability scale and a rating it maps to avoidance. Virginia Cooperative Extension reaches the opposite result, assigning L on a three-point scale of how forest-fire-prone a plant is. Michigan State’s extension service also considers goldflame honeysuckle wildfire resistant and recommends it for Michigan’s climate.
These findings come from expert-curated landscape guidance, but the institutions are not applying one shared yardstick. Ohio uses five flammability bands, Virginia uses three, and Michigan uses a binary list of recommended wildfire-resistant plants. The regional settings also differ: Ohio and the Midwest, Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic, and Michigan and the Great Lakes. Those differences help explain how the same vine can land on opposite sides without resolving which assessment best predicts its behavior in another place.
The practical conclusion is a cautious yes. Two services support fire-resistant use, while Ohio’s high rating is a real warning, not a minor disagreement. Goldflame honeysuckle should not be treated as a universally low-flammability choice solely because it receives the overall fire-resistant classification.
Form
vine
Rated in
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest; Virginia / Mid-Atlantic
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest; Virginia / Mid-Atlantic
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 3 scopes across 3 cited fire sources
Michigan State University Extension Bulletin E2948 is explicitly a list of wildfire-resistant landscape plants for Michigan and includes a Michigan-native field. FireApproved publishes 221 exact GBIF owners from 226 represented source rows and holds 15 complex or non-exact rows. This dated publication scope is not a current site-suitability determination.
Ohio State University Extension Bulletin 921 is an Ohio publication that describes Ohio fire seasons and landscape conditions and labels nativity to Ohio. FireApproved publishes 352 exact source-owning plant records from its eight rated tables. This historical publication scope does not assert current extension endorsement or that a listed plant suits every Ohio site.
Virginia Cooperative Extension's publication opens with Virginia wildfire conditions, identifies its Virginia Firewise Landscaping Task Force, and labels plants native to Virginia. FireApproved publishes 306 exact source owners. Publication scope does not establish parcel suitability or current endorsement of this archived 2009 list.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in OH.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 4–9.
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.
4–9 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Lonicera xheckrottii · accepted name match.
Source location: Table 1, vine row.
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.
