United States / Grow / bird's-foot trefoil

bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus)
Photo: (c) Tom Scavo, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

bird's-foot trefoil

Lotus corniculatus · Fabaceae · all Lotus records · also called Birdfoot Trefoil · Wikipedia

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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
perennial
Mature height
~1 ft
Water need
high
Rated in
Global; New Zealand; southern Idaho / Intermountain
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
Global; New Zealand; southern Idaho / Intermountain
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
  • 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 AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, GA, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Introduced / established
15 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 4a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Reported invasive here
2 ecological invasive reports.
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

0

exact source areas

Current introduced

15

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

15 introduced source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04
  • Alabama (AL)
  • Arkansas (AR)
  • California (CA)
  • Colorado (CO)
  • Idaho (ID)
  • Illinois (IL)
  • Kentucky (KY)
  • Maryland (MD)
  • Minnesota (MN)
  • New Mexico (NM)
  • Nevada (NV)
  • Oregon (OR)
  • Tennessee (TN)
  • Washington (WA)
  • Wisconsin (WI)

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 (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): 4641.49”

    FLAMITS record 4997; Combustibility measurement; plant part stems; fuel live; predrying yes; device calorimeter; site Hogenbirk1995-1; sampling june. Primary study Hogenbirk1995: Hogenbirk, J.C., & Sarrazin-Delay, C.L. (1995). Using fuel characteristics to estimate plant ignitability for fire hazard reduction. Water Air Soil Pollut, 82, 161–170.

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

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Lotus corniculatus (Birdfoot Trefoil). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/lotus-corniculatus/. Last verified 2026-08-23.