United States / Grow / Beale's barberry

Beale's barberry (Mahonia bealei)
Photo: (c) Steve Rainwater, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA) (CC BY-SA), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Beale's barberry

Mahonia bealei · Berberidaceae · all Mahonia records · also called Beale's mahonia · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

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

The Mahonia bealei file for mahonia bealei carries keep away recommendation. On mahonia bealei, limited evidence sits versus that bealei row. This is not one slogan on Mahonia bealei. avoid and limited evidence stay split for mahonia bealei.

On mahonia bealei, Mahonia bealei also carries same form alternatives for bealei.

Use evidence on mahonia bealei for bealei. The jumps stay with mahonia bealei on Mahonia bealei. On mahonia bealei, avoid sits with limited evidence on Mahonia bealei for bealei.

Fire-resistant shrubs instead

Form
shrub
Mature height
~8 ft
Light
Full sun
Rated in
Virginia / Mid-Atlantic; eastern US
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Highly flammable — location does not change the cited classification.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
Virginia / Mid-Atlantic; eastern US
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
  • Virginia Firescapes — Firewise Landscaping for Woodland Homes (430-300) · Official scoped edition
    • VA; partial normalized coverage · 2009-04-15

      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 AL, DC, DE, FL, GA, MD, NC, NJ, OH, PA, SC, VA, WV.
USDA hardiness
Only uncertain or inapplicable hardiness rows are cited; no primary zone is projected.

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.

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.

Avoids (1)

Mid-scale / conditional (1)

Fire-resistant shrubs instead

Fire-resistant shrubs listed above

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

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · Wikipedia · ITIS

Mahonia bealei (Beale's mahonia). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/mahonia-bealei/. Last verified 2026-08-23.