Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Chinese silvergrass is not fire resistant; published assessments classify it as highly flammable and best kept away from structures.
Five sources point to the same practical conclusion. The USDA Forest Service’s Northeastern Area and state Firewise programs point to its large grass clump as providing plenty of fire-load material and assign it Not Firewise, the least favorable of their four ratings. The Diputació de Girona and Catalonia’s fire service advise against it using a method that assumes species-specific care and weighs fire research, fuel structure, maintenance, invasiveness, origin, and firefighting experience.
NC State Extension tags Chinese silvergrass as highly flammable, while the University of Arizona calls it fire-prone. Arizona says plants in that category may ignite readily and burn intensely. The Sun City Texas Firewise Group also gives it a high flammability hazard rating, meaning it can burn at high temperatures for a prolonged time. At maturity, the grass reaches about eight feet.
For placement around a home, the Texas guidance draws a useful boundary: plants rated above medium should not be planted within five feet of a building. Chinese silvergrass is rated high there, and every assessment supports caution rather than an exception. Its showy appearance and common landscape use do not offset the fire concern. Keep it away from structures.
Sun City Texas, Georgetown (TX footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-01-14
The guide is authored for the Sun City Texas community in Georgetown. FireApproved publishes 142 exact owners only as community-level context. It is an archived HOA exhibit with unknown rating lineage, not a current statewide Texas source or an independent Tier 1 determination.
Yavapai County (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2025-03-14
University of Arizona Cooperative Extension authors Bulletin 34 for Yavapai County. FireApproved publishes 198 exact source owners from its resistant and prone tables and keeps the county boundary visible. County publication scope is regional Arizona context, never statewide scope.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IL, KY, LA, MA, MD, MI, MO, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, VA, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
29 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 5a; no upper limit is documented.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
3 legal-list records; the Place chip matches exact scope.
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
Broader regional context
Federal context
Plant-specific legal-list reviews (1)
These source-bound review receipts are separate from ecological invasive reports. A source or plant identity change invalidates a receipt.
DE · Prohibited here. Designated prohibited in the reviewed Delaware 3 DE Admin. Code 806 Invasive Plant and Plant Watch Lists as of 2026-08-26. Authority: Delaware Department of Agriculture; scope: state; as of 2026-08-26.Official reference.Normalized source record.
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.
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 prints 5 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Miscanthus sinensis · exact match.
Source location: Cold Hardiness Zone field in the recovered selector record.
Not used for comparison: The recovered selector prints one Cold Hardiness Zone value but does not define it as a minimum threshold or a one-zone range.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 23962, 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.
Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector: Landscape Zone 4 — beyond 30 ft; outside the selector's recommendation area [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (with its avoid rating)
Guía de pirojardinería: not suitable inside the 25-metre maximum-risk zone [girona-2020-iuf-25m-suitability] (with its avoid rating)
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: miscanthus-sinensis [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (with its avoid rating)
Firewise Plant Guide: Ornamental Grasses [Sun City plant-table sections] (with its avoid rating)
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.
Miscanthus sinensis is rated “DESACONSEJADA” by the guide's qualitative IUF garden-suitability method. The method assumes species-specific care and integrates fire evidence with fuel structure, maintenance, origin, invasiveness, and expert fire-service experience.
Listed as Maiden grass — Miscanthus sinensis. The bulletin says fire-resistant plants tend to resist ignition when irrigated and maintained, while fire-prone plants may ignite readily and burn intensely.
The table rates Maiden Grass, Chinese silvergrass — Miscanthus sinensis high for flammability hazard, defined as the ease a plant can burn at high temperatures for a prolonged time.
