Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Yes, white mulberry is consistently rated fire resistant.
Across six published assessments, every institution recommends it. The USDA Forest Service and state Firewise programs place it in Firewise category 1. White mulberry receives a low flammability rating from both extension services: Ohio State University Extension uses five bands, and Virginia Cooperative Extension uses three. Both low bands support a recommendation.
The agreement also extends beyond the eastern United States. FireSmart BC approves white mulberry as fire resistant but flags it for further research. The Generalitat Valenciana recommends it for low-flammability gardens, and Girona’s provincial government and Catalonia’s fire service rate it “recommended” under a method that assumes species-specific care. Their method considers fire research alongside fuel structure, maintenance, origin, invasiveness, and firefighting experience. These approaches do not ask precisely the same question, but all reach the favorable side of their respective scales.
White mulberry reaches about 30 feet at maturity. This Moraceae tree is hardy to USDA zone 6a and suited to full sun with low water. Fire resistance does not settle every planting question, however. The tree has been introduced in 40 states, and two jurisdictions flag it as invasive. The Forest Service selection also warns that birds spread it through its abundant fruit. For fire behavior alone, the institutional agreement is unusually clear; local invasiveness remains a separate reason to check whether white mulberry belongs in a particular yard.
Form
tree
Mature height
~30 ft
Light
Full sun
Water need
low
Rated in
British Columbia; Catalonia, Spain; Global; Ohio / Midwest +3
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
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 AL, AR, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, HI, IA, ID, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, MT, NC, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VA, VT, WA, WI, WV, WY.
Native range
Introduced / established
41 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
2 legal-list records; the Place chip matches exact scope.
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
2 ecological invasive reports.
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.
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 6 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Morus alba · 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.
Minimum 5a · no upper limit documented · half zone precision · derived containing band
Exact source measurement: -18°F; mapped only to its containing half-zone.
Source taxon: Morus alba · source identifier match.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 70882, 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 3 — 10–30 ft from the structure; thin vegetation, remove debris, and minimize plant massing [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (with its recommendation)
Guía de pirojardinería: suitable inside or outside the 25-metre maximum-risk zone [girona-2020-iuf-25m-suitability] (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.
Morus alba is rated “RECOMENDADA” 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.
3 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
Primary study Pacheco2022: Pacheco, A. S., Goodman, H. D., Hankenson, L., Fisk, J. J., Ortiz, A., Marinace, H. M., ... Tng, D. Y. P. (2022). Fighting fire with food: Assessing the flammability of crop plant species for building fire resilient agroforestry systems. in review, preprint.
Shared row context: plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Pacheco2022-1; sampling october to november 2022.
