Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Purple passionflower cannot be called reliably fire resistant because Virginia and North Carolina extension services rate it oppositely.
Virginia Cooperative Extension and Virginia Tech gave this vine an “L” rating, the recommended end of their three-point scale for plants considered more or less forest-fire prone. Their guidance describes it as requiring support and also suitable for use as a groundcover. By that assessment, purple passionflower is a reasonable firewise choice.
North Carolina’s guidance reaches the opposite conclusion. NC State University, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service assigned it an extreme rating in 2005, the top of a four-level flammability scale. NC State’s 2025 revision rates it high after dropping the former extreme category, and its live Plant Toolbox likewise places Passiflora incarnata under high flammability. Both high and extreme mean avoid on those North Carolina scales, although the Toolbox does not identify who assigned its values. The published ratings therefore show a real regional conflict, not a minor difference in wording.
For planting near a home, the prudent reading is that Virginia’s low rating offers reassurance, but North Carolina’s repeated high or extreme findings rule out treating the vine as dependably fire resistant.
The complete three-table AG-874 plant list is explicitly for North Carolina and contains 202 low-, medium-, or high-flammability rows. FireApproved accounts for all source rows under its strict taxonomy and lineage rules; source scope does not establish local suitability at a particular North Carolina 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, DC, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, MO, MS, NC, NJ, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV.
Native range
Current cited native range in AL, AR, FL, GA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MO, MS, NC, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, TX, VA, WV.
Introduced / established
4 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5a–9b.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
2 state noxious-weed seed records; the Place chip matches exact scope.
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.
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.
5a–9b explicit range · half zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Passiflora incarnata · exact match.
Source location: Passiflora incarnata profile, USDA Plant Hardiness Zone field.
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.
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: passiflora-incarnata [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (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.
