Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Oregon boxleaf has favorable fire-resistant landscaping guidance from Oregon State University, with the regional scope of that advice kept in view.
The university's 2015 Willamette Valley guide profiles the shrub as Oregon Boxwood, printing the scientific name Paxistima myrtifolia. Its later broadleaf-evergreen gallery uses that same name and includes Oregon boxwood among choices for a fire-resistant landscape. The gallery directs readers to PNW 590 for further details.
These are two resources from one extension service. Their agreement records a consistent recommendation rather than two independent institutional assessments or a measured ignition score. The Willamette Valley setting is explicit in the earlier guide, so its favorable listing should remain connected to those growing conditions.
For someone comparing Oregon boxleaf with other shrubs, the useful result is a regional recommendation supported by limited primary evidence. The two source titles and the printed Oregon Boxwood name make that recommendation traceable.
Form
shrub
Rated in
Oregon (Willamette Valley); Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho)
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Willamette Valley (OR footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-02-01
OSU Extension says EM 9103 highlights fire-resistant plants that thrive under Willamette Valley growing conditions. FireApproved publishes 172 exact owners only as valley context. The guide shares the PNW 590 lineage and is not a second independent vote or statewide site clearance.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, TX, UT, WA, WY.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
2 applicable cited hardiness statements overlap but have different boundaries; compare each complete source row.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
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.
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.
5–8 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Paxistima myrtifolia · exact match.
Source location: Oregon boxwood profile, USDA hardiness zones 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.
Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Oregon Boxwood profile (PDF page 141) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
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.