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Oregon boxwood

Paxistima myrtifolia (accepted: Paxistima myrsinites) · Celastraceae · all Paxistima records · syn. Paxistima myrtifolia

Your local evidence lens

Separate evidence questions, never one approval badge

Set a ZIP to compare this record with state distribution, native range, USDA hardiness, and invasive records.

A genus split is not a placement verdict. Set a ZIP to read the local documented split.

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
1 condition stated in cited fire-evidence rows.
Fire ecology context
No section-reviewed fire-ecology context is normalized.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Oregon; eastern WA; western WA
Maintenance
No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.
Typed publication scope: 3 scopes across 3 cited fire sources
  • Firewise Plants for the Puget Sound Basin · Official scoped edition
    • Puget Sound Basin (WA footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2011-01-01

      King County's current wildfire page links this list for the Puget Sound Basin. FireApproved publishes 82 exact source owners as basin context, not statewide Washington guidance or a site-specific recommendation.

  • Fire-Resistant Plants for Home Landscapes (PNW 590) · Official scoped edition
    • ID, OR, WA; partial normalized coverage · 2023-10-01

      The October 2023 joint Pacific Northwest Extension publication explicitly names Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and publishes more than 150 plant profiles. FireApproved has normalized 155 exact plant records from the source; publication scope does not assert that every listed plant suits every site within the three states.

  • Fire-Resistant Plants for Eastern Washington · Official scoped edition
    • Eastern Washington (WA footprint); partial normalized coverage

      Washington DNR publishes the guide for Eastern Washington and says it compiles plants from other Firewise documents that are likely to thrive there. FireApproved publishes 46 exact owners only as eastern Washington context. The rows are corroborative, not empirical or statewide.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, TX, UT, WA, WY.
Native range
No current cited or legacy state native range is normalized.
Introduced / established
No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5–8.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

Legal-list status
Set a location for an exact legal-list result; source silence is not clearance.
Seed-list status
Set a location to compare the separate state noxious-weed seed layer.
Reported invasive here
No ecological invasive report is normalized; that does not prove noninvasiveness.
Broader regional context
Aggregate AK, HI, and L48 evidence is shown only as regional context, never as an exact-state finding.
Federal context
Federal designations remain separate from state legal-list results.
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.

Oregon boxwood (Paxistima myrtifolia)
Photo: (c) giantcicada, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.
Form
shrub
USDA hardiness
5–8
Grows in
AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NM, OR, TX +3
Rated in
British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Oregon; eastern WA +1
Family
Celastraceae
Evidence
5 cited sources

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.

Conditions in the fire evidence

These describe tested or rated plant material. They are not horticultural maintenance instructions.

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.

Recommends (5)

Same genus in the directory · the Paxistima group page

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

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

Paxistima myrtifolia (Oregon boxwood). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/paxistima-myrtifolia/. Last verified 2026-08-23.