United States / Grow / Oregon boxleaf

Oregon boxleaf (Paxistima myrtifolia)
Photo: (c) giantcicada, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Oregon boxleaf

Paxistima myrtifolia (accepted: Paxistima myrsinites) · Celastraceae · all Paxistima records · also called Oregon boxwood · syn. Paxistima myrtifolia · Wikipedia

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Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Form
shrub
Rated in
British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Oregon; eastern WA +1
On this lot

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.
Placement evidence
1 source placement record; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Oregon; eastern WA; western WA
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.
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5–8.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

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.

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)

Corroboration (2 rows from 2 sources)

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

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