United States / Grow / swamp bay

swamp bay

Persea palustris · Lauraceae · all Persea records · also called Persea palustris · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

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

Form
tree
Mature height
~35 ft
Water need
high
Rated in
Global
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Evidence regions
Global

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AL, DE, FL, GA, LA, MD, MS, NC, SC, TX, VA.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 8a; no upper limit is documented.

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.

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.

Listed without a rating (2)
Corroboration (2 rows from 1 source)
  • FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

    2 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.

    • Primary study Safdari2018: Safdari, M.-S., Rahmati, M., Amini, E., Howarth, J. E., Berryhill, J. P., Dietenberger, M., … Fletcher, T. H. (2018). Characterization of pyrolysis products from fast pyrolysis of live and dead vegetation native to the Southern United States. Fuel, 229, 151–166.

      Shared row context: Combustibility measurement; plant part leaves; fuel live; predrying no; device flat flame burner; site Safdari2018-1; sampling ND.

      • “calorific value (kcal/kg): 4899.623”

        FLAMITS record 18004.

      • “calorific value (kcal/kg): 5282.0326”

        FLAMITS record 18018.

Fire-resistant trees instead

Last verified 2026-08-25. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

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

Persea palustris (Persea palustris). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/persea-palustris/. Last verified 2026-08-25.