Home / Plants / Grow / Karo

Karo

Pittosporum crassifolium · Pittosporaceae · all Pittosporum records

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: California; Global; Marin County, California; New Zealand
Maintenance: No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources

Fire-Resistant Plants Common to Marin County · Official scoped edition
- Marin County (CA footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2019-01-01
  The publication is explicitly limited to plants common to Marin County. FireApproved publishes 104 exact owners as Marin regional context while retaining its placement, spacing, irrigation, and maintenance boundary. It is not statewide California guidance or parcel suitability.
Defensible Space Landscaping in the Urban/Wildland Interface: A Compilation of Fire Performance Ratings of Residential Landscape Plants · Official scoped edition
- CA; partial normalized coverage · 1997-07-01
  The UC Forest Products Laboratory says the guide covers properties of common California landscaping plants and was prepared for California fire agencies. FireApproved publishes 130 exact owners at historical California publication scope. The report is a 1997 compilation, not a current endorsement, site rating, or independent test of every row.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in CA.
Native range: No current cited or legacy state native range is normalized.
Introduced / established: 2 sourced range or established records; set a location to match them. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness: No hardiness value is normalized.

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.

Karo (Pittosporum crassifolium) — Photo: (c) Saryu Mae 前朝琉, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: tree
Grows in: CA
Rated in: California; Global; Marin County, California; New Zealand
Family: Pittosporaceae
Evidence: 12 cited sources

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.

Current native

0

exact source areas

Current introduced

1

exact source area

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

1 introduced source area · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

California (CA)

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.

Conditions in the fire evidence

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

irrigated: Fire-Resistant Plants Common to Marin County evidence row

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.

Defensible Space Landscaping in the Urban/Wildland Interf…: Chapter 4, Landscape Vegetation Database [ucfpl-1997] (with its recommendation)

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.

Mid-scale / conditional (1)

A quantitative assessment of shoot flammability for 60 tree and shrub species — International Journal of Wildland Fire (Wyse, Perry, O'Connell, Holland, Wright, Hosted, Whitelock, Geary, Maurin, Curran) · 2016 · original source Primary evidence Lab-tested lineage: lincoln-nz-tree

“Moderate flammability category (Fig. 2)”

Shoot category from the paper's cluster analysis; samples were air-dried for 24 hours before testing.

Listed without a rating (8)

FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

8 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
- “ignition frequency (%): 100” · score 100 (FLAMITS — ignition frequency (%))
  
  FLAMITS record 1466; Ignitability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND. Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
- “maximum sample temperature (°C): 391” · score 391 (FLAMITS — maximum sample temperature (°C))
  
  FLAMITS record 1660; Combustibility measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND. Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
- “burning duration (s): 7.6” · score 7.6 (FLAMITS — burning duration (s))
  
  FLAMITS record 1854; Sustainability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND. Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
- “estimated burnt biomass (%): 6.9” · score 6.9 (FLAMITS — estimated burnt biomass (%))
  
  FLAMITS record 2048; Consumability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Cui2020a-1; sampling ND. Primary study Cui2020a: Cui, X., Paterson, A. M., Wyse, S. V., Alam, M. A., Maurin, K. J. L., Pieper, R., ... Curran, T. J. (2020a). Shoot flammability of vascular plants is phylogenetically conserved and related to habitat fire-proneness and growth form. Nature Plants, 6, 355-359.
- “ignition frequency (%): 100” · score 100 (FLAMITS — ignition frequency (%))
  
  FLAMITS record 14365; Ignitability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Wyse2016-3; sampling ND. Primary study Wyse2016: Wyse, S. V., Perry, G. L. W., O'Connell, D. M., Holland, P. S., Wright, M. J., Hosted, C. L., ... Curran, T. J. (2016). A quantitative assessment of shoot flammability for 60 tree and shrub species supports rankings based on expert opinion. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 25, 466-477.
- “maximum sample temperature (°C): 386.3” · score 386.3 (FLAMITS — maximum sample temperature (°C))
  
  FLAMITS record 14425; Combustibility measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Wyse2016-3; sampling ND. Primary study Wyse2016: Wyse, S. V., Perry, G. L. W., O'Connell, D. M., Holland, P. S., Wright, M. J., Hosted, C. L., ... Curran, T. J. (2016). A quantitative assessment of shoot flammability for 60 tree and shrub species supports rankings based on expert opinion. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 25, 466-477.
- “burning duration (s): 7” · score 7 (FLAMITS — burning duration (s))
  
  FLAMITS record 14485; Sustainability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Wyse2016-3; sampling ND. Primary study Wyse2016: Wyse, S. V., Perry, G. L. W., O'Connell, D. M., Holland, P. S., Wright, M. J., Hosted, C. L., ... Curran, T. J. (2016). A quantitative assessment of shoot flammability for 60 tree and shrub species supports rankings based on expert opinion. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 25, 466-477.
- “estimated burnt biomass (%): 8.4” · score 8.4 (FLAMITS — estimated burnt biomass (%))
  
  FLAMITS record 14545; Consumability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Wyse2016-3; sampling ND. Primary study Wyse2016: Wyse, S. V., Perry, G. L. W., O'Connell, D. M., Holland, P. S., Wright, M. J., Hosted, C. L., ... Curran, T. J. (2016). A quantitative assessment of shoot flammability for 60 tree and shrub species supports rankings based on expert opinion. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 25, 466-477.

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

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

Pittosporum crassifolium (Karo). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/pittosporum-crassifolium/. Last verified 2026-08-23.