Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Muttongrass has mixed fire evidence, with favorable plant listings and a British Columbia request for further research.
FireSmart BC identifies Poa fendleriana as fire resistant but marks it as needing more research. The favorable designation and the research flag belong together. Removing either would change what the program tells a gardener about this grass.
The University of Arizona Cooperative Extension also includes muttongrass among FireWise plant materials. Its guide addresses Arizona landscapes at higher elevations, above 3,000 feet. That is a regional recommendation accompanying the British Columbia listing, rather than a resolution of its research question.
Arizona describes a grass with low water needs and a mature height reaching about two feet. A homeowner comparing grasses has qualified support from the two programs, but the fire evidence remains unsettled. Arizona provides a planting recommendation within its stated scope, while FireSmart BC leaves its call for more research attached to the favorable label.
Form
grass
Mature height
~2 ft
Water need
low
Rated in
Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest; British Columbia
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest; British Columbia
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 1 scope across 1 cited fire source
Arizona at or above 3,000 feet (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2011-12-01
AZ1289 is explicitly limited to Arizona elevations of 3,000 feet and higher. FireApproved publishes 69 exact owners as regional Arizona context, retaining every water and elevation condition. It is never promoted to statewide low-desert guidance or an independent Tier 1 vote.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OK, OR, SD, TX, UT, WA, WY.
Native range
Current cited native range in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, ND, NE, NM, NV, OK, OR, SD, TX, UT, WA, WY.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 3a; no upper limit is documented.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 24930, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
