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Mountain tōtara

Podocarpus laetus · Podocarpaceae · all Podocarpus records · also called Hall’s tōtara

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
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
No test or rating condition is normalized.
Fire ecology context
No section-reviewed fire-ecology context is normalized.
Placement evidence
0 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions
New Zealand
Maintenance
No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
No state distribution is normalized.
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
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.

Mountain tōtara (Podocarpus laetus)
Photo: (c) Tom Field, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.
Form
tree
Region
New Zealand
Rated in
New Zealand
Uses
timber
Family
Podocarpaceae
Evidence
1 cited source

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)

Fire-resistant trees instead

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

Profiles: GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata ·

Podocarpus laetus (Mountain tōtara, Hall’s tōtara). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/podocarpus-laetus/. Last verified 2026-08-23.