Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Yes, Christmas fern is rated fire resistant, with North Carolina and Oregon extension guidance supporting that conclusion.
NC State University and NC Cooperative Extension, working with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2005, gave Christmas fern a low flammability rating. Low was the recommended category on that four-level scale. NC State Extension’s 2025 guidance again rated it low on a three-level scale, and the live Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox carries the same low-flammability tag. The Toolbox serves as corroboration because it does not identify who assigned its values.
Oregon State University Extension uses a different approach. It profiles Christmas fern among fire-resistant plants that thrive under Willamette Valley growing conditions rather than assigning it a flammability band. That regional recommendation reaches the same practical result as the North Carolina ratings. Christmas fern is a perennial in the Dryopteridaceae family, listed for USDA zones 3a to 9b.
The advice is consistent across the four findings: low flammability in North Carolina and inclusion among fire-resistant plants in Oregon. Although the institutions use different classification systems and address different regions, each places Christmas fern on the fire-resistant side of its guidance.
Form
perennial
Rated in
NC; North Carolina; North Carolina / southeastern US; Oregon (Willamette Valley)
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
The complete three-table AG-874 plant list is explicitly for North Carolina and contains 202 low-, medium-, or high-flammability rows. FireApproved accounts for all source rows under its strict taxonomy and lineage rules; source scope does not establish local suitability at a particular North Carolina site.
Willamette Valley (OR footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2015-02-01
OSU Extension says EM 9103 highlights fire-resistant plants that thrive under Willamette Valley growing conditions. FireApproved publishes 172 exact owners only as valley context. The guide shares the PNW 590 lineage and is not a second independent vote or statewide site clearance.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, CT, DC, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, TN, TX, VA, VT, WI, WV.
Native range
The legacy compatibility field lists NC in native range; its field-level source was not retained.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 3–9.
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.
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.
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.
Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Christmas Fern profile (PDF page 42) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: polystichum-acrostichoides [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (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.
