Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Yes, spring cinquefoil is widely treated as fire resistant, though the label does not remove the need for careful planting and maintenance.
Six regional sources recommend spring cinquefoil. Fire Safe Marin lists it among fire-resistant plants common to Marin County. Extension services in Montana and Michigan likewise include it among fire-resistant or wildfire-resistant choices suited to their regions. Nevada’s extension compilation includes plants favorably listed by at least two named western sources, and spring cinquefoil meets that threshold.
Utah State University’s guidance is more conditional: Potentilla neumanniana ‘Nana’, also named P. verna, can be firewise when properly used and maintained. FireSmart BC also calls spring cinquefoil FireSmart-approved, but flags it as needing more research. These are expert and compiled planting lists rather than a shared experimental scale, so their agreement supports a landscape recommendation without proving that the plant cannot ignite.
Spring cinquefoil is a groundcover in the rose family, listed for USDA zones 4a through 7b. Its low-fire-risk designation still depends on ordinary defensible-space care. Fire Safe Marin specifically says spacing, placement, irrigation, and removal of dead material remain necessary. The practical conclusion is reassuring but limited: spring cinquefoil is a broadly recommended fire-resistant choice, not a fireproof one.
Form
groundcover
Rated in
British Columbia; Marin County, California; Michigan / Great Lakes; Montana / Northern Rockies +2
On this lot
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
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
British Columbia; Marin County, California; Michigan / Great Lakes; Montana / Northern Rockies; Nevada / Great Basin; Utah / Intermountain West
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 5 scopes across 5 cited fire sources
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.
Michigan State University Extension Bulletin E2948 is explicitly a list of wildfire-resistant landscape plants for Michigan and includes a Michigan-native field. FireApproved publishes 221 exact GBIF owners from 226 represented source rows and holds 15 complex or non-exact rows. This dated publication scope is not a current site-suitability determination.
The April 2022 MontGuide explicitly presents fire-resistant species adapted to Montana. FireApproved publishes 92 exact plant records from the source while retaining excluded genus, family, and unresolved rows; the guide itself says not every listed species grows in every part of the state.
University of Nevada Cooperative Extension compiled plants suited to Nevada climate zones and reported favorably by at least two upstream firewise lists. FireApproved publishes 126 exact source owners at Nevada publication scope. The source explicitly makes no independent flammability determination, so these rows remain corroborative.
Utah State University Extension states that this fact sheet selects examples for Utah landscapes and that they require proper placement and maintenance. FireApproved publishes 83 exact source owners at Utah publication scope. The table is not a site-specific planting clearance.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CT, MA, MI.
Native range
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented range 4–7.
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.
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.
