Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Bitter cherry is treated as fire resistant by two agencies, but its field-trial score leaves the overall case unsettled.
The difference is between affirmative plant lists and a scored trial, not a simple yes-or-no dispute.
Bitter cherry has fire-resistant approval from FireSmart BC, but that approval carries the program’s flag for more research. The New Mexico Forestry Division includes it on its FireWise plant list at 5,000 through 9,000-plus feet, with its suitability at 4,000 feet marked unknown or doubtful. That listing describes water need as low to moderate and exposure as sun or partial shade.
Idaho Firewise links fire-resistance scores to minimum planting distances, with higher scores allowing less separation. Bitter cherry’s 5 of 10 falls in the mixed band under CSU’s published thresholds for the scale.
Bitter cherry is a rose-family shrub native across parts of the Southwest, Northwest, and South-Central United States, and it can reach about 80 feet at maturity. For a homeowner, the two approvals are encouraging, but they do not establish a broad assurance of fire resistance. The fairest reading is conditional: some regional programs recommend bitter cherry, while the scored trial and FireSmart BC’s research flag leave its performance less than settled.
Form
shrub
Mature height
~80 ft
Water need
moderate
Rated in
British Columbia; New Mexico; southern Idaho / Intermountain
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Southern Idaho (ID footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2013-11-08
The official database labels itself "For Southern Idaho" and describes Idaho residents at the urban-rangeland interface. FireApproved publishes 419 existing plant owners that cite its scored rows. This bounded Southern Idaho scope is regional context, not statewide coverage or a conclusion that the score transfers unchanged to every Idaho site.
New Mexico Forestry Division publishes this as its FireWise Plant List for New Mexico. FireApproved accounts for all 140 printed rows and publishes 95 exact same-rank owners already represented in the directory; 29 exact taxa without an existing record, 14 unresolved spellings or higher-rank matches, one compound taxon cell, and one species row whose only apparent owner has an infraspecific printed identity remain held. Every published row retains the source's Y, N, ?, or blank elevation cells. Publication scope does not erase those elevation limits or establish suitability for every New Mexico site.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AZ, CA, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY.
Native range
Current cited native range in AZ, CA, ID, MT, NM, NV, OR, UT, WA.
Introduced / established
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 4b; 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 90567, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
Fire Resistance of Plants Master Database: plantable at 60' from home [Idaho minimum planting distance] (mid-scale rating)
FireWise Plant List for New Mexico: PDF page 3, Trees and Large Shrubs, p3-r27 [nm-emnrd-firewise-table-row] (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.
FireWise Plant List for New Mexico — New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, Forestry Division · 2003 Forestry Division PDF · original sourceCorroborationCompilationlineage: csu-nmsu-firewise
“FireWise Plant List for New Mexico”
Listed as Prunus emarginata (Bitter cherry) in Trees and Large Shrubs. Printed elevation cells: 4,000 ft=?, 5,000 ft=Y, 6,000 ft=Y, 7,000 ft=Y, 8,000 ft=Y, 9,000+ ft=Y. Water need: L-M; sun/shade: S/PS; mature height: 10-20; approximate bloom: May.
