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Blackthorn is rated fire resistant overall, but a Greek fire-protection rule treats it as particularly flammable.
Diputació de Girona and Catalonia’s fire service gave blackthorn their most favorable garden-suitability verdict in the 2020 Spanish edition. The rating assumes species-specific care. Maintenance, origin, invasiveness, and fuel structure contribute to it, together with fire-resistance literature and expert fire-service experience. This is a broad judgment about suitability for fire-adapted gardens, not a simple measurement of ignition.
The Hellenic Ministry of Environment and Energy takes the opposite position in Greece’s 2023 fire-protection regulation. It places Prunus spinosa in a table of particularly flammable endemic trees and shrubs.
Introduced in eight states, including Connecticut, Idaho, and Massachusetts, blackthorn is a shrub in the rose family. The overall verdict leans fire resistant, but it rests on limited primary evidence and does not erase Greece’s explicit warning. Its resistance should be treated as conditional, especially where local fire rules govern plant choices.
Form
shrub
Rated in
Catalonia, Spain; Greece
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
9 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
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.
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.
Guía de pirojardinería: suitable inside or outside the 25-metre maximum-risk zone [girona-2020-iuf-25m-suitability] (with its recommendation)
Κανονισμός Πυροπροστασίας Ακινήτων εντός ή πλησίον δασικώ…: section 5.4.2, Table 2δi [greece-2023-particularly-flammable] (with its avoid rating)
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.
Prunus spinosa is rated “MUY RECOMENDADA” by the guide's qualitative IUF garden-suitability method. The method assumes species-specific care and integrates fire evidence with fuel structure, maintenance, origin, invasiveness, and expert fire-service experience.