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mexican elder/blue elderberry

Sambucus nigra · Viburnaceae · all Sambucus records

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: Fire-resistant — 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: 3 source placement records; source schemes remain separate.
Evidence regions: Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest; Arkansas; Catalonia, Spain; Global; Oregon (Willamette Valley)
Maintenance: No sourced horticultural maintenance assertion is normalized; fire-test conditions do not supply maintenance advice.

Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources

Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley (EM 9103) · Official scoped edition
- 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.
FIREWISE Plant Materials for 3,000 ft. and Higher Elevations (AZ1289) · Official scoped edition
- Arizona at or above 3,000 feet (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2011-12-01
  AZ1289 is explicitly limited to Arizona elevations of 3,000 feet and higher. FireApproved publishes 69 exact owners as regional Arizona context, retaining every water and elevation condition. It is never promoted to statewide low-desert guidance or an independent Tier 1 vote.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in AZ.
Native range: No current cited or legacy state native range is normalized.
Introduced / established: 3 sourced range or established records; set a location to match them. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness: Documented range 5–8.

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.

mexican elder/blue elderberry (Sambucus nigra) — Photo: (c) Rison Thumboor, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA) (CC BY-SA), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: tree
USDA hardiness: 5–8
Grows in: AZ
Rated in: Arizona above 3,000 feet / interior Southwest; Arkansas; Catalonia, Spain; Global +1
Family: Viburnaceae
Evidence: 7 cited sources

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.

Current native

0

exact source areas

Current introduced

3

exact source areas

Qualified

0

doubtful or extinct source rows

3 introduced source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04

Connecticut (CT)
Pennsylvania (PA)
Virginia (VA)

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.

Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley (EM 9103) · EM 9103, February 2015 · as of 2026-08-26

5–8 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated

Source taxon: Sambucus nigra · exact match.

Source location: Black Elder or Common Elder profile (PDF page 111).

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)
Fire-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Black Elder or Common Elder profile (PDF page 111) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
FireWise Plants offer colorful choices for Fire Safe Gardens: Scientific name / Common name / Comments table [arkansas-firewise-table] (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.

Listed without a rating (3)

FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

3 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.
- “maximum flame temperature (°C): 517.7666667” · score 517.7666667 (FLAMITS — maximum flame temperature (°C))
  
  FLAMITS record 16393; Combustibility measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Pacheco2022-1; sampling october to november 2022. Primary study Pacheco2022: Pacheco, A. S., Goodman, H. D., Hankenson, L., Fisk, J. J., Ortiz, A., Marinace, H. M., ... Tng, D. Y. P. (2022). Fighting fire with food: Assessing the flammability of crop plant species for building fire resilient agroforestry systems. in review, preprint.
- “burning duration (s): 7.5” · score 7.5 (FLAMITS — burning duration (s))
  
  FLAMITS record 16394; Sustainability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Pacheco2022-1; sampling october to november 2022. Primary study Pacheco2022: Pacheco, A. S., Goodman, H. D., Hankenson, L., Fisk, J. J., Ortiz, A., Marinace, H. M., ... Tng, D. Y. P. (2022). Fighting fire with food: Assessing the flammability of crop plant species for building fire resilient agroforestry systems. in review, preprint.
- “estimated burnt biomass (%): 13.33333333” · score 13.33333333 (FLAMITS — estimated burnt biomass (%))
  
  FLAMITS record 16395; Consumability measurement; plant part branches; fuel all; predrying yes; device grill; site Pacheco2022-1; sampling october to november 2022. Primary study Pacheco2022: Pacheco, A. S., Goodman, H. D., Hankenson, L., Fisk, J. J., Ortiz, A., Marinace, H. M., ... Tng, D. Y. P. (2022). Fighting fire with food: Assessing the flammability of crop plant species for building fire resilient agroforestry systems. in review, preprint.

Last verified 2026-08-24. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: GBIF ·

Sambucus nigra (mexican elder/blue elderberry). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/sambucus-nigra/. Last verified 2026-08-24.