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Elderberry

Sambucus · 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: British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho); Yavapai County, Arizona; eastern US
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 Plants for Home Landscapes (PNW 590) · Official scoped edition
- ID, OR, WA; partial normalized coverage · 2023-10-01
  The October 2023 joint Pacific Northwest Extension publication explicitly names Oregon, Washington, and Idaho and publishes more than 150 plant profiles. FireApproved has normalized 155 exact plant records from the source; publication scope does not assert that every listed plant suits every site within the three states.
Fire-Resistant and Fire-Prone Plants Common to Yavapai County (Bulletin 34) · Official scoped edition
- Yavapai County (AZ footprint); partial normalized coverage · 2025-03-14
  University of Arizona Cooperative Extension authors Bulletin 34 for Yavapai County. FireApproved publishes 198 exact source owners from its resistant and prone tables and keeps the county boundary visible. County publication scope is regional Arizona context, never statewide scope.

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution: Documented in ID, OR, WA.
Native range: No current cited or legacy state native range is normalized.
Introduced / established: No introduced or established row is normalized; that does not prove native status.
USDA hardiness: Documented range 4–9.

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.

Elderberry (Sambucus) — Photo: (c) Eric Lamb, some rights reserved (CC BY) (CC BY), via iNaturalist. Species-typical, not necessarily this cultivar.

Form: shrub
USDA hardiness: 4–9
Grows in: ID, OR, WA
Rated in: British Columbia; OR/WA/ID; Pacific Northwest (Oregon / Washington / Idaho); Yavapai County, Arizona +1
Family: Viburnaceae
Evidence: 5 cited sources

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 Plants for Home Landscapes (PNW 590) · record shrubs:Elderberry · 2023-10 · as of 2026-08-26

4–9 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated

Source taxon: Sambucus spp. · exact match.

Source location: Elderberry profile, USDA hardiness zones field.

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.

FireSmart BC Plant Program: suitable for HIZ extended zone (30-100 m) [FireSmart BC Home Ignition Zone] (with its recommendation)
Fire-resistant plant profile galleries: Elderberry — Sambucus spp. [osu-2023-shrubs-gallery] (with its recommendation)
Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector: Master Plant DB row 1130 [lwf-2024-fps-carrier] (mid-scale 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.

Mid-scale / conditional (1)

Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector — USDA Forest Service Northeastern Area S&PF + state Firewise programs (WV, OH, PA, DE, DC, MD, NJ) · 2024-03-05 carrier workbook · original source Primary evidence Keyed curation lineage: ufifas-srs-tree

“M-H”

Living With Fire workbook row 1130 attributes this value to FPS.

Last verified 2026-08-23. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

Profiles: USDA PLANTS · GBIF · iNaturalist · Wikidata · ITIS

Sambucus (Elderberry). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/sambucus/. Last verified 2026-08-23.