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Japanese skimmia is a poor choice for a fire-focused planting near the house, even when its fruit and growing conditions appeal.
The historical Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector calls Skimmia japonica NOT Firewise and records ladder potential without pruning. Its separate LZ2 placement label does not resolve that adverse assessment.
Showy red fruit brings another planning requirement: the source says fruiting needs male and female plants. It supplies no planting ratio. Partial sun and acidic soil suit the recorded site preferences, but poor drainage and drought both receive low tolerance ratings. The same row notes susceptibility to spider mites and marks invasive as No. These are reasons to assess the planting's care demands, not evidence that successful fruiting improves its fire grade.
LZ2 means the band 5 to 10 feet from the structure in a landscape framework for high fire risk. Its instructions retain lawn maintenance, use features such as stone walkways and walls to interrupt fuel, and avoid evergreens that ignite easily and burn rapidly. The accompanying tree rules require mature trees to clear the house by at least 10 feet in both vertical and horizontal directions, leaving crown-edge gaps of 10 to 15 feet. They do not specify distances between skimmia shrubs.
The selector also requires debris removal, pruning of low, diseased or dead branches, vertical and horizontal spacing, and watering and pruning that keep deadwood from accumulating. For a fruit display near a building, that workload comes alongside an unfavorable fire classification; the LZ2 label is insufficient grounds to choose this shrub.
Only uncertain or inapplicable hardiness rows are cited; no primary zone is projected.
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.
Source prints 7 · single-value meaning unresolved · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Skimmia japonica · exact match.
Source location: Cold Hardiness Zone field in the recovered selector record.
Not used for comparison: The recovered selector prints one Cold Hardiness Zone value but does not define it as a minimum threshold or a one-zone range.
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.
Eastern United States Fire Performance Plant Selector: Landscape Zone 2 — 5–10 ft from the structure; maintained lawn or fuel breaks, with easily ignited evergreens avoided [Fire Performance Plant Selector landscape zone] (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.
