Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Woodland pinkroot is fire resistant, with low-flammability ratings in North Carolina and a fire-resistant recommendation in Oregon.
NC State’s extension service consistently places woodland pinkroot in the low band of its flammability scales. The four-band scale in the 2005 guidance from NC State and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service runs from low through extreme; woodland pinkroot receives its lowest rating. The current North Carolina guidance also calls it low flammability, and the live Plant Toolbox repeats that classification. On those scales, low-flammability plants are recommended rather than treated as mixed or unsuitable choices.
Oregon State’s extension service reaches the same practical conclusion by a different route. Its Willamette Valley guide profiles woodland pinkroot, under the name Indian pink, among plants recommended as fire resistant. Unlike North Carolina’s multi-band ratings, Oregon uses inclusion in its profiles as a yes-or-no recommendation for that region’s growing conditions. The agreement across these approaches supports the fire-resistant classification.
The native range of this Loganiaceae perennial includes the southeastern, northeastern, north-central and south-central United States. It is listed for USDA zones 5a through 9b. Regional climate still matters when choosing a plant, but the available extension guidance gives a clear and consistent answer: woodland pinkroot belongs among the lower-flammability landscape choices.
Form
perennial
Rated in
NC; North Carolina; North Carolina / southeastern US; Oregon (Willamette Valley)
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
The complete three-table AG-874 plant list is explicitly for North Carolina and contains 202 low-, medium-, or high-flammability rows. FireApproved accounts for all source rows under its strict taxonomy and lineage rules; source scope does not establish local suitability at a particular North Carolina site.
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.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MD, MO, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA.
Native range
Current cited native range in AL, AR, FL, GA, IL, IN, KY, LA, MO, MS, NC, OK, SC, TN, TX, VA.
Introduced / established
1 sourced range or established record. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented range 5–9.
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.
5–9 explicit range · whole zone precision · source stated
Source taxon: Spigelia marilandica · exact match.
Source location: Indian Pink profile (PDF page 54).
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-resistant Landscape Plants for the Willamette Valley: Indian Pink profile (PDF page 54) [osu-em-9103-profile] (with its recommendation)
North Carolina Extension Gardener Plant Toolbox: spigelia-marilandica [nc-toolbox-flammability-facet] (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.
