Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.
Extension services in Ohio and Michigan support Japanese meadowsweet as a fire-resistant choice.
Ohio State University Extension recommends Japanese meadowsweet with an L rating: low flammability, one step above very low on its five-point scale. Its assessment also says the shrub requires acid soil, is sensitive to disease, and adapts to urban settings. Michigan State University Extension reaches the same practical conclusion through a simpler system, listing Japanese meadowsweet among plants considered wildfire-resistant and recommended for Michigan’s climate.
The agreement matters because the two services express their judgments differently. Ohio State gives the plant a relative flammability grade, while Michigan State places it directly on a wildfire-resistant list. Neither finding means the plant cannot burn, but together they support choosing it where lower-flammability landscaping is desired.
Japanese meadowsweet is a rose-family shrub that reaches about two feet at maturity and needs moderate water. It is hardy to USDA zone 4b and has been introduced in 27 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, and California. Fire resistance does not settle every planting question, however: the species has also been flagged as invasive in one jurisdiction, so local restrictions and ecological concerns still deserve attention.
Form
shrub
Mature height
~2 ft
Water need
moderate
Rated in
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest
Uses
mass-planting, specimen
On this lot
1. Fire evidence and conditions
Fire evidence
Fire-resistant — location does not change the cited classification.
Fire-performance conditions
Fire ecology context
Placement evidence
Evidence regions
Michigan / Great Lakes; Ohio / Midwest
Maintenance
Typed publication scope: 2 scopes across 2 cited fire sources
Michigan State University Extension Bulletin E2948 is explicitly a list of wildfire-resistant landscape plants for Michigan and includes a Michigan-native field. FireApproved publishes 221 exact GBIF owners from 226 represented source rows and holds 15 complex or non-exact rows. This dated publication scope is not a current site-suitability determination.
Ohio State University Extension Bulletin 921 is an Ohio publication that describes Ohio fire seasons and landscape conditions and labels nativity to Ohio. FireApproved publishes 352 exact source-owning plant records from its eight rated tables. This historical publication scope does not assert current extension endorsement or that a listed plant suits every Ohio site.
2. Why this plant is relevant here
State distribution
Documented in CT, DE, GA, IL, IN, KY, MA, MD, ME, MI, MO, NC, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, SC, TN, VA, WV.
Native range
Introduced / established
27 sourced range or established records. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
2 applicable cited hardiness statements overlap but have different boundaries; compare each complete source row.
3. Legal, ecological, and broader status
Legal-list status
Seed-list status
Reported invasive here
1 ecological invasive report.
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.
Source location: PlantCharacteristics record 91813, Temperature, Minimum (°F).
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.
