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Spanish moss

Tillandsia usneoides · Bromeliaceae · also called Tillandsia usneoides · Wikipedia

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Is this one for your yard?

Enter your ZIP to see whether this is legal to plant in your state, and whether it survives your winter.

Form
perennial
Water need
moderate
Rated in
Global
On this lot

1. Fire evidence and conditions

Fire evidence
Mixed evidence — location does not change the cited classification.
Evidence regions
Global

2. Why this plant is relevant here

State distribution
Documented in AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MD, MS, NC, PR, SC, TX, VA, VI.
Native range
Current cited native range in AL, AR, FL, GA, LA, MS, NC, PR, SC, TX, VA.
Introduced / established
1 sourced range or established record. This is not an invasive warning.
USDA hardiness
Documented minimum 9a; no upper limit is documented.

3. Legal, ecological, and broader status

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.

Current native

11

exact source areas

Current introduced

0

exact source areas

Qualified

1

doubtful or extinct source row

12 native source areas · World Checklist of Vascular Plants, version 16 v16, as of 2026-06-04
  • Alabama (AL)
  • Arkansas (AR)
  • Florida (FL)
  • Georgia (GA)
  • Louisiana (LA)
  • Maryland (MD) extinct
  • Mississippi (MS)
  • North Carolina (NC)
  • Puerto Rico (PR)
  • South Carolina (SC)
  • Texas (TX)
  • 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.

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 (2)
Corroboration (2 rows from 1 source)
  • FLAMITS: FLAMmability plant traiTS database — Dryad / Global Ecology and Biogeography · Dryad version 9 · original source Corroboration Trait database lineage: meta-aggregator

    2 cited rows from this source; its identity, lineage and tier are stated once.

    • Primary study Hough1969: Hough, W. A. (1969). Caloric Value of Some Forest Fuels of the Southern United States. Res. Note SE-120. Asheville, NC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southeastern Forest Experiment Station.

      Shared row context: Combustibility measurement; plant part litter; fuel live; predrying yes; device calorimeter; sampling august.

      • “calorific value (kcal/kg): 4541”

        FLAMITS record 5040; site Hough1969-2.

      • “calorific value (kcal/kg): 4627”

        FLAMITS record 5041; site Hough1969-1.

Fire-resistant perennials instead

Last verified 2026-08-25. JSON (CC BY 4.0)

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

Tillandsia usneoides (Tillandsia usneoides). FireApproved. https://fireapproved.com/plants/tillandsia-usneoides/. Last verified 2026-08-25.