Cistus salviifolius - Sage-leaved cistus

Sage-leaved cistus (Cistus salviifolius) is a low, spreading evergreen shrub native to the Mediterranean basin, grown as a drought-tolerant ground cover on poor, sandy soils.

Inputs

• Hardiness zone 8¹
• Hardiness zone 9¹
• Hardiness zone 10¹
• Hardiness zone 11¹

Type

• Shrub
• Evergreen
• Perennial

Functions

• Pollination¹
• Ground cover¹
• Drought-tolerance¹
• Flammable²

Footnotes

1. Cistus salviifolius | Plants for a Future ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

2. White, R.H. & Zipperer, W.C., “Testing and classification of individual plants for fire behaviour,” International Journal of Wildland Fire 19(2), 2010, pp. 213-227 (https://research.fs.usda.gov/download/treesearch/36499.pdf), Table 6: cone-calorimeter data (after Weise et al. 2005) ranking Cistus salviifolius 8th of 10 species tested for time to sustained ignition; corroborated by Contra Costa County Fire Protection District’s “Wildland Urban Interface Vegetation Lists,” 2021 (https://web.archive.org/web/20250504084353/https://ccfd.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/CCFD-WUI-Vegetation-Lists-2021.pdf), which requires 30ft structure clearance for “Cistus Salviifolius” by name ↩