Hamilton County, TN Invasive Plant Rules: Prohibited Species (2026)

Article V, Section 307 of the Hamilton County Zoning Regulations sets installation standards for every tree, shrub and screen required elsewhere in Article V, including street yards (Section 303), screening between incompatible uses (Section 305) and landscape buffers. Subsection F, Prohibited Plants, lists sixteen species that cannot be used to satisfy any of those planting requirements: Kudzu Vine, Purple Loosestrife, Japanese Honeysuckle, Shrub Honeysuckle, Autumn Olive, Common Privet, Tree of Heaven, Lespedeza, Garlic Mustard, Paulownia, Multiflora Rose, Siberian Elm, Silver Poplar, Mimosa, Mulberry and Silver Maple, excluded for problems with hardiness, maintenance or nuisance.

The same list is repeated in Article VI's commercial telecommunication tower landscaping standards at Section 410(6), so it governs tower-site buffers too. The rule targets required landscaping, not a property owner's whole yard: the county does not order removal of volunteer kudzu or privet growing wild on a lot, but a developer's landscape plan submitted for site plan, subdivision or special-permit approval must substitute an approved species from the Class I, Class II, screening tree or screening shrub lists in the same section. Plan review runs through the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Agency and the Director of Building Inspection, who confirms landscape compliance before a certificate of occupancy issues.

Property owners maintaining required landscaping under Section 307E must replace any dead or diseased plant with a conforming species, so a banned tree that dies cannot be replanted with another banned tree.