American Yellowrocket Barbarea orthoceras
American Yellowrocket is a biennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.3 ft and blooms Apr – Aug.
More about this plant
Barbarea orthoceras is a species of flowering plant in the family Brassicaceae known by the common name American yellowrocket. It is native to North America, including much of Canada and the western United States, as well as parts of Asia. It grows in moist areas such as meadows and riverbanks. This is a perennial herb producing a stiff, branching stem to heights between 10 and 60 centimeters. The leaves are a few centimeters long and generally oval in shape with several rounded lobes toward the end. The inflorescence is a spike or cluster of bright yellow flowers at the tip of each stem branch. The fruit is a straight, narrow silique up to 5 centimeters long. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 5 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.3 ft
- Lifespan
- Biennial
- Flower colour
- Yellow AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos (~87% expert agreement) — not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~6 caterpillar species
Barbarea supports ~6 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a modest genus for introduced plants — native genera typically support far more.
Recorded feeding on Barbarea in North America, including:
+ 2 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 15 bee visitors
15 native & managed bee species are documented visiting American Yellowrocket — the 12 most-recorded:
Wildlife & visitors 37 nectaring
Open records of who else uses American Yellowrocket — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
37 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Related plants
More Barbarea →
How we know this (2) Methods & honest limits
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (23) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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