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Brassicaceae family

Grayleaf Draba Draba cinerea

Native

Grayleaf Draba is a perennial wildflower native to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. It grows to 0.2 ft.

Growing & care

USDA PLANTS · TRY
Size & form
Sources · Size & form
TRY Plant Trait Database (CC BY 4.0) — Height
USDA PLANTS — Lifespan
Height
0.2 ft
Lifespan
Perennial
In the garden
Ground-cover layer — Sits in the ground-cover of a layered food forest or polyculture.Open guide →
Living mulch / groundcover — Low, ground-hugging grower — can carpet bare soil as a living mulch, shading out weeds and holding moisture.Open guide →
derived roles
Species characteristics from USDA PLANTS (public domain) + TRY (CC BY) — general guidance, not a guarantee for your exact site. Deer "browsing" is documented palatability, not a deer-proof claim.

Wildlife & pollinators

How pollinator value is scored →
❧ Caterpillar hosts ~2 caterpillar species

Draba supports ~2 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.

Recorded feeding on Draba in North America, including:

Euchloe creusa · Northern Marblewing Paramidea midea · white / sulphur butterfly Pieris napi · Green-Veined White Pontia occidentalis · Western White
Keystone count (genus-level) from Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use records. Named species (a documented Nearctic sample, not exhaustive) from NHM HOSTS (CC0).
Species thumbnails re-hosted from iNaturalist — Creative Commons, credited per image (hover for credit). Click any species to see it on iNaturalist. Not exhaustive; many taxa have no openly-licensed photo yet.
Frequently grows with

Across 47 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Grayleaf Draba, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.

Entireleaf Mountain-avens · 83% Curly Sedge · 51% Beautiful Sandwort · 51% Blackish Oxytrope · 51% Bering Chickweed · 49% Arctic Bluegrass · 47% Glaucous Bluegrass · 43% Longstalk Starwort · 43%
"%" = share of this plant's plots that also held the species. From sPlotOpen → (Sabatini et al. 2021, CC BY 4.0) — open vegetation plots: wild community composition, not garden design.
Sources for this entry (14) Open & cited
[01] Scientific name & family — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[02] Growth habit & duration — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[03] Native status & distribution — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503)
[04] Common name — USDA PLANTS (via GBIF)
[05] Invasive / introduced status — USDA PLANTS (DwCA, Zenodo 17903503) — native status
[07] Ecological value — Warren II 2026 (CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[08] Conservation rank — NatureServe Explorer (CC BY)
[11] Caterpillar host count — Warren II 2026 (Dryad, CC0) · Tallamy host-use counts
[12] Caterpillar species — NHM HOSTS (CC0)
[13] County range — GBIF Open Data — open-licensed occurrences (CC0/CC-BY) → county
Spot an error or have a better photo? Every field links to its source, and the whole dataset is open.
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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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