Common Dogmustard Erucastrum gallicum
Common Dogmustard is an introduced annual herb, found in Alaska, Canada, and the lower 48 states. It grows to 1.2 ft and blooms May – Aug.
More about this plant
Erucastrum gallicum is an annual or biennial plant in the family Brassicaceae known by the common names hairy rocket and common dogmustard. It is a low growing plant with an erect upright habit or sometimes with ascending tops with bright yellow flowers. Plants bloom in late spring through the summer into early autumn. As plants bloom the stems extend upward and when finished blooming plants are 30 to 60 centimeters long. The plant is native to Eurasia but is an introduced species in many areas of the world, including much of North America. Wikipedia →
Common Dogmustard is flagged invasive in the U.S. These natives fill a similar niche — same growth habit, bloom season, height, and region — so you keep the look and feed local wildlife instead of spreading a problem.
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 4 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 1.2 ft
- Lifespan
- Annual
- Foliage
- Evergreen broadleaf
- 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 →✦ Bees 54 bee visitors
54 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Common Dogmustard — the 12 most-recorded:
Related plants
More Erucastrum →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
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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