Armoracia rusticanaG.Gaertn., B.Mey. & Scherb.

Horseradishhorseradish

WFO wfo-0000549445 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Armoracia rusticana, photographed by Andrew Skotnicki
fig. a Andrew Skotnicki, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205524745

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium
The New York Botanical Garden
Accession
01206758
Filed as
Armoracia rusticana P.Gaertn., B.Mey. & Scherb.
Det. by
D. E. Atha 2010-01-01
Collected
D. E. Atha 2010-04-05
Origin
US
The sheet
View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 2 botanical countries

Regions where Armoracia rusticana is native: South European Russia, Ukraine South European RussiaUkraine
Native distribution of Armoracia rusticana, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.
RegionTDWG codeContinent
South European Russia RUS EUROPE
Ukraine UKR

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 305 in flower of 608 examined

Proportion of examined Armoracia rusticana in flower, by month
Month In flower Examined Share 95% interval
Jan 0 0 too few examined
Feb 0 0 too few examined
Mar 0 2 too few examined
Apr 22 46 48% 34% to 62%
May 164 200 82% 76% to 87%
Jun 109 146 75% 67% to 81%
Jul 9 47 19% 10% to 33%
Aug 1 99 1% 0% to 6%
Sep 0 40 0% 0% to 9%
Oct 0 23 0% 0% to 14%
Nov 0 5 0% 0% to 43%
Dec 0 0 too few examined

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Armoracia rusticana observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 305 of 608 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 4 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,990 observations

Condition 5th percentile Median 95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low -19.5 °C -6.8 °C 2.0 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high 19.7 °C 22.9 °C 26.1 °C
Annual rainfall 454 mm 673 mm 1,096 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter 48 mm 111 mm 195 mm

It is found where winters are severely cold. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,990 research-grade observations of Armoracia rusticana that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 18 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Armoracia armoracia (L.) Cockerell ex Daniels
  • Armoracia austriaca (Crantz) Bluff, Nees & Schauer
  • Armoracia lapathifolia Gilib.
  • Armoracia rustica Schur
  • Armoracia sativa Bernh.
  • Cardamine armoracia (L.) Kuntze
  • Cochlearia armoracia L.
  • Cochlearia lancifolia Stokes
  • Cochlearia lapathifolia Gilib.
  • Cochlearia rusticana Lam.
  • Cochlearia variifolia Salisb.
  • Crucifera armoracia (L.) E.H.L.Krause
  • Nasturtium armoracia (L.) Fr.
  • Radicula armoracia (L.) B.L.Rob.
  • Raphanis magna Moench
  • Raphanus rusticanus Garsault
  • Rorippa armoracia Hitchc.
  • Rorippa rusticana (G.Gaertn., B.Mey. & Scherb.) Gren. & Godr.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
  3. Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
  4. Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.