Barbarea vulgarisW.T.Aiton

bitter wintercress

WFO wfo-0000560064 Accepted WFO 2026-06 7 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–g

Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Виктория Билоус
fig. a Виктория Билоус, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205701639
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Anastasia_Surkova
fig. b Anastasia_Surkova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203935023
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Силаева Татьяна Борисовна
fig. c Силаева Татьяна Борисовна, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203559503
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Marina Potapova
fig. d Marina Potapova, CC0 1.0 / obs. 203207874
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Anastasia_Surkova
fig. e Anastasia_Surkova, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 203937743
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Екатерина Кропочева
fig. f Екатерина Кропочева, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201980066
Barbarea vulgaris, photographed by Aleksey Shumkov
fig. g Aleksey Shumkov, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 201503158

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.

Confused withby our own model

These are not lookalikes we guessed at. Each one is a species our identification model genuinely mistook for this plant, and how many times. The error rate is published.

Flowering n = 5,272 observations

Peak flowering in May, from 5,272 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 63 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.

  • Arabis barbarea Bernh.
  • Barbarea abortiva Hausskn.
  • Barbarea altaica Andrz. ex Steud.
  • Barbarea arcuata (Opiz J. ex Presl & C.Presl) Rchb.
  • Barbarea arcuata Andrz. ex DC.
  • Barbarea arcuata f. brachycarpa (Rouy & Fouc.) Kuusk
  • Barbarea arcuata f. pubescens (N.Busch) Kuusk
  • Barbarea arcuata var. pubescens Busch
  • Barbarea augustana Boiss.
  • Barbarea barbarea MacMill.
  • Barbarea barbarea subsp. brachycarpa (Rouy & Foucaud) Piper
  • Barbarea barbarea var. longisiliquosa Farw.
  • Barbarea ceretana Sennen
  • Barbarea conferta Boiss. & Heldr. ex Boiss.
  • Barbarea croatica Borb. & Vuk.
  • Barbarea hirsuta Weihe
  • Barbarea iberica DC.
  • Barbarea kayserii Schur
  • Barbarea lepuznica Nyár.
  • Barbarea linnaei Spenn.
  • Barbarea lyrata Asch.
  • Barbarea macrophylla Halácsy
  • Barbarea oligosperma K.Koch
  • Barbarea pyrenaica Jord.

and 39 more.

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.

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