Arugula is native to the Mediterranean region, where it has grown wild and been cultivated for thousands of years. The plant’s range stretches from southern Europe through North Africa and into western Asia, with its deepest roots in what is now Italy. Today it grows on every inhabited continent, but its story starts in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Ancient Mediterranean Roots
Arugula thrived as a wild plant across the dry, rocky soils of the Mediterranean basin long before anyone thought to cultivate it. The ancient Romans knew it as “eruca” and grew it widely as both a food and a medicinal herb. They considered it a stimulant and an aphrodisiac, and it appeared frequently in Roman cooking and folk medicine. The Greeks also cultivated it, though they left fewer records of its use.
As the Latin word “eruca” traveled northward through Italy over the centuries, it softened into the Northern Italian diminutive “ruchetta.” When it crossed the Alps into France, it became “roquette.” In 1530, John Palsgrave translated “roquette” into English as “rocket” in his grammar of French for English speakers, giving the plant its British name. By 1597, the English botanist John Gerard was describing “garden rocket” in his illustrated plant encyclopedia, and the name stuck throughout the English-speaking world outside of North America.
How “Rocket” Became “Arugula”
The word “arugula” traces a different path through Italian. While northern Italians said “ruchetta,” southern Italian dialects produced variations closer to “arugula.” When waves of Italian immigrants arrived in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they brought seeds and the southern dialect name with them. That’s why Americans say “arugula” while the British, Australians, and most of the rest of the English-speaking world say “rocket.” The two names refer to the same plant.
Australian colonists were growing rocket as early as the 1830s. Planting guides published in the Hobart Town Courier in 1836 listed it alongside cress and mustard as an essential kitchen garden crop.
A Relative of Mustard and Broccoli
Arugula belongs to the mustard family (Brassicaceae), making it a cousin of broccoli, cabbage, kale, radishes, and wasabi. Its scientific name is Eruca vesicaria. It’s an annual herb, meaning it completes its entire life cycle in a single growing season. The peppery, slightly bitter flavor that makes arugula distinctive comes from the same sulfur-containing compounds that give mustard its bite and horseradish its heat.
The plant grows low to the ground with lobed, deeply notched leaves and produces small white or yellowish flowers when it bolts in warm weather. It’s one of the fastest greens you can grow: Cornell University’s gardening program notes that arugula can be ready to harvest as early as four weeks after seeding. Seeds germinate best in cool conditions, between 40°F and 55°F, which is why it’s traditionally a spring and fall crop.
Where Arugula Grows Today
Commercially, arugula is grown across southern Europe (especially Italy), North Africa, Turkey, and India. In the United States, most commercial production happens in California and Arizona, where the mild winters support year-round growing. Arizona’s arugula harvest typically runs from mid-November through early April, filling the gap when colder states can’t produce leafy greens outdoors. California supplies much of the rest of the year.
Because arugula is a cool-weather crop that bolts quickly in heat, home gardeners in most of the U.S. grow it in early spring or fall. In warmer climates, it works as a winter green. It tolerates light frost, grows well in containers, and needs relatively little space, which has made it one of the more popular greens for backyard gardens.
How Arugula Became Popular in America
For most of the 20th century, Americans barely knew arugula existed. Italian-American families grew it in home gardens, but it was almost invisible in mainstream grocery stores. That changed during the 1980s and 1990s, when American food culture underwent a dramatic shift. The countercultural food movement of the 1960s and ’70s had sparked new interest in local, seasonal ingredients, anchored by pioneers like Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California. By the next decade, specialty shops like Manhattan’s Dean & DeLuca, celebrity chefs like Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse, the rise of the Food Network, and an expanding culture of gourmet cooking pushed once-obscure ingredients into the mainstream.
Arugula rode this wave alongside extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, goat cheese, and sun-dried tomatoes. What had been an ethnic garden green became a symbol of upscale American eating. Today it’s a grocery store staple, sold loose, in clamshell containers, and in pre-mixed salad blends, available year-round in virtually every supermarket in the country. Its journey from ancient Roman herb gardens to American salad bowls took roughly two thousand years, but the last forty were the fastest.