General: plant height: 5-30 cm tall. Growth habit: tufted perennial, erect to creeping at base, from fleshy thick roots, without rhizomes. Stems: usually several, simple, hairless.
Leaves: opposite, hairless, mostly 7-9 pairs, the lowest joined around stem at base, but usually with blades at least as long as the sheath. Main stem leaves 1-2.5 cm long, broadly lance-shaped to ovate-rounded.
Flowers: funnel-shaped, usually single or in terminal 3's. Corolla 25-40 mm long, deep blue and variously streaked or mottled with green, to (rarely) yellowish, with 5 spreading, pointed or rounded lobes, with 2-4 fringes between each lobe. Calyx funnel-shaped, 4-10 mm long, from membranous and bluish- or purplish-tinged to greenish overall. Lobes from broadly oval and spreading, to lance-shaped and erect and from twice as long as the tube to greatly reduced and linear to oblong, or lacking entirely, the calyx tube then usually deeply cleft to unequally 2-lipped.
July-October.
Fruits: capsules with flattened, spindle-shaped seeds.
Distribution
Meadows, swamps, and stream banks, montane to alpine zone, in w. and s. parts of MT. Also from B.C. to CA.
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No edibility data
No medicinal data
