Synonyms: Other names: sticky polemonium, sky pilot Nomenclature: viscosum = sticky Nativity / Invasiveness: Montana native plant
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Description
General: low perennial from a stout taproot and much-branched, sometimes elongate root crown, up to 20 cm tall, sticky with dense, stalked glands or glandular-long-hairy, and strongly foul-smelling.
Leaves: mainly basal plus about 2 alternate, up to 15 cm long, the rather short stalk with a conspicuously expanded and paper-textured, persistent base. Leaflets numerous, crowded, mostly or all 2- to 5-cleft to the base or nearly so, thus apparently whorled, the individual segments broadly ovate or obovate, 1.5-6 mm long and 1-3 mm wide.
Flowers: several in a dense, rounded cluster, usually elongating a little in fruit, Calyx 7-12 mm long at flowering, the 5 narrow, pointed lobes shorter than the tube. Corolla blue, more or less funnel-shaped, 17-25 mm long, longer than wide, often very conspicuously so, the 5 lobes shorter than the tube. Stamens distinctly shorter than to sometimes nearly equaling the corolla.
July-August.
Fruits: capsules, 3-celled, enclosed by the calyx, containing few to several seeds.
Distribution
Open, rocky places at high altitudes in the mountains, commonly above timber line, in w. and c. parts of MT. Also from s.w. Alberta to WA, OR, NV and n. NM.
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No edibility data
No medicinal data
