General: perennial from rhizomes, occasionally with stolons, the stems slender, 20-30 cm tall, naked or with 1 or 2 membranous bracts or even with 1 (2) reduced leaves, from glandular-short-hairy to nearly hairless.
Leaves: basal, long-stalked, the blades cordate, 2-5 cm broad and usually somewhat longer, almost hairless to coarsely stiff-hairy on both surfaces, shallowly and indistinctly 5- to 9-lobed and doubly blunt-toothed.
Flowers: 6-25 in a narrow spike, the flowers stalks 2-7 mm long. Petals 5, greenish, 2-3 mm long, fringed into 4-10 thread-like side segments. Calyx broadly saucer-shaped, becoming more cup-shaped in fruit, 3-4 (5) mm, broad, the lobes triangular, spreading to curved back. Stamens 5, opposite the petals. Styles almost lacking, the 2 stigmas nearly stalkless, 2-lobed and cordate in outline as viewed from above.
June-August.
Fruits: 2-sided capsules, splitting open widely at tip as cupped structures holding shiny, black seeds.
Distribution
Moist woods, especially along streams, to wet mountain meadows, in w. and c. parts of MT. Also from AK, along the coast, Alberta to n.e. CA and CO.
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No edibility data
No medicinal data
