General: Annual herb from a taproot; stems slender, erect, 3-30 cm tall, simple or branched from below the middle, minutely hairy and sometimes glandular-hairy above.
Leaves: Opposite, unstalked, few, egg-shaped to circular, 2-18 mm long, palmately veined, prominently 7- to 11-toothed, sparsely hairy; bracts resembling the leaves but with more pointed teeth.
Flowers: Inflorescence a terminal spike of single small flowers in the axils of leafy bracts; corollas whitish with purple markings and a yellow eye, about 5 mm long, 2-lipped, the upper lip slightly concave with 2 lobes, the lower lip spreading, with 3 shallowly notched, oblong lobes; calyces bell-shaped, hairy or glandular-hairy, almost as long as the corolla, 4-toothed, the teeth triangular or lanceolate; stamens 4.
Fruits: Capsules, oblong, flattened, 3-6 mm long, more or less hairy; seeds numerous, narrowly winged.
Moist to wet streambanks, shores, bogs, gravelly openings in thickets, and heath in the montane and subalpine zones; infrequent in BC in and east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains and north of 52degreeN; N to AK, YT and NT, E to NF and S to MT; Greenland.
The table below shows the species-specific information calculated from original data (BEC database) provided by the BC Ministry of Forests and Range. (Updated August, 2013)
