General: Perennial herb from slender rhizome; flowering stems 5-25 cm tall, single.
Leaves: Evergreen, basal, leathery, lustrous, oval to egg-shaped or circular, the blades 1-4.5 cm long, 1-5 cm wide, from nearly heart-shaped to blunt, rounded, or pointed at base, blunt to rounded at tip, nearly entire to toothed or undulating on margin, green above, often reddish beneath, often whitened along the veins; stalks 1-8 cm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence a 4- to 11-flowered terminal, cylindric raceme, with dry, brown, membranous, broadly lanceolate bracts, the flowers weakly bilaterally symmetric; flower stalks 2-8 mm long; petals broadly rounded, creamy white with some pink, 7-12 mm long; sepals petal-like, purplish with irregular, membranous margins, elliptic-oblong, 2-4 mm long, distinctly veined; anthers about 2 mm long, rounded and rather blunt at the base, yellow to pink, the pores on very short tubes; filaments slender, almost thread-like at the summit; styles up to 6 mm long at maturity, bent at the base, with a collar below the stigma.
Moist heath, turfy tundra, thickets, and mossy forests in the montane to alpine zones; infrequent in N BC; circumpolar, N to AK, YT, and NT and E to NF; N Eurasia.
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)
BC Ministry of Environment:BC Species and Ecosystems Explorer,
the authoritative source for conservation information in British Columbia.
Synonyms and Alternate Names
Pyrola borealis Rydb. Pyrola canadensis Andres Pyrola gormanii Rydb. Pyrola grandiflora var. canadensis (Andres) Porsild Pyrola grandiflora var. gormanii Rydb. Pyrola occidentalis R. Br. ex D. Don