General: Low to medium shrub, 0.5-2 m tall, spreading by rhizomes and sometimes thicket-forming; stems spindly to stout, erect to spreading, usually with a pair of straight or slightly curved prickles near the base of the leaves, often with weak internodal prickles or bristles especially on young shoots; mature stems reddish- to greyish-brown.
Leaves: Alternate, deciduous, odd-pinnately compound, the leaf-stalk and axis short-hairy and sometimes glandular; leaflets 5, 7 or 9, elliptic to egg-shaped, 1.5-5 cm long, short- or glandular-hairy to smooth beneath, coarsely single-toothed, the teeth not gland-tipped; stipules entire or glandular-blunt-toothed, short-hairy on the back.
Flowers: Inflorescence of 1 to 5 stalked flowers in a small, short cluster at the end of a lateral branchlet; corollas pink, saucer-shaped, rather small (3-5 cm across), the petals 5, 12-25 mm long; calyces 5-lobed, the lobes lanceolate, long-tapering and narrowing then flaring below the tip, 10-20 mm long, rarely stalked-glandular on the back, persistent; ovaries superior but enclosed in the urn-shaped floral tube (hypanthium); stamens numerous.
Fruits: Achenes, numerous, stiffly long-hairy on one side, enclosed by the fleshy hypanthium, which ripens into a dark red, globe-shaped to ellipsoid hip 6-12 mm long.
Dry rocky slopes, open forests and clearings, and moist gullies, draws and streambanks in grasslands and savanna in the steppe and montane zones; frequent in S and C BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains, infrequent northward; E to SK and S to WI, MO, TX and CA.
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)
