General: Low to medium shrub, 0.3-1.5 m tall; stems spreading to erect, freely branched; young branches silky-hairy but soon becoming smooth; older branches with brown, shredding bark.
Leaves: Alternate, deciduous, numerous, short-stalked, pinnately compound; leaflets 3 to 7, usually 5, crowded, oblong to linear, 0.5-2 cm long, greyish-green and silky to sparsely hairy above, silvery-silky beneath, the margins entire and often rolled under.
Flowers: Inflorescence of 1 to few stalked flowers, single in the leaf axils or in small clusters at the branch tips; corollas yellow, saucer-shaped, (small and pale at low elevations to larger and brighter at higher elevations), the petals 5, nearly circular, 6-14 mm long; calyces soft-hairy, 5-lobed, the lobes lance-egg-shaped, 4-9 mm long, alternating with 5 narrower, slightly longer bractlets; ovaries superior, the styles club-shaped; stamens 25 to 30.
Fruits: Achenes, numerous, clustered, egg-shaped, 1.5-2 mm long, coarsely white-hairy.
Dry to wet meadows, thickets, fens, bogs, rocky slopes, gravelly flats and tundra in the montane to alpine zones; common throughout BC, except rare on the coast; circumboreal, N to AK and NT, E to NF and S to NJ, CO, NM and CA; Eurasia.
