General: Biennial or short-lived perennial or occasionally annual herb from a slender taproot; stems simple or branched, 10-30 cm tall, hairy with simple, branched, or starlike hairs.
Leaves: Mostly basal, in a rosette, oblanceolate, 5-30 mm long, 2-6 mm wide; stem leaves 1-6, lanceolate to egg-shaped, 0.5-3 cm long, 2-14 mm wide, entire to few toothed, hairy with 4- to 7-rayed hairs, usually mixed with branched or simple hairs.
Flowers: Racemes 5- to 30-flowered, elongate in fruit; flower stalks 3-10 mm long, ascending, with starlike or branched hairs; petals white, sometimes creamy yellow, 2-3.5 mm long; sepals 1.5-2 mm long, soft-hairy.
Fruits: Silicles, 7-14 mm long, 1.5-2.5 mm wide, narrowly-lanceolate, plane, soft-hairy with simple and branched hairs; styles 0.1-0.2 mm long; seeds 20-70, about 0.8 mm long.
Moist to mesic forests, meadows and rocky slopes in the montane and subalpine zones; infrequent in S BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains, rare northward; N to AK, YT and NT, E to AB and S to WY, NV and OR.
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)