General: Perennial from a slender taproot; stems simple or slightly branched, hairy, 20-70 cm tall.
Leaves: Basal leaves (if present) entire to coarsely toothed or pinnately cut; stem leaves alternate (or lacking in dwarfed plants), entire to pinnately cut, linear-oblong or the lower oblanceolate, up to 15 cm long and 2.5 cm wide, hairy.
Flowers: Heads with ray and disk flowers, solitary or few on long stalks; involucres 8-20 mm tall; involucral bracts several, overlapping, loosely hairy and spreading, with long-pointed tips; receptacles with well-developed scales which exceed the achenes; ray flowers yellow, often with purple bases, 6-16, commonly 13, 1-3.5 cm long, tips broad and 3-lobed; disk flowers brownish-purple, rarely yellow, woolly-hairy at the top.
Fruits: Achenes 3-4 mm long, faintly ribbed, densely hairy; pappus of 6-10 long-pointed, white scales.
Dry grasslands and shrublands in the lowland, steppe and lower montane zones, also on moist sand bars (lowland zone); common in SC and SE BC, introduced in SW BC (lower Fraser Valley); E to MB and S to CO, UT and N 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)
