General: Perennial herb from a thick yellow taproot; stems usually single, erect, 5-30 cm tall, unbranched, densely long-hairy to white-woolly, especially in the inflorescence.
Leaves: Basal leaves numerous, long-stalked, narrowly lanceolate, deeply pinnately lobed to pinnately compound, the lobes toothed to pinnately cleft; stem leaves alternate, short-stalked, rather numerous and not much smaller than the basal ones.
Flowers: Inflorescence a dense, bracted, terminal spike of numerous flowers, the spike soon elongating, the bracts similar to the leaves but reduced upward, white-woolly; corollas pink to lavender, smooth, 15-20 (25) mm long, 2-lipped, the upper lip somewhat arched, hood-like, beakless and lacking teeth, the lower lip about as long as the upper, 3-lobed; calyces 4-5 mm long, long-woolly, 5-toothed, the teeth triangular, about 1 mm long; stamens 4, the filaments long-hairy.
Fruits: Capsules, egg-shaped, pointy-tipped, 8-13 mm long; seeds several, with a loose, ashy-grey, honeycombed seed-coat.
Mesic to dry rocky slopes and ridges and grassy tundra in the alpine zone; infrequent in BC north of 54degreeN; circumpolar, N to AK, YT and NT and E to AB, disjunct to N PQ; Greenland, 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)
