General: Perennial herb with slender, long-creeping (to 1 m) stolons or runners, rooting at the nodes and producing short (10 cm or less), erect flowering shoots with 1 to 4 leaves; unarmed, fine-hairy to nearly smooth.
Leaves: Alternate, deciduous (some persisting through the winter), long-stalked, palmately compound; leaflets usually 5, sometimes 3 with the lateral leaflets divided nearly to the base, egg- to diamond-shaped, 1-3 cm long, irregularly coarse-double-toothed to cleft, smooth except for hairy veins beneath; stipules membranous, egg-shaped.
Flowers: Inflorescence of single long-stalked flowers on erect leafy shoots, the stalks very slender, 2-8 cm long; corollas white, the petals 5, oblong, 6-10 mm long, spreading or bent back; calyces smooth or sparsely hairy, 5-lobed, the lobes lanceolate, often few-toothed near the tip, 4-11 mm long, bent back; ovaries superior; stamens numerous.
Fruits: Drupelets, smooth, 1 to 6, more or less coherent in a small red raspberry-like cluster that remains attached to the receptacle, the berries about 1 cm wide.
Moist to mesic open forests, glades and streambanks in the lowland to subalpine zones; common throughout BC, especially south; N to AK, E to AB and S to MT, ID 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)
A shade-tolerant, montane to subalpine, Asian and Western North American forb distributed equally in the Pacific and Cordilleran regions. Occurs in boreal and cool temperate climates on fresh to very moist, nitrogen-poor soils; its occurrence increases with increasing elevation and precipitation and decreases with increasing latitude. Common in semi-open coniferous forests on waterÂshedding and water-receiving sites. Typically associated with Blechnum spicant, Clintonia uniflora, Rhododendron albiflorum, Rhytidiopsis robusta, Vaccinium alaskaense, and V. membranaceum. An oxylophytic species characteristic of Mor humus forms.
