General: Perennial herb from a rhizome, with slender trailing stems and erect flowering shoots; vegetative stems at first ascending then reclining, creeping and whip-like,10-100 cm long, often rooting at the nodes and becoming semi-woody, soft-hairy; flowering shoots erect, 15-50 cm tall, leafy, unarmed, soft-hairy.
Leaves: Alternate, deciduous, long-stalked, palmately compound, the stalks hairy; leaflets 3, egg-shaped, 2-6 cm long, coarsely single- or double-toothed except near the base, greenish and smooth to hairy above, pale and somewhat hairy especially on the veins beneath; stipules lanceolate.
Flowers: Inflorescence of 1 to 3 stalked flowers on erect leafy shoots, the stalks with raised glands; corollas white, rarely pale pink, the petals 5, lance-oblong to spoon-shaped, 4-10 mm long, erect; calyces hairy and often glandular, 5-lobed, the lobes lanceolate, 3-7 mm long, bent back; ovaries superior; stamens numerous, the filaments broad and flattened.
Fruits: Drupelets, smooth, several, weakly coherent in a dark-red globe-shaped cluster that tardily separates from the spongy receptacle (blackberry-like), the berries to 1 cm wide.
Moist to wet forests, thickets, streambanks, swamps and bogs in the montane zone; common throughout BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; N to NT, E to NF and S to WA, CO, SD, IN, WV and NJ.
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/intolerant, sub montane to subalpine, transcontinental North American forb (in the Pacific region, eastern parts of the coast-interior ecotone). Occurs in continental boreal and temperate climates on fresh to very moist, nitrogen-rich soils. Scattered in herbaceous understories on water-receiving sites throughÂout the interior region. A nitrophytic species characteristic of Moder and Mull humus forms.
