Description

Key Characters:

Growth Form: Biennial herbs 2–10 dm tall.

Stems:

Roots:

Leaves: Leaves simple. Cauline Alternate. Basal leaves lanceolate to oblong–oblanceolate, 6–17 cm long, 1–3 cm wide. Surfaces gray canescent with fine, soft, usually appressed hairs. Margins usually entire. Petioles 2–9 cm long. Stipules absent.

Flowers: Flowers in +/- scorpioid, paniculate or racemose cymes. Flowers bisexual (perfect). Pedicels 2–4 mm long, curved downward after flowering. Calyx 5-lobed, spreading or recurved in fruit; lobes broadly elliptic to suborbicular, 2–2.5 mm long, densely strigose. Corolla blue, white, or pink, funnelform or salverform, 5-lobed, the tube short, with scales in the throat; ca. 6–7 mm long, the lobes 2–3 mm long; funnelform or salverform. Stamens as many as and alternate with the corolla lobes, inserted on the tube, sometimes unequal, often with basal appendages; anthers dithecal, opening by longitudinal slits, not exserted. Ovary superior, 2(4–5)-carpellate, the carpels connate to various degrees, 2-celled, often becoming 4-celled by means of false septa, entire to 4-lobed; ovules usually 4, 2 per carpel, eventually 1 per cell, sometimes fewer by abortion, anatropous, erect, ascending, or nearly horizontal, rarely pendulous; style 1(2), sometimes 2-lobed, gynobasic, arising from between the essentially distinct ovary lobes, sometimes terminal, often heterostylous; stigma usually simple, capitate or discoid, sometimes 2-lobed or 4-lobed.

Fruit: Fruit consisting of 4 nutlets; widely spreading at maturity; apically attached to the gynobase; flat on the back; covered with barbed or hooked prickles; nutlets ovoid; compressed; 2.5–3 mm long; densely covered with barbed prickles. Seeds 1–4; endosperm absent or; if present; fleshy and scanty.

Ploidy: 2n = 24

Habitat: Naturalized and locally common in grassland and pastures.

Elevation Range: 900–1,850 m.