FIELD ID CHARACTERISTICS:
Flowers and fruits are distinctive.
Description: Small, leafy herb rarely 0.5 m tall, usually less, with groups of purple hooded flowers at stem tips.
Leaves: Narrowly elliptical leaves, about 4 cm long and 1 cm wide; upper leaves smaller. Leaves have mostly entire margins, occasionally slightly toothed.
Flowers/Fruit: Flowers are light blue-purple with a hooded upper petal extending over the lower petal, which has a pair of white marks. Flowers are at stem tip, with many leafy bracts. Fruits are white or tan, flattened, round, and slightly cupped like miniature scoops. Flowers May through July; fruits July to August.
Habit and Range: Found in a wide variety of partly shaded to open habitats, including pine wetlands, forest seeps, bottomland wetlands, ditches and other moist places. In the Coastal Plain it is more often found in wetlands; in the Piedmont, it is found in moist but also dry places. In the Mountains, it is found both in damp and drier places, but prefers more moisture. Common statewide.
