WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains cover

Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 26: Crassulaceæ Stone-Crop Family
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

About This Book

A concise field manual that surveys the alpine and subalpine plants encountered along the Canadian Rockies and the Selkirks accessible by the trans-mountain railway, emphasizing distinct regional assemblages and plant adaptations to differences in moisture and exposure. Species are arranged by botanical families with general keys to families and genera; treatments include ferns, conifers, shrubs and the majority of herbaceous flowering plants while excluding grasses, sedges, and willows. Descriptions are accompanied by plates, watercolour illustrations and photographs, and the text relates local taxa to comparable mountain floras while noting characteristic species, habitats and elevational ranges.

Crassulaceæ
Stone-Crop Family

Fleshy smooth herbs with alternate leaves, and perfect flowers in terminal, oftentimes 1-sided cymes. Calyx 4—5-lobed; petals 4—5, distinct, stamens twice as many as the petals; carpels 4—5, styles short.

Sedum stenopetalum Pursh. Narrow Petaled Stone-crop.

Perennial, tufted, smooth, flowering branches 3—7 inches long. Leaves alternate, crowded, sessile, linear ¼—½ an inch long, entire. Flowers bright yellow, nearly half an inch broad in a 5—7-forked, compact cyme, petals narrowly lanceolate, very acute.

Common throughout the Rockies in moist, gravelly or sandy soil, on river shores, and on rocky slopes, flowering in June and July.