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Alpine flora of the Canadian Rocky Mountains

Chapter 52: Hydrophyllacæ Water-Leaf Family
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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.

Hydrophyllacæ
Water-Leaf Family

Herbs, mostly rough-hairy, with alternate or basal leaves, and perfect regular 5-parted flowers in cymes, spikes or racemes, curled when in bud and uncoiling as they flower; stamens 5, inserted on the corolla and alternate with its lobes; filaments thread-like; flowers yellow, purple or white.

Plant rough-hairy; leaves lanceolate and simple or pinnate;
flowers blue or violet-purple. Phacelia.
Plant smooth; leaves round reniform or cordate; flowers white.   Romanzoffia.

Phacelia sericea (Graham) A. Gray. (⅓ Nat.)
Mountain Phacelia.

Phacelia heterophylla Pursh. (⅓ Nat.)

Phacelia heterophylla Pursh.

Rough-hairy; stem stout, 6—24 inches high. Leaves white-hairy, lanceolate to ovate, acute, pinnately and obliquely, striately veined, the lower tapering into petioles, commonly with 1—2 pairs of small lateral leaflets. Flowers in a dense spike; corolla bluish, longer than the oblong-lanceolate or linear calyx lobes; filaments much exserted, sparingly bearded.

In the Cougar Valley in the Selkirks; flowering in July.

Phacelia sericea (Graham) A. Gray. Mountain Phacelia.

Silky-hairy or canescent throughout, 6—18 inches high, leafy to the top. Leaves pinnately parted into linear or narrow oblong, numerous, often pinnatifid divisions, the lower petioled, the upper nearly sessile. Flowers crowded in an elongated spike, corolla violet, blue or white, open-campanulate, cleft to the middle; stamens much exserted.

In dry ground and open slopes throughout the region; flowering in June and July.

Romanzoffia sitchensis Bong. Romanzoffia.

Stems slender, weak, 3—6 inches long. Leaves mainly at the root, with slender petioles, alternate, round-cordate, or reniform, with 7—11 crenate, glandular-tipped lobes. Flowers more or less racemose on slender, weak scapes with spreading pedicels longer than the flowers; calyx lobes smooth, much shorter than the delicately veiny pale pink or usually white funnel-form corolla with yellow throat and broad rounded lobes.

On constantly dripping ledges of wet rocks, rare in the region generally but rather frequent about Lake Louise and Lake O’Hara; flowering during July.