Herbs, shrubs or trees with alternate or verticillate leaves, and flowers in umbels, heads or panicles; calyx tube adnate to the ovary; petals usually 5, sometimes cohering together; stamens as many as the petals and alternate with them; seeds flattened, somewhat 3-angled with a coloured, fleshy covering.

Acaulescent or nearly so, rootstock long. Leaf usually solitary, arising with the peduncle from a very short stem; petiole erect, 6—12 inches long, primary divisions of the leaf slender, stalked, pinnately 3—5 foliate; leaflets sessile or short-stalked, oval or ovate, acuminate, rounded at the base, finely serrate, 2—5 inches long, often hairy on the veins beneath. Flowers on a peduncle usually shorter than the leaves; umbels usually three, nearly round, composed of numerous small greenish flowers.

In rich woods throughout the region, flowering in July.

Very prickly throughout; stems erect from a decumbent base 4—12 feet high, leafy at the top. Leaves roundish, cordate, prickly on both sides, palmately lobed, more or less hairy beneath, 6—24 inches long. Flowers greenish-white in a dense terminal paniculate umbel; petals 5; stamens 5, alternate with the petals; fruit berry-like, laterally compressed, bright scarlet when ripe.

An ornamental though very prickly shrub, in moist rich woods throughout the region, sparingly in the Rockies, west of the divide, but very abundant in the Selkirks where it frequently forms dense impenetrable thickets, flowering in early summer.