WILDFLOWERS OF NEW MEXICO

Perfectly at home on rocky mountain ridges and cliffsides, erect flowering stems, sometimes branching, reach 28-inches tall from a dense basal rosette of heart-shaped to rounded leaves. Spike-like clusters of tiny, greenish to cream-colored flowers bloom on the upper portion of the slender, hairy stems.

FLOWERS: May–August. Spike-like clusters (racemes) along upper portion of finely glandular-hairy stem; 5 tiny white, spreading petals extend slightly beyond the sepal tips, but the 5 stamens are shorter than the sepals; sepals green or red-tipped, spreading, and densely covered with glandular hairs.

LEAVES: Basal leaves with hairless or slightly hairy stems (petioles), blades heart-shaped to rounded, 3/8–3 1/8-inch (1–8) cm long, with 5–7 rounded lobes with teeth, surfaces hairless to densely covered with short hairs.

HABITAT: Rock outcrops, rocky soils; pinyon-juniper, ponderosa to spruce-fir-aspen forests.

ELEVATION: 5,300–12,500 feet.

RANGE: AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, WY.

SIMILAR SPECIES: 5 species of white-flowering alumroot in NM. The look-alike H. wootonii, in mountain areas of Lincoln and Otero counties, has leaf stems (petioles) with long, stiff, spreading hairs. The widespread H. novamexicana, has erect (not spreading) petals shorter than the erect sepals. Sandia Mountain Alumroot, H. pulchella, endemic to  the Sandia and Manzano Mts., has hairy, pink flowers.

NM COUNTIES: Widespread throughout mountains of NM: Bernalillo, Catron, Cibola, Colfax, Dona Ana, Grant, Hidalgo, Lincoln, Los Alamos, McKinley, Mora, Rio Arriba, San Juan, San Miguel, Sandoval, Santa Fe, Sierra, Socorro, Taos, Torrance, Union, Valencia.