Flora of North America species comparison

The green links below add additional plants to the comparison table. Blue links lead to other Web sites.
enable glossary links

Montia parvifolia

little-leaf miner's lettuce, showy rock montia, small-leaf montia, small-leafed montia, streambank springbeauty
Habit Plants perennial, often bul-biferous, with branched caudices, mat forming.
Stems

simple erect or ascending, 10–30 cm.
Leaves

basal and alternate, petiolate;

blade oblanceolate, 10–70 × 4–12 mm.
Inflorescences

leafy, from apices of fertile caudex branches (determinate) or from leaf axils of shortened fertile caudex (indeterminate), sometimes bulbiliferous in leaf axils.
Flowers

1–12, showy;

sepals 2–3.5 mm;

petals 5, pink or white, 6–15 mm;

stamens 5, anther pink.
Seeds

0.8–1.5 mm;

eliaosome rounded, minute, shorter than 0.5 mm, shiny, appearing smooth.
2n

= 22, 44.

Montia parvifolia
Phenology Flowering late spring-mid summer.
Habitat Moist or wet soils and rocky cliffs of coastal and inland mountains
Elevation 0-2800 m (0-9200 ft)
Distribution
from FNA
AK; CA; ID; MT; NV; OR; UT; WA; AB; BC
[WildflowerSearch map]
[BONAP county map]
Discussion

Montia parvifolia is a variable diploid and tetraploid species. Plants with larger flowers, leaves, and seeds have been treated as var. flagellaris (Bongard) C. L. Hitchcock or as the separate species M. sweetseri Henderson. Because the complex has not been studied using modern methods, and the variation observed in herbarium specimens has no correlated geographical base, I adopt the position of K. L. Chambers (1993) and do not recognize the two above-mentioned taxa at this time. I equate the species situation here to that of M. fontana and choose not to recognize infraspecific taxa.

(Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.)
Source FNA vol. 4.
Parent taxa Portulacaceae > Montia
Sibling taxa
M. bostockii, M. chamissoi, M. dichotoma, M. diffusa, M. fontana, M. howellii, M. linearis
Synonyms Claytonia parvifolia, Naiocrene parvifolia
Name authority (Mociño ex de Candolle) Greene: Fl. Francisc., 181. (1891)
Web links 
Unless otherwise noted, all data comes from the online version of the Flora of North America, who have made most of their content available via a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0).



Type/paste one or more Latin names into the boxes above; matching taxa will show up below the box as you type. You can use the up/down arrow keys to move through the list.

(If the plant you're looking for doesn't show up in the auto-complete list, that means it either isn't described in Flora of North America yet, or it's listed under a synonym. And please note that Flora of North America is still missing several plant families, including Fabaceae, Apiaceae, Boraginaceae, and Polemoniaceae.)

Choose a data source: Flora of North America, OregonFlora, UW Burke Herbarium

The species comparison tool is brought to you by:
Northwest Wildflowers