Northeast Wetland Flora
Field Office Guide to Plant Species
Bidens connata Muhl. ex Willd.
- Family: Composite (Compositae)
- Flowering: August-October
- Field Marks: This species is distinguished by its simple leaves that are often cleft into two or more basal lobes, rayless flower heads, and 2-6 outer leaf-like bracts.
- Habitat: Swamps, wet ground.
- Habit: Annual herb with fibrous roots.
- Stems: Upright, branched, slender or stout, smooth, up to 6 feet tall.
- Leaves: Opposite, simple, elliptic to lanceolate, pointed at the tip, tapering to the base, sharply toothed or sometimes lobed at the base, up to 8 inches long, smooth.
- Flowers: Many crowded in heads, with few to several heads on stalks up to 4 inches long, each head usually without rays but with numerous tubular disk flowers, each head subtended by 2-6 leafy outer bracts; disk flowers orange, up to 1/3 inch long.
- Sepals: 0.
- Petals: 4, united to form tubular disk flowers.
- Stamens: 5.
- Pistils: Ovary inferior, sparsely hairy.
- Fruits: Achenes crowded into heads, each achene 4-angled, narrowly wedge-shaped, 1/6-1/3 inch long, smooth except for bristly edges, with 2-5 stout, barbed awns at the tip.
- Notes: Gleason and Cronquist call this family Asteraceae. This species is frequently confused with B. tripartita, a Eurasian introduction.
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