Plants annual, biennial, or perennial, often matted; taproot slender. Stems prostrate to erect, branched, 5-70 cm, mostly retrorsely to spreading-pubescent on 1 side or throughout. Leaves: stipules lanceolate, 2-6 mm, apex acuminate, entire; blade oblong to elliptic or oblanceolate, 3-25 × 1-6 mm, herbaceous, apex acute and briefly cuspidate, glabrous. Cymes terminal, 20-40+-flowered, diffuse, lax, repeatedly forked or dichotomous. Flowers 5-merous, ± short-cylindric, with enlarged hypanthium and calyx cylindric, 1-1.7 mm, glabrous to pubescent with short hairs, often minutely ciliate, sometimes glaucous; sepals greenish or greenish white to brownish, veins absent, ovate to oblong, 0.8-1.3 mm, herbaceous, margins white, 0.05-0.1 mm wide, scarious to papery, apex terminated by minute cusp, hood narrowly rounded, cusp light green to whitish, straight, short-conic, 0.1-0.15 mm, minutely scabrous; staminodes subulate, 0.2-0.3 mm; style 1, cleft in distal 4/ 5+, 0.2-0.4 mm. Utricles ellipsoid, 1-1.3 mm, papillate distally.

Flowering summer-fall. Dunes, woodlands, fields, clearings, roadsides, riverbanks, hummocks, waste places; 0-200 m; Ala., Fla., Ga., N.C., S.C., Va.

Chaudhri used duration and pubescence to recognize two subspecies of Paronychia baldwinii, characters that L. H. Shinners (1962c) found to vary independently in this species.

Taprooted perennial with minutely puberulent or glabrate, wiry, prostrate or sometimes erect stems 2-6(-12) dm; lvs broadly to narrowly elliptic or elliptic- oblanceolate, 10-25 נ2-6 mm, acute, minutely serrulate, glabrous or minutely puberulent; flowering branches delicate, tending to be cyme-bearing on one side, less often from alternate sides of successive nodes, or the infl forking; fls subsessile; cal 1-1.5 mm; sep oblong-ovate, cucullate, minutely cuspidate, ciliolate on the margins, otherwise glabrous or scantily puberulent between the 3 rather strong nerves. Sandy soils of the coastal plain; se. Va. to c. Fla. July-Oct. (P. baldwinii ssp. r.)

Gleason, Henry A. & Cronquist, Arthur J. 1991. Manual of vascular plants of northeastern United States and adjacent Canada. lxxv + 910 pp.

©The New York Botanical Garden. All rights reserved. Used by permission.