3. Aureolaria pectinata (Nutt.) Pennell

A. pectinata var. ozarkensis Pennell

Gerardia pedicularia L. var. pectinata Nutt.

Pl. 471 h, i; Map 2154

Plants annual. Stems 40–100 cm long, densely pubescent with a mixture of longer and shorter, slender, multicellular, gland-tipped hairs, not glaucous. Leaf blades 2–7 cm long, deeply pinnately lobed, the lobes linear to elliptic or broadly lanceolate, variously entire, toothed, or lobed again, the surfaces and margins densely pubescent with a mixture of longer and shorter, slender, multicellular, gland-tipped and nonglandular hairs. Bracts 1–4 cm long, otherwise similar to the leaves. Flower stalks 4–10 mm long at flowering, elongating 5–12(–20) mm at fruiting, relatively stout, at least toward the tip, straight or curved upward, densely glandular-hairy. Calyces 11–20 mm long, densely glandular-hairy, the lobes longer than the tube, toothed or pinnately lobed. Corollas 30–40 mm long, glandular-hairy on the outer surface, the upper lobes glandular-hairy on the inner surface near the base, the margins usually also hairy. Fruits 9–15 mm long, glandular-hairy. Seeds 0.6–1.2 mm long, with relatively short, fine ridges enclosing relatively large areoles. August–September.

Scattered in the Ozark and Ozark Border Divisions (southeastern U.S. west to Missouri and Texas). Mesic to dry upland forests, savannas, glades, tops of bluffs, and banks of streams.

Pennell (1928) treated A. pedicularia as comprising five confusingly similar varieties, none of which were reported to grow in Missouri. He segregated A. pectinata as a closely related species and divided this into four equally confusing varieties. Plants from the Ozarks were assigned to A. pectinata var. ozarkensis, the only member of the complex that he reported from Missouri. More recently, some botanists have taken a more conservative approach to the taxonomy of the group. Steyermark (1963, as Gerardia) and Gleason and Cronquist (1991) both treated the complex as a single species, A. pedicularia, with various numbers of varieties. However, although Cronquist (1991) treated our plants as var. pectinata (Nutt.) Gleason, that combination apparently has never been validly published within A. pedicularia. The main characters indicated to separate A. pectinata from A. pedicularia include the calyces hemispheric vs. conic, leaf blade margins sharply vs. bluntly toothed, ovoid vs. ellipsoid fruits, and denser and more spreading pubescence. The group of annual members of the genus requires a careful taxonomic revision.