Stems 0 or 1 (internodes to ¹/2 times lengths of subtending leaves). Leaves erect to spreading; blades (2-)5-15(-24) cm × (1.5-)2-10(-16) mm, mostly toothed to lobed, rarely entire, teeth or lobes (2-)3-5 pairs, faces usually densely, ± uniformly hairy, rarely glabrous. Peduncles 6-60 cm, lengths mostly 1.5-4 times leaves at flowering, 2-5 times length of leaves in fruit, glabrous or glabrate, or apically hairy to tomentose. Heads (7-)10-18 mm wide (flowering). Phyllaries green or medially rosy purple, sometimes spotted, margins glabrous or ciliate, faces mostly hairy, occasionally glabrous or villous, stipitate-glandular, with translucent, yellowish or purple-septate, often purple-tipped hairs or eglandular with whitish-opaque hairs; outer erect to spreading, adaxially glabrous or pubescent and eglandular. Florets 20-100(-300); corollas much surpassing phyllaries at flowering, tubes 2-5 mm, ligules 10-15 × 2-3 mm; anthers 2-4 mm. Cypselae: outermost strongly differing from inner, highly variable as to color, shape, ornamentation, and pubescence, ribs flattened to alate, or 0, straight to strongly undulate, often strongly diminishing proximally. 2n = 18.

Flowering Mar-Sep. Mesic to dry habitats in grasslands, chaparral, oak woodlands, and open pine forests; 150-2100 m; Calif.

Variety cryptopleura occurs on hills and ranges surrounding the Great Central Valley (it appears to be absent from the valley itself). It is ± sympatric with var. heterophylla, except that var. cryptopleura almost completely supplants var. heterophylla in the south Coast Ranges of California. Older floras treated this taxon as var. californica; more recent works have not recognized it at all. K. L. Chambers (1963b) demonstrated that var. cryptopleura is strictly allogamous and is not self-fertile. Varieties heterophylla and cryptopleura are differentiated almost entirely by corolla size, which appears to be correlated with breeding system; otherwise the two exhibit almost complete morphologic overlap. Corolla size in depauperate specimens of var. cryptopleura approaches that found in robust specimens of var. heterophylla. The two varieties still separate on corollas longer than the phyllaries in var. cryptopleura versus subequaling the phyllaries in var. heterophylla. The degree of introgression, if any, between var. cryptopleura and var. heterophylla is not known.