A perennial, smooth, herbaceous plant, with a simple, erect, somewhat 4-sided stem, about 2 or 3 feet high. The leaves are opposite, sessile, or nearly so, smooth, oblong-lanceolate, acuminate, serrate, and of a dark, shining green above. The flowers are large, inodorous, white, rose color, or purple, subsessile, in a short, terminal, dense spike, somewhat resembling the head of a snake or tortoise; the corolla is inflated, bilabiate, and contracted at the mouth; the upper lip is broad and arched, and keeled in the middle; the one woolly within; the calyx is deeply 5-parted, with 3 bracts at the base. Stamens 4, with hairy filaments and hairy, cordate anthers, a fifth sterile filament smaller than the others; ovary ovate; style long, exsert, and bending downward. The fruit is an oval, 2-celled 2-valved capsule, with many small, wing-margined seeds.

Anti-depressant, laxative, antibilious, aperient, appetizer, cathartic, cholagogue, detergent, tonic, vermifuge (herb).

Plants for a Future
King's American Dispensatory

For the liver, digestive system, debility, diseases of the liver, gallbladder problems, gallstones, to relieve nausea and vomiting, intestinal colic and to expel worms, as a soothing ointment to piles, inflamed tumours, irritable ulcers, inflamed breasts etc (herb).