An annual glucous plant, with a sub-erect, much-branched, spreading, leafy, angular stem, growing from 10 to 15 inches high. The leaves are mostly alternate, bipinnate, or tripinnate; the leaflets are wedge-shaped, cut into flat, lanceolate segments. The flowers are small, flesh-colored, tipped with crimson, nodding, the pedicles becoming erect in fruit. The racemes are opposite to the leaves, stalked, erect, many-flowered, and rather lax. The bracts are lanceolate, acute, and not half the length of the pedicles, especially when in fruit. Petals 4, unequal, one of them with a short, rounded spur at the base. The calyx is colored, toothed, and deciduous. The fruit or nut is ovoid or globose, indehiscent, emarginate, 1-seeded, and valveless, and the seed crestless.

Antispasmodic, aperient, cholagogue, depurative, slightly diaphoretic, mildly diuretic, laxative, hepatoprotective and weakly tonic (herb)

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Tattvas's Herbs
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King's American Dispensatory
Herb Information

Fumaric acid, fumarine; Isoquinoline alkaloids, including bulbocapnine, canadine, coptisine, corydaline, dicentrine, cryptopine, fumaricine, fumariline, fumaritine, N-methylhydrastine, protopine, sanguinarine, sinactine.

In the treatment of all visceral obstructions, particularly those of the liver, arthritis, gallstones, in scorbutic affections, urticaria, jaundice and in troublesome eruptive diseases of the skin, especially eczema and scabies.