Betonica hirsuta

Betonica hirsuta, the hairy betony, is a tufted perennial herb of the family Lamiaceae growing 15-50 cm tall and native to the alpine and subalpine grasslands of the mountains of central and southern Europe, including the Alps, Pyrenees, Apennines and Balkans. The plant arises from a short knotty rhizome and produces a basal rosette of long-petioled leaves together with one or several erect quadrangular flowering stems that are densely clothed in long spreading whitish hairs as the epithet suggests. The leaves are opposite, ovate-oblong to oblong-lanceolate, 3-10 cm long, with a deeply cordate base, prominently crenate margins, a rugose dark green upper surface and long shaggy hairs on both surfaces; the upper stem leaves are smaller and sessile or very shortly stalked. The inflorescence is a dense terminal cylindrical to ovoid spike-like thyrse 2-6 cm long composed of several whorls of stalkless flowers crowded above an interrupted base. Each flower has a tubular calyx with five spinose teeth and a showy two-lipped tubular corolla 18-25 mm long that is pink, rose-purple or rarely white, with the upper lip arching as a hood and the lower three-lobed. The fruit is a tetrad of small smooth brown nutlets concealed in the persistent calyx.