Crowfoot-leaved hare's-ear

Bupleurum ranunculoides is a slender, glabrous perennial herb of the Apiaceae family, typically 10 to 40 centimetres tall, forming small tufts from a slender, branched, woody rootstock. The basal and lower stem leaves are narrowly linear to lanceolate, 5 to 15 centimetres long and 2 to 8 millimetres wide, with parallel veins, an entire margin, an acute apex and a tapered base sheathing the stem, resembling those of a grass or buttercup; the upper cauline leaves are smaller and more strongly sheathing. Atypically for the family the leaves are simple and entire rather than dissected. From mid summer to early autumn the wiry, sparsely branched stems carry small terminal compound umbels 2 to 4 centimetres across, with five to ten primary rays, each bearing a secondary umbel of tiny yellow five-petalled flowers; the umbellules are subtended by a conspicuous involucel of five ovate, yellow-green bracts longer than the flowers. The fruit is a small, dark, ovoid schizocarp with slender ridges. Native to dry, calcareous, rocky alpine and subalpine grasslands and screes of the European mountains.