Cut-leaf toothcup

Cardamine concatenata, the cut-leaf toothwort or pepper-root, is a delicate spring-ephemeral perennial herb in the family Brassicaceae, native to eastern North America from southern Quebec and Ontario south to Florida and west to Minnesota and eastern Texas, where it grows in rich, moist, deciduous woodlands, especially on calcareous slopes and in floodplain forests. The slender stem rises 20 to 40 centimetres from a horizontal, segmented, knobby, fleshy rhizome that has a sharp, pungent, peppery taste. A single basal leaf, when present, and a whorl of typically three stem leaves are each palmately divided into three deeply and narrowly cut, sharply toothed, linear-lanceolate segments. In early spring the stem terminates in a short, loose raceme of four to fifteen showy, four-petalled flowers, white tinged with pink to pale lavender, each about 1.5 to 2 centimetres across, opening before the canopy closes and the foliage dies back to the rhizome by early summer. The fruit is a linear, ascending silique.