Lactuca sibirica

Lactuca sibirica is a perennial herbaceous plant in the Asteraceae family with a wide boreal-temperate distribution across northern Eurasia, occurring from Scandinavia and northern European Russia through Siberia to the Russian Far East, Mongolia, northern China, the Korean Peninsula and northern Japan, as well as parts of northern North America. It grows in damp meadows, riverbanks, willow thickets, forest clearings and roadside ditches, often on alluvial soils. The plant arises from a creeping rhizome and produces erect, simple to sparingly branched, glabrous stems 30 to 100 centimetres tall, exuding white latex when broken. The alternate cauline leaves are sessile and slightly clasping with auriculate bases, lanceolate to oblong-lanceolate in outline and 5 to 15 centimetres long, with entire to sparsely toothed margins; basal leaves are larger and sometimes pinnatifid. The inflorescence is a terminal corymbose to paniculate cluster of small, narrowly cylindrical capitula, each bearing seven to twenty bright blue to violet-blue ligulate florets. The fruit is a brownish, beaked achene crowned by a white pappus of fine bristles.