| Author | (Sullivant) A. Wood | |
| Distribution | An odd range, with a cluster of records for the central Piedmont, and a second cluster in the southern Mountains. Seemingly absent in the northern Mountains and most of the Piedmont foothills. Weakley's (2024) map shows it as "rare" in the Coastal Plain, but the website editors can find no certain records for that province.
This is a species found mostly northwest of NC, from MA west to IL, and south to SC and AL. | |
| Abundance | Apparently rare and declining in the southwestern Mountains and in the northern Piedmont, but very rare in the central and southern Piedmont. This is a Watch List species, as its current status is not clear; most or all specimens are several decades old. There is just a single Research Grade photo on iNaturalist, from Haywood County in 2025. The current State Rank of S2? might need to be elevated to S1S2 or S1? in the near future. | |
| Habitat | This is a somewhat ruderal species, of moist and open habitats. It grows in wet meadows, openings in bottomlands, roadsides, and other disturbed places. | |
| Phenology | Blooms in April and May, and fruits shortly after flowering. | |
| Identification | This is an herb of medium height, with an erect stem to about 1.5 feet tall. It has scattered pairs of opposite stem leaves, each somewhat oblanceolate with a rounded apex, about 2 inches long and much narrower. As with the more numerous V. radiata, it is the flower clusters that are quite distinctive and identify a plant to this genus. At the ends of several dichotomous branches are the clusters, each with a tight handful of white flowers, and rather rounded in shape when viewed from above, about 1-inch across. The flowers are noticeably larger than those in V. radiata, which has each cluster strongly packed into a tight rectangle when viewed from above. As mentioned in Abundance, there is a need for new collections of this species, not just for documenting new counties but also to gain a better understanding of its current abundance level. | |
| Taxonomic Comments | A few older references named this as V. intermedia.
Weakley (2020) places Valerianella and Valeriana into family Valerianaceae, but without taxonomic justification. The papers he cites are a mixed bag without consensus. We will await further developments. | |
| Other Common Name(s) | Northern Cornsalad | |
| State Rank | S2? | |
| Global Rank | G4G5 | |
| State Status | W7 | |
| US Status | | |
| USACE-agcp | FAC link |
| USACE-emp | FAC link |
