notes Growing in a small wet meadow within lodgepole pine forest. Back when I photographed this it keyed to Camissonia subacaulis, but since then the species previously in that genus have been split and rearranged into a number of smaller genera, ...among them Taraxia, with just 3 species.
This species has glabrous, entire leaves and stigma at roughly the same level as the anthers. Like its more common lower elevation and cismontane relative Taraxia (Camissonia) ovata, most of the fertile part of the long inferior ovary/fruit is at or below ground level...what appears to be a long pedicel is actually the long sterile tip of the inferior ovary. You can see a bulge near the bottom of the ovary in the last photo of this series, where the fertile (ovule/seed-bearing) portion of the ovary begins.
I guess that when the mostly underground fruits mature the seeds are dispersed by ants, or perhaps by small subterranean mammals like voles, pocket gophers, etc.
