Euphorbia dentata
Family: Euphorbiaceae
Description: Annual to 70 cm high with mostly ovate leaves 1.5-6 cm long. Floral leaves are sometimes slightly colored but not conspicuously so. Stems are green to reddish and branch profusely, resulting in a broad, compact crown shape.
Field Identification: This plant is distinguished by hairy stems, opposite leaves, and leafy bracts usually green or white at the base. erect, often branched form. Leaves vary in width but are mostly opposite, oval, hairy, with toothed margins. Inconspicuous flowers are borne in cup-shaped bracts, clustered at branch tips, with white petal-like appendages. Fruit: pea-sized, 3-lobed capsule. This is a hairy annual herb with an erect or somewhat erect stem reaching anywhere from 20 to 50 centimeters tall. Its hairy pointed leaves are a few centimeters long, widely to narrowly lance-shaped, and generally toothed. The inflorescence appears at the end of branches and contains cream or yellowish staminate or pistillate flowers just a few millimeters wide. The fruit is a lobed spherical or heart-shaped capsule about half a centimeter wide which contains three bumpy rounded seeds.
Plant Trivia: Milky sap toxic.
Occurrence: Common on various soils in pastures, woods, fields, and waste places. It is native to parts of North and South America.
Bloom Period: Mar-Dec
Plant Use:
Dichotomous Key to the Genus Euphorbia: See Plants of the Texas Coastal Bend by Roy L. Lehman, Ruth O’Brien & Tammy White.
stxflora 