by Nathaniel Lord Britton & Addison Brown, An Illustrated Flora of the Northern United States… (1913)
“ Tall herbs, perennial by rootstocks or tubers, or sometimes annual, with scapose or leafy stems, mostly large entire long-petioled sheathing leaves, often swollen at the base of the blade, the veins pinnate, parallel. Flowers perfect or sometimes polygamous, irregular, in panicles, racemes or spikes. ”
