Plant: shrub, 80-300 cm tall; stems erect or ascending, wand-like, branching above, glabrous, more or less glaucous and grayish green, in age leafless; milky sap Leaves: opposite, narrowly linear, 1-5 cm long, deciduous at about the time of early flowering INFLORESCENCE: UMBELS lateral and sometimes approximate at the upper nodes, 3-6 cm broad, the peduncles mostly 0.5-3 cm long, glabrate, the pedicels more or less pubescent Flowers: rather large; calyx lobes 2-4 mm long; corolla mostly greenish, the lobes 7-11 mm long; hoods yellowish, erect, oblong, dilated in the upper portion to a truncate or oblique apex, 5-9 mm long, 2-4 mm broad at the top, 2-5 mm longer than the gynostegium, the horns attached in the upper half of the hoods, radially flat, more or less triangular, with an inwardly pointed, beaklike tip, concealed within the hoods or scarcely exserted; anther wings 2.2-2.8 mm long; corpusculum 0.4-0.5 mm long, the pollinia 1.3-1.6 mm long Fruit: FOLLICLES more or less pendulous on spreading to drooping peduncles and pedicels, 8-13 cm long Misc: Desert washes and scrub communities; 50-850 m (200-2800 ft); all year REFERENCES: Sundell, Eric. 1994. Asclepiadaceae. J. Ariz. – Nev. Acad. Sci. Volume 27, 169-187.