It is a perennial woodland wildflower native to eastern North America.

Members of the alliance are morphologically similar, with an elongated fleshy rhizome and either ternate or palmately compound leaves.

[5] The vegetative parts of this plant, which can reach 20–40 cm, arise from a segmented rhizome.

The leaves are on long petioles, deeply and palmately dissected into five segments with large "teeth" on the margins.

It has the widest distribution of any member of the alliance, with a range that extends north to Québec and Ontario, south to Florida and Texas, and west to Kansas and Oklahoma.