The fleshy roots store food to carry the plant through the dry summers and produce new leaves and flowers the following spring.

Each pinkish stem is somewhat decumbent and has five to eight twice compound or deeply incised, bluish green, hairless, somewhat fleshy leaves which may develop purple-tinged edges when temperatures are low.

The blades of the leaflets or segments are oval to inverted egg-shaped, 3-6 × 2–5 cm, with a clearly narrowed, stalk-like foot and a stump or rounded tip.

The bisexual flowers are cup-shaped, 2–3 cm when open, nodding, and are set individually at the tip of a branching stem, and bloom for 9–15 days.

The five to ten circular petals are usually shorter than the sepals, and grade in colour from brownish-maroon at the base, via wine red to greenish or yellowish on the edge.

A disc consisting of about twelve fleshy cone-shaped greenish-yellow lobes of 2½-3 mm high surrounds the two to six (mostly five) glabrous, initially yellow-green to ultimately yellow-red carpels, each having a short style topped by a curved stigma that forms a ridge.

In addition to a variety of grasses, the surrounding vegetation includes western monkshood, Hooker's and arrowleaf balsamroot, redstem ceanothus, pinkfairies, hairy clematis, dwarf larkspur, parsnipflower buckwheat, fernleaf and nineleaf biscuitroot, sulphur lupine, beardtongues species, virgate scorpion-weed, sticky and slender cinquefoil, sagebrush buttercup, dwarf and Nootka rose, common snowberry, American vetch and northern mule's ears.

Brown's peony avoids drought by dying down completely in early summer, after flowering and surviving underground with stores of nutrients and energy in its thick rootstock.

Flowers give off the same smell more weakly and the lobes of the disc secrete a sweet nectar with a bitter aftertaste over the entire time the stigmas and anthers are fertile.

According to one source, wasps, such as the common aerial yellowjacket and Polistes aurifer, and sweat bees, in particular, Lasioglossum species, make up the majority of pollinators, in addition to hoverflies such as Criorhina caudata.

[2] Bernhardt et al., after studying an endemic population in Oregon's Blue Mountains, stated:The most common pollen vectors were wasp queens in the family Vespidae, the large flower fly Criorhina caudata (Syrphidae), and females of various Lasioglossum species (Halictidae), all of which foraged exclusively for nectar.

Indigenous tribe members would also use them as a medicine to cure cough, kidney problems, sexually transmitted infections, pneumonia, nausea, indigestion and tuberculosis.