Description
A creeping, woodland perennial species to about 15cm tall at most and considerably less than that here. It comes from a small, worm-like, creeping rhizome covered in tiny scales to make plain green leaves held like partly folded umbrellas below bell-shaped, solitary , nodding, 1.5cm flowers of white, marked internally with fine red-purple stripes. A tiny tuft of bracts sits right behind the flower (and the presence of these behind the flower, not half way along the stem, easily separates O. obtriangulata from the related O. griffithii which is often misidentified as this plant).
Though superficially a little like O. acetosella this is easily separated botanically and here it is non-invasive and it forms a tight clump in a humus-rich, shaded spot growing with Erythronium and Arisaema under dwarf trees and flowering in April. In the wild it is a native of forests in China and both Koreas occurring rarely also in Primorsky, Russia and in Northern Japan from where it was described by Maximowicz in 1867.
