Erodium moschatum
Encyclopedia
Erodium moschatum is a species of flowering plant in the geranium family
Geraniaceae
Geraniaceae is a family of flowering plants placed in the order Geraniales. The family name is derived from the genus Geranium. It includes both the genus Geranium and the garden plants called geraniums, which modern botany classifies as genus Pelargonium, along with other related genera.There are...

 known by the common names musky stork's bill and whitestem filaree. This is a weedy annual or biennial herb which is native to much of Eurasia and North Africa but can be found on most continents where it is an introduced species
Introduced species
An introduced species — or neozoon, alien, exotic, non-indigenous, or non-native species, or simply an introduction, is a species living outside its indigenous or native distributional range, and has arrived in an ecosystem or plant community by human activity, either deliberate or accidental...

. The young plant starts with a flat rosette of compound leaves, each leaf up to 15 centimeters long with many oval-shaped highly lobed and toothed leaflets along a central vein which is hairy, white, and stemlike. The plant grows to a maximum of about half a meter in height with plentiful fuzzy green foliage. The small flowers have five sepal
Sepal
A sepal is a part of the flower of angiosperms . Collectively the sepals form the calyx, which is the outermost whorl of parts that form a flower. Usually green, sepals have the typical function of protecting the petals when the flower is in bud...

s behind five purple or lavender petals, each petal just over a centimeter long. The filaree
Erodium
Erodium is a genus of the botanical family Geraniaceae. The genus includes about 60 species, for the most part originating in the Mediterranean or Western Asian regions...

fruit has a small, glandular body with a long green style up to 4 centimeters in length.

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