"Wood Geranium" redirects here. Not to be confused with Wood Cranesbill

Wood Cranesbill

Geranium sylvaticum, commonly called Wood Cranesbill or Woodland Geranium, is a plant species in the genus Geranium belonging to Geraniaceae. The Wood Geranium of North America is the related G...

 or Woodland Geranium, G. sylvaticum.

Geranium maculatum, the Spotted Geranium, Wood Geranium, or Wild Geranium is a woodland perennial plant

Perennial plant

A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives for more than two years. The term is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter lived annuals and biennials. The term is sometimes misused by commercial gardeners or horticulturalists to describe only herbaceous perennials...

 native to eastern North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

, from southern Manitoba

Manitoba

Manitoba is a Canadian prairie province with an area of . The province has over 110,000 lakes and has a largely continental climate because of its flat topography. Agriculture, mostly concentrated in the fertile southern and western parts of the province, is vital to the province's economy; other...

 and southwestern Quebec

Quebec

Quebec or is a province in east-central Canada. It is the only Canadian province with a predominantly French-speaking population and the only one whose sole official language is French at the provincial level....

 south to Alabama

Alabama

Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...

 and west to Oklahoma

Oklahoma

Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...

 and South Dakota

South Dakota

South Dakota is a state located in the Midwestern region of the United States. It is named after the Lakota and Dakota Sioux American Indian tribes. Once a part of Dakota Territory, South Dakota became a state on November 2, 1889. The state has an area of and an estimated population of just over...

. It is known as Spotted Cranesbill or Wild Cranesbill in Europe, but the Wood Cranesbill

Wood Cranesbill

Geranium sylvaticum, commonly called Wood Cranesbill or Woodland Geranium, is a plant species in the genus Geranium belonging to Geraniaceae. The Wood Geranium of North America is the related G...

 is another plant, the related G. sylvatium (a European native called "Woodland Geranium" in North America). Colloquial names are Alum Root, Alum Bloom and Old Maid's Nightcap.
It grows in dry to moist wood

Wood

Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...

s and is normally abundant when found. It is a perennial

Perennial plant

A perennial plant or simply perennial is a plant that lives for more than two years. The term is often used to differentiate a plant from shorter lived annuals and biennials. The term is sometimes misused by commercial gardeners or horticulturalists to describe only herbaceous perennials...

 herbaceous plant

Herbaceous plant

A herbaceous plant is a plant that has leaves and stems that die down at the end of the growing season to the soil level. They have no persistent woody stem above ground...

 growing to 60 cm tall, producing upright usually unbranched stems and flowers in spring to early summer. The leaves

Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants....

 are palmately lobed with five or seven deeply cut lobes, 10–12.5 cm broad, with a petiole

Petiole (botany)

In botany, the petiole is the stalk attaching the leaf blade to the stem. The petiole usually has the same internal structure as the stem. Outgrowths appearing on each side of the petiole are called stipules. Leaves lacking a petiole are called sessile, or clasping when they partly surround the...

 up to 30 cm long arising from the rootstock

Rootstock

A rootstock is a plant, and sometimes just the stump, which already has an established, healthy root system, used for grafting a cutting or budding from another plant. The tree part being grafted onto the rootstock is usually called the scion...

. They are deeply parted into three or five divisions, each of which is again cleft and toothed. The flowers are 2.5–4 cm diameter, with five rose-purple, pale or violet-purple (rarely white) petals and ten stamens; they appear from April to June in loose clusters of two to five at the top of the stems. The fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

 capsule, which springs open when ripe, consists of five cells each containing one seed

Seed

A seed is a small embryonic plant enclosed in a covering called the seed coat, usually with some stored food. It is the product of the ripened ovule of gymnosperm and angiosperm plants which occurs after fertilization and some growth within the mother plant...

 joined to a long beak-like column 2–3 cm long (resembling a crane

Crane (bird)

Cranes are a family, Gruidae, of large, long-legged and long-necked birds in the order Gruiformes. There are fifteen species of crane in four genera. Unlike the similar-looking but unrelated herons, cranes fly with necks outstretched, not pulled back...

's bill) produced from the center of the old flower. The rhizome

Rhizome

In botany and dendrology, a rhizome is a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes...

 is long, and 5 to 10 cm thick, with numerous branches. The rhizomes are covered with scars, showing the remains of stems of previous years growth. When dry it has a somewhat purplish color internally. Plants go dormant in early summer after seed is ripe and dispersed.

The plant has been used in herbal medicine, and is also grown as a garden plant.