Flower:

Open branching cluster of showy blue to violet dandelion type flowers, ½ to 1 inch across. Flowers have 14 to 50 rays (petals) with 5 small teeth at the tip and fading to white at the base. Each ray has a blue divided style and a blue stamen at the base.

The bracts (phyllaries) surrounding the base of a flower are narrowly egg-shaped, pointed at the tip, appressed, green to purple, hairless, the outermost less than half as long as the innermost and the entire structure (involucre) forming a tube up to ~¾ inch (11 to 18 mm) long. Flower stalks are hairless, green to purple.

Leaves and stem:

Leaves are mostly alternate, 1 to 6 inches (3 to 15 cm) long, to 1¼+ inches (5 to 35 mm) wide, linear-oblong to lance-elliptic, hairless, sometimes lobed or with a few teeth along the edges. Basal leaves are stalked but usually absent; stem leaves are mostly stalkless; color is green to blue-green. Stems are single, erect, hairless, unbranched except in the flower clusters. Loose to dense colonies may form from elongating rhizomes.

Fruit:

Fruit is a dandelion type plume of ribbed, red-brown seeds 4 to 5 mm long with bright white fluff to carry them off in the wind.

Notes:

This species was formerly in the Lactuca genus, going by a number of names: Lactuca tatarica, Lactuca pulchella, Lactuca oblongifolia. The flowers are much like Chicory (Cichorium intybus) but Chicory has much larger flowers, is a taller plant, and the clusters are more like elongated spikes, not a branching panicle. While found throughout much of Minnesota, particularly in the western third, this species is not one we've commonly encountered, but you might also be lucky enough to happen upon a swarm of it.

When flowering it is not difficult to distinguish Mulgedium from Lactuca, since the Minnesota Lactuca species all have much smaller flowers, which are yellow on some species. One other distinction is Mulgedium is perennial where Lactuca is annual or biennial, but also M. pulchellum leaves on the mid and upper stem are typically unlobed and toothless, where most Lactuca species have lobed or toothed leaves, but this can be quite variable, particularly on L. canadensis.