Chicken gut, chicken gut grass, ground pepper, sparrow puff pull, for the comfrey family of plants in the genus Trigonotis, alias "ground pepper".
Annual herb, 5-30 cm tall; stem usually branched from the base, slender. Leaflets alternate, spatulate, elliptic, or lanceolate, base narrowed, both surfaces with appressed hirsute hairs. Spiral cymes, corollas blue, tips of inflorescences convolute. 4 tetrahedral nutlets. Flowering period May to June.
Inflorescences on top of stems, convolute when young, then gradually elongating, 5-20 cm long, usually 1/2-4/5 of the whole stem, with 2-3 leafy bracts only at the base, the rest of the stem ebracteate; pedicels short, elongating after flowering, 3-5 mm long, the apical part connecting with the calyx thickening to become clavate; calyx lobes ovate, 1-3 mm long, apex acute; corolla pale blue or pink, tube very short, limb 1.5 mm in diam. very short, limb 1.5-2.5 mm in diam., lobes spreading, obovate, apex rounded, throat appendages 5, white or yellowish; anthers ovate, 0.3 mm, apex mucronate. Nutlets 4, obliquely trigonous tetrahedral, 0.8-1 mm, shortly hairy or smoothly glabrous, abaxially triangular-ovate, with 3 acute ribs, ventrally subequal on the 2 lateral sides and slightly smaller on the basal side, raised, shortly stipitate, stipe ca. 1 mm, curved to one side. Flowers in early spring, very long flowering period.
The bark of the branches is rolled or grooved, 10-60cm long, 1.5-3mm thick; the outer surface is gray-white, gray-brown to black-brown or interspersed with mottled, flat or a little rough, with gray-white dotted lenticels and fine diagonal wrinkles, some with branching scars; the inner surface is yellow-white or brown, smooth. Hard and brittle, fibrous in section, yellowish white. Odorless, bitter taste. The dried bark is long strip-shaped piece, 3-6mm thick, the outer surface gray-brown, with reddish brown round or transverse long lenticels and tortoise crack-like grooves. The texture is hard, and the section is more fibrous.