This is a straggling plant, from one to three feet tall, a perennial, with a long, deep tap-root, stiff, branching stems, and leaves irregularly slashed into toothed lobes and chiefly from the root. The pretty flowers are from an inch to an inch and a half across, much like those of Desert Chicory, but very brilliant blue, occasionally white. This plant has escaped from cultivation and is now very common in waste places and along roadsides in the East and often found in the West. The ground-up root is used as a substitute for coffee. There is a picture in Mathews' Field Book.

There are several kinds of Microseris, rather difficult to distinguish.