Schoenocaulon is a North American

North American

North American generally refers to an entity, people, group, or attribute of North America, especially of the United States and Canada together.-Culture:*North American English, a collective term used to describe American English and Canadian English...

 genus of 26 species of perennial herbaceous flowering plant

Flowering plant

The flowering plants , also known as Angiospermae or Magnoliophyta, are the most diverse group of land plants. Angiosperms are seed-producing plants like the gymnosperms and can be distinguished from the gymnosperms by a series of synapomorphies...

s, ranging from the southern United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 to Peru

Peru

Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....

. It is a member of the Melanthiaceae

Melanthiaceae

Melanthiaceae is a family of flowering perennial herbs in the Northern Hemisphere. The family has been recognized by relatively few taxonomists, and the circumscription has varied...

, according to the AGP II

Angiosperm Phylogeny Group

The Angiosperm Phylogeny Group, or APG, refers to an informal international group of systematic botanists who came together to try to establish a consensus on the taxonomy of flowering plants that would reflect new knowledge about plant relationships discovered through phylogenetic studies., three...

. Unlike related genera, the flowers are arranged in a spike

Raceme

A raceme is a type of inflorescence that is unbranched and indeterminate and bears pedicellate flowers — flowers having short floral stalks called pedicels — along the axis. In botany, axis means a shoot, in this case one bearing the flowers. In a raceme, the oldest flowers are borne...

; depending on the species the flower stalks for each flower are either very short or completely absent.

Plants generally grow in chaparral

Chaparral

Chaparral is a shrubland or heathland plant community found primarily in the U.S. state of California and in the northern portion of the Baja California peninsula, Mexico...

, oak, or pine forests. Grazing has narrowed the natural ranges of some species to only steep, rocky terrain. Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 is the center of Schoenocaulon diversity, with 22 endemic species - some with distributions limited to single mountain ranges. The two species with the widest distributions, S. yucatanense (sometimes treated as part of S. ghiesbreghtii) and S. officinale (sabadilla), may have been spread by pre-Columbian

Pre-Columbian

The pre-Columbian era incorporates all period subdivisions in the history and prehistory of the Americas before the appearance of significant European influences on the American continents, spanning the time of the original settlement in the Upper Paleolithic period to European colonization during...

s who used the seeds as pesticides.

The petal and sepal color varies by species, with some shade of green being most common, but with maroon, cream, and bright red also represented.