Rio Grande nailwort

Plants perennial; caudex woody, branched. Stems erect, 6-10 cm, evenly puberulent with spreading hairs. Leaves: stipules lanceolate, 4-7 mm, apex acuminate, entire; blade linear or needlelike, 4-7 × ca. 0.5 mm, leathery, apex spin-ulose, puberulous. Cymes ter-minal, 7-28+-flowered, branched, mostly congested in clusters 5-15 mm wide. Flowers 5-merous, extended-urecolate, with prominent hypanthial bulge and calyx tapering somewhat distally, 2.8-3.1 mm, moderately pubescent with straight, spreading to appressed hairs generally throughout; sepals green to red-brown, veins absent or midrib and lateral pair of veins evident in fruit, lanceolate to oblong, 1.3-1.5 mm, leathery to rigid, margins translucent, less than 0.05 mm wide, scarious, apex terminated by awn, hood prominent, narrowly rounded, awn widely divergent, 0.5-0.7 mm, broadly conic in proximal 1/ 2/ 3 with yellowish, ± glabrous spine; staminodes subulate, ca. 0.5 mm; style 1, 2-lobed in distal 1/3- 5, 0.5-0.7 mm. Utricles ± ovoid, 0.8-0.9 mm, ± smooth, glabrous.

Flowering spring-summer. Thorn scrubland openings; of conservation concern; 200-300 m; Tex.

Paronychia congesta is known only from two collections in Jim Hogg County.