Medium-sized plant, a few feet tall. Basal leaves, with three to five leaflets arranged like the fingers of a hand (palmately) at the end of a long stalk. Each leaflet coarsely toothed. Upper leaves similar, but stalkless. Flowers in small clusters of clusters, the smallest cluster being called an umbellet. Umbellets  (below, middle) have three perfect flowers, that is flowers that have both male and female parts, and usually three to five (but up to 15) flowers with male parts only (called staminate, since male parts are stamens). The perfect flowers (below, right) have a bristly ovary at the base, and white petals.  Both the male parts (stamens) and female parts (styles) are hidden inside. Male flower, visible below middle, have sharply pointed, narrow triangular green sepals and white petals, and are shorter than the bristly part of the female flowers. The stamens are hidden inside. The perfect flowers develop into round fruits covered with hooked bristles. The staminate flowers lose their stamens and petals and persist only as sepals. The remnants of the staminate flowers are much shorter than the fruits, which are shown at the bottom.

A native of most of eastern North America from Quebec and Ontario south to Florida, west to Texas and Wyoming. It is a plant of shaded habitats.  In Wildwood it seems to occur randomly all over the forested parts..

The palmately three-to-seven-parted leaves with their lobes and teeth and the small flowers in clusters of clusters make snakeroots or sanicles fairly easy to recognize. There are two other snakeroots in Wildwood. Clustered Snakeroot (S. odorata) has yellow flowers and usually occurs in clusters of many plants. Maryland Sanicle, also confusingly called Black Snakeroot (or Maryland Snakeroot) has white flowers like Canada Snakeroot, but stamens and styles stick way out and the male flowers are longer than the bristly parts of the perfect flowers.  It also generally has larger basal leaves with five to seven leaflets..