General: Perennial herb from a thick stem-base and taproot; stems several, erect to spreading, 20-60 cm tall, usually branched above, sparsely short-stiff-hairy, greenish, shallowly grooved.
Leaves: Alternate, odd-pinnate, sparsely hairy below, glabrous but minutely glandular above, stalked, 8-20 cm long; leaflets 9 to 17, elliptic to egg-shaped, conspicuously veined, abruptly sharp-pointed at the tip, 15-30 mm long, 5-10 mm wide; stipules brown, membranous, joined or free, 10-15 mm long.
Flowers: Inflorescence an axillary raceme of 20 to 100 pea-like, nodding flowers; corollas yellow to whitish, 14-18 mm long, the wing-lobes slender and nearly equalling the claw; calyces 3-4 mm long, the teeth shorter than the tube, the upper pair of teeth wider and shorter than the lower three.
Fruits: Pods, constricted between the seeds into (1) 2 to 4 segments, the segments asymmetrically elliptic, 6-10 mm wide, irregularly net-veined, narrowly wing-margined.
Mesic to dry glades and open forests in the steppe and montane zones; locally common in SE BC, infrequent in the Peace River region; E to SW AB and S to MT, WY and NC WA.
The table below shows the species-specific information calculated from original data (BEC database) provided by the BC Ministry of Forests and Range. (Updated August, 2013)
