General: Perennial herb from a taproot and branching stem-base; stems solitary to few, ascending to erect, 15-70 cm tall, unbranched, with short, stiff, appressed, unbranched hairs.
Leaves: Alternate, pinnately compound, 3-11 cm long on very short or no stalks; leaflets 9 to 19, thin, greenish, hairless above, hairy below, elliptic to lance-oblong, blunt or notched at the tip, 1-2.5 cm long; stipules lanceolate, 4-9 mm long, a few lowermost fused and clasping at the base, free above.
Flowers: Inflorescence an axillary raceme of 10 to 30 pea-like flowers, the racemes compact and 2-3 cm long initially, elongating in age to 20 cm, on stalks 8-18 cm long and about twice the length of the leaves, the flowers nodding and becoming oriented to one side; corollas purplish, occasionally white, 6-9 mm long, the wings shorter than the banner, slightly longer than the keel; calyces bell-shaped, 2.5-4 mm long, black- or grey-hairy, the teeth linear-lanceolate and 1/2 as long as the tube.
Fruits: Pods, obliquely egg-shaped to ellipsoid, rigid-pointed at the tip, somewhat flattened, drooping, densely grey-black-hairy, 8-12 mm long, straight, nearly unstalked, membranous-papery, 1-chambered but with a partial partition.
Moist to mesic meadows, streambanks, gravel bars, rocky slopes, thickets and open forests in the montane and lower subalpine zones; infrequent in BC east of the Coast-Cascade Mountains; N to AK, YT and NT, E to NF and S to MT and CO.
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)
