Description
Key Characters:
Growth Form:
Perennial herbs, usually with a woody rootstock.
Stems:
Stems erect or prostrate, hollow, 3–10 dm long, vegetative parts glabrate (outside Hawai‘i also villous).
Roots:
Leaves:
Leaves compound.
Alternate.
Leaflets usually obovate, 8–25 mm long, 3–15 mm wide. Leaves appearing trifoliate, but actually pinnately 5–foliate with a basally placed pair of leaflets.
Surfaces sparsely long–villous especially toward margins.
Leaflet margins entire.
Petiolate.
Stipules present.
Flowers:
Flowers 5–12(–15) in heads, peduncles 1–2 mm long.
Flowers papilionaceous.
Calyx teeth about as long as the tube, the upper pair separated by an acute sinus in bud, sparsely long–villous, 5-toothed.
Corolla yellow, 10–18 mm long, keel often red–tipped, standard obovate, wing petals oblong, auriculate, keel petals as long as wings, curved.
Stamens 10; upper stamen distinct, the other 9 connate into a tube, alternately with longer filaments that are widened at apex.
Ovary superior; ovules numerous; style 1; style 1, apical, bent abruptly upward at base.
Fruit:
Pods straight; dehiscent with twisted valves; cylindrical; 15–35 mm long; 2–2.5 mm wide.
Seeds numerous; small.
Ploidy:
2n = 12; 24
Habitat:
Pastures.
Elevation Range:
ca. 1,340 m.