Astragalus lentiginosus var. wahweapensis |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. albifolius |
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wahweap freckled milkvetch |
northern freckled milkvetch, Owens Valley milkvetch, white leaf milk vetch |
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Habit | Plants perennial (short-lived, sometimes flowering first year), 10–25(–35) cm. | Plants perennial, halophyte, 30–100 cm. |
Stems | diffuse and incurved-ascending. |
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Leaves | (2.5–)4–11 cm; leaflets 13–23, blades elliptic-oblanceolate, broadly oblong-oblanceolate, or obovate, (3–)5–17(–20) mm, apex obtuse or emarginate. |
2–9 cm; leaflets (9 or)11–17(–21), blades oblanceolate, elliptic, or narrowly oblong, (3–)5–15(–18) mm, apex obtuse or subacute. |
Racemes | 10–20-flowered, flowering from middle and distally, compact to loose in fruit; axis 1.5–5.5(–7) cm in fruit. |
(9–)12–35-flowered, crowded into subglobose or cylindric heads, short and compact in fruit; axis obscured, (0.5–)1–4 cm in fruit. |
Peduncles | 2.5–6(–7.5) cm. |
(1–)1.5–6.5 cm. |
Flowers | (12.5–)15–18.2 mm; calyx (6.2–)7.5–10.5 mm, tube (4.6–)5.2–6.7 mm, lobes 1.4–3.8 mm; corolla usually bright pink-purple with pale, striate eye, rarely white (concolorous). |
8.2–11.5 mm; calyx 5–7.3 mm, tube 3.2–4.5 mm, lobes 1.5–2.8 mm; corolla whitish, sometimes with purple veins, or pink-purple with white wing tips. |
Legumes | green, sometimes stramineous or purple-mottled, almost always very strongly incurved, very obliquely ovoid-acuminate, moderately or greatly inflated, 15–30(–40) × (7–)9–15 mm, bilocular, thinly papery, semitranslucent, seeds visible, to almost leathery, opaque, usually glabrous, rarely puberulent; beak well-defined, triangular or deltoid, 6–15 mm, unilocular. |
pale green and purple-mottled becoming stramineous, plumply ovoid-acuminate, bladdery-inflated, 9–17 × 8–14 mm, papery-membranous, subtranslucent, strigulose; beak decurved, triangular, 3–5 mm, unilocular. |
Seeds | (20–)24–28. |
10–15. |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. wahweapensis |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. albifolius |
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Phenology | Flowering Apr–Jul. | Flowering Apr–Jul. |
Habitat | Pinyon-juniper, sagebrush, and mixed desert shrub communities. | Saline, summer-dry flats about seepage areas in lower foothills, on clay soils moist in springtime. |
Elevation | 1400–1900 m. (4600–6200 ft.) | 600–1500 m. (2000–4900 ft.) |
Distribution |
AZ; UT |
CA |
Discussion | Variety wahweapensis may be very abundant in wetter years, filling the interspaces in pinyon-juniper woodland much like an alfalfa field. It is found on the plateaus and drainages affluent to Lake Powell in eastern Kane and Garfield counties in Utah, and in northern Arizona. Variety wahweapensis grades into the slender-podded var. palans to the east and the ovoid-fruited var. diphysus southward. (Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.) |
Variety albifolius was described as an elongate, ungainly, trailing or scrambling halophyte (D. Isely 1998); it occurs at the eastern base of the Sierra Nevada in Inyo County near Big Pine and Lone Pine, near Muroc in Kern County, and near Lancaster in Los Angeles County. Astragalus albifolius (M. E. Jones) Abrams is an illegitimate later homonym of A. albifolius Freyn & Sintenis 1893. (Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.) |
Source | FNA vol. 11. | FNA vol. 11. |
Parent taxa | ||
Sibling taxa | ||
Name authority | S. L. Welsh: Great Basin Naturalist 38: 286. (1978) | M. E. Jones: Rev. N.-Amer. Astragalus, 124. (1923) |
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