Astragalus lentiginosus var. wahweapensis |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. ineptus |
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wahweap freckled milkvetch |
freckled milkvetch, fumbling milk vetch, homely milkvetch |
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Habit | Plants perennial (short-lived, sometimes flowering first year), 10–25(–35) cm. | Plants perennial, (1–)3–30 cm, herbage loosely strigulose or villosulous. |
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. |
1.5–5.5 cm; leaflets (9–)15–21, crowded, blades obovate or oblanceolate, (1–)2–10 mm, apex obtuse or retuse. |
Racemes | 10–20-flowered, flowering from middle and distally, compact to loose in fruit; axis 1.5–5.5(–7) cm in fruit. |
(4–)10–21-flowered, short and compact in fruit; axis (0.3–)1–2.5 cm in fruit. |
Peduncles | 2.5–6(–7.5) cm. |
0.5–2 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). |
(8.8–)9.8–12 mm; calyx (4.8–)5.4–7.3 mm, tube (3.6–)3.9–4.9 mm, lobes (1–)1.2–2.4 mm; corolla whitish or cream, sometimes with pink 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. |
usually faintly mottled becoming stramineous, plumply ovoid- or ellipsoid-acuminate, strongly inflated, 10–18 × (5–)6–12 mm, thinly papery, strigulose or, sometimes, glabrous; beak erect or incurved, deltoid, 3–5 mm, unilocular. |
Seeds | (20–)24–28. |
(12–)14–19. |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. wahweapensis |
Astragalus lentiginosus var. ineptus |
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Phenology | Flowering Apr–Jul. | Flowering Jun–Aug. |
Habitat | Pinyon-juniper, sagebrush, and mixed desert shrub communities. | Gravelly slopes, ridges, and talus, on coarse granitic sand or volcanic tuff, in bristlecone pine and alpine tundra communities. |
Elevation | 1400–1900 m. (4600–6200 ft.) | 1800–3700 m. (5900–12100 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 ineptus occurs along the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada from Alpine County southward to the Inconsolable Range, Inyo County, Sweetwater Mountains, Mono County, and Bonita Meadows, Tulare County. (Discussion copyrighted by Flora of North America; reprinted with permission.) |
Source | FNA vol. 11. | FNA vol. 11. |
Parent taxa | ||
Sibling taxa | ||
Synonyms | A. ineptus | |
Name authority | S. L. Welsh: Great Basin Naturalist 38: 286. (1978) | (A. Gray) M. E. Jones: Rev. N.-Amer. Astragalus, 124. (1923) |
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