Tephrosia_virginiana1.jpg

It’s easy to see this one while speeding down the highway, blooming now, and well into the summer. This is a perennial species, coming back year after year. It likes to grow in groups, and often makes big, crowded patches. Plants produce long, tough roots from a knottly base. The foliage consists of hairy compound leaves arranged alternately (meaning one at a time) up and down the stem. Of course, any compound leaf will bear a number of divisions, and the divisions (or “leaflets”) in this case are lined up on both sides of the midrib (also hairy). Because the leaflets are lined up this way, we say that the leaf is ”pinnately” compound, like a feather appears, rather than “palmately” compound, wherein the various leaflets are all attached at the same point at the end of the midrib, as in white clover or Virginia-creeper. If you take a close look at a leaf from our Mystery Plant, you’ll see that there is always a terminal leaflet. All in all, there should be 18-25 or so of these leaflets on one leaf.

One of the neatest things about this species is that its flowers are bicolored. Now, you must remember that at the base of a flower will be sepals, usually green, and above those, there will be (most often) some petals.

John Nelson is the retired curator of the A.C. Moore Herbarium at the University of South Carolina. As a public service, the Herbarium offers free plant identifications. For more information, visit www.herbarium.org or email johnbnelson@sc.rr.com.

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