| Hedysarum alpinum subsp. americanum (Michx.) Fedtsch. | |||
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| Family | Leguminosae — APG family: Fabaceae | ||
| Synonyms | Hedysarum americanum (Michx.) Britt., Hedysarum auriculatum Eastw., Hedysarum boreale DC., Hedysarum alpinum var. americanum Michx. | ||
| Description | Stem tall, branched above, appressed-pubescent, from branching caudex and long, woody root; leaves with 15-20 leaflets, glabrous above, pubescent beneath, broadly lanceolate-oblong, obtuse or rarely acute, apiculate; inflorescence elongated; >gt; flowers purple at tip, pale at base, deflexed; calyx pubescent, with upper teeth short and triangular, the lower narrow and longer; standard emarginate, wings with linear auricles, united beneath standard; loments glabrous or appressed-pubescent, stipitate, 2-5-articulate, wing-margined. | ||
| Ecology | Rocky slopes, spruce forests, gravel bars. H. alpinum described from Siberia; subsp. americanum from boreal Canada and the Allegheny Mountains. | ||
| Taxonomy notes | Broken line on circumpolar map indicates range of subsp. alpinum. | ||
| Uses | Root and young stem, especially the conical lateral roots, are eaten raw, boiled, or roasted by the natives; the plant is also eaten by bears and collected by mice. |
This is a digital representation of Eric Hultén’s ‘Flora of Alaska and Neighboring Territories: A Manual of the Vascular Plants’, which was published by Stanford University Press in 1968. The book was digitized by C. Webb (at UAMN) as part of the Flora of Alaska project, with funding by the US NSF (Grant 1759964 to Ickert-Bond & Webb), and with permission of Stanford University Press. Data and images © 1968 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. Univ. Usage licence: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. NB: You may find OCR errors; please refer to the hard-copy if in doubt.