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Alpine Milk-Vetch

Alpine Milk-Vetch

Astragalus alpinus

Identify the Alpine Milk-Vetch from a photo and log your finds with Florapass.

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How common: Common

Alpine Milk‑Vetch is a low, long‑lived pea‑family plant with rounded clusters of bluish‑violet flowers. It grows across the far north of the Northern Hemisphere and in high mountains farther south. Look for it on open heaths, sandy or gravelly slopes, riverbanks and rocky places.

Did you know?

  • A truly circumpolar species of the far north that also climbs high mountains farther south.
  • Flower heads are usually blue‑purple but can sometimes be completely white.

About the species

Identification

Small clump-forming plant 8–20 cm tall. Stems rise from the base and are softly hairy. Each leaf has many pairs of small oval leaflets, blunt-tipped and smooth-edged; the underside is whitish from hairs. Flowers sit in rounded heads on long stalks from the leaf joints. They are pea‑like, about 1–1.4 cm, blue to purplish with a paler base, sometimes all white. After flowering it makes drooping, slightly curved pods 1–1.5 cm long, covered with dark hairs. Rounded flower heads and dark‑haired pods help tell it from other milk‑vetches with long spikes or pale pods. Flowers in Finland in June–July.

Plant group

Herbaceous plants

Habitat

heath forest, fell

Flowering

Jun–Jul

About the habitat

Open, sunny ground in cold regions: arctic and subarctic heaths, alpine meadows and open forest edges; also sandy riverbanks, sandy ridges, road verges and rocky slopes, usually on sandy or gravelly soils. Common in Lapland; rarer farther south and absent from western Finland.

Sources

Photo: Bernd Haynold, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Astragalus alpinus 240708.jpg

Text: Pinkka: BIO-503 Suomen kasvisto ja kasvillisuus - Metsät: harjumetsät, CC BY 4.0 https://laji.fi/taxon/MX.38959

Text: Pinkka: BIO-503 Suomen kasvisto ja kasvillisuus - Tunturit: tunturiniityt, CC BY 4.0 https://laji.fi/taxon/MX.38959

Text: Pinkka: A Pohjolan kasveja - Abies-Allium, CC BY 4.0 https://laji.fi/taxon/MX.38959

Text: Wikipedia (Finnish), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunturikurjenherne

See also