Greater bird's-foot trefoil
Lotus pedunculatus
Family · Fabaceae · Harmless
.jpg){kind=link}
The bird's-foot trefoil of waterlogged places: taller, more branched and with far more flowers per head than the common trefoil of dry verges. It marks watercourses and ditches that do not dry out.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture · Uplands
Also known asmarsh bird's-foot trefoil, big trefoil
How to tell it
An upright plant to a metre, with a hollow stem, unlike common trefoil, whose stem is solid. Heads of eight to fifteen yellow flowers, often veined red. Slender straight pods that split in a spiral and stand like open fingers.
What it is confused with
Bird's-foot trefoil
Lotus corniculatus
Squeeze the stem between your fingers: greater trefoil's is hollow and crushes, the common one's is solid. And the greater is far taller and grows only in damp places.
What it is for
Forage in wet meadows, no use for walkers. Like all species of the genus, it holds small amounts of cyanogenic compounds: it does not go in the mouth.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.