Lathyrus pratensis

Meadow grass pea ( Lathyrus pratensis)

The meadow grass pea ( Lathyrus pratensis) is a perennial plant of the genus grass pea ( Lathyrus ). It is the most abundant in Central Europe Lathyrus species.

Other names are or were honey sweet peas (Silesia ), Yellow Klee ( Bern ), Geele Quintches ( Ostfriesland), Strümpf (St. Gallen Sargans ) Schüala (St. Gallen Sargans ), Yellow Bird Wicki ( Switzerland ) and As (Silesia ).

Description

The meadows pea grows as a deciduous, perennial, herbaceous plant is often heavily branched and reaches stature heights of 30 to 100 centimeters. The aboveground plant parts are bare hairy until dispersed. It has often several, tetragonal and climbing stems.

The alternate on the stem arranged leaves are stalked. The feathered leaf blade consist of a single Fiederpaar and one or more terminal tendrils. The stipules are arrow-shaped and only slightly smaller and of similar shape as the leaflets. Often the leaflets are much more and along annoying.

The flowering season is from June to August. Over a long inflorescence stem sit five to ten flowers together in a racemose inflorescence. The 15 -millimeter-long flowers are zygomorphic and fünfzählig double perianth. The color of the petals is deep yellow. The legume is elongated and flat over a length of up to 4 cm.

The species has the chromosome numbers 2n = 14 or 28

Ecology

The meadow grass pea is a Hemikryptophyt. Your root nodules contain Rhizobium leguminosarum as a nitrogen -fixing bacterium. It is rooted to 25 cm, rarely up to 100 cm deep.

The flowers are " butterfly flowers with folding mechanism ". The pollen is deposited on the pen brush. A "power flower ", the flowers are open only by large bees, especially bumblebees.

The legumes open like a typical dehydration spreader, so xerochas. When mature, the legumes turn black and therefore can record particularly intense heat. The spherical seeds propagate as ground roll; next to it often occurs a random spread of seeds by the hay etc.. Ripe fruit is from August to September.

Vegetative propagation is done by long underground runners.

From the cattle meadow grass pea is usually avoided because it contains bitter substances. Toxic but it is not. It is the preferred food plant of the caterpillars ink stain - white body ( Leptidea sinapis ).

Occurrence

Its distribution area of the meadows pea extends across the temperate zones of Eurasia to the subtropics of East Africa. In North America, meadow pea is naturalized and is there to the neophytes.

The meadows pea grows on rich, not too dry meadows. It grows best on loamy and humus-rich soils. Phytosociological the meadow grass pea is in Central Europe, a characteristic species of Molinio - Arrhenatheretea class.

Pictures

Inflorescence with flowers zygomorphic

Immature legumes

Seed