Description
This is an annual herb, a distant member of the vine and pea family, with hollow, four-sided, hairless to hairy stems which can reach two meters in maximum length. The leaves are each made up of a few pairs of linear, lance-shaped, oblong, or wedge-shaped, needle-tipped leaflets up to 3.5 centimeters long. The pealike flowers occur in the leaf axils, solitary or in clusters of up to three. The flower corolla is 1 to 3 centimeters in length and whitish to bluish to red or bright pink-purple in color. The fruit is a legume pod up to 6 or 7 centimeters long which is hairy when new and smooth later. It contains up to 12 seeds.
Read more about this topic: Vicia Sativa
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“Once a child has demonstrated his capacity for independent functioning in any area, his lapses into dependent behavior, even though temporary, make the mother feel that she is being taken advantage of....What only yesterday was a description of the childs stage in life has become an indictment, a judgment.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.”
—Freda Adler (b. 1934)