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:
“He hath achieved a maid
That paragons description and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“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 (1817–1862)