Wildflowers of Houston and Southeast Texas by John Tveten

Author:John Tveten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press

SIZE

Plant: Trailing, twining stems to 10 feet.

Flower: To 1 inch, in small clusters.

LEAVES

3 leaflets, each 1–3 inches long.

BLOOMS

April – November, most common in fall.

Wild cowpea belongs to a tropical and subtropical genus found around the world. It is a close relative of the cultivated cowpea—also called black-eyed-pea and cream-pea—which was introduced from the Old World as a food plant. The latter species, Vigna unguiculata, usually has purplish flowers and produces a much larger seed pod.

Wild cowpea has yellow flowers in sparse clusters on long stalks. The “standard,” the wide upper petal, measures nearly an inch across. Leaves are trifoliate, with three lance-shaped leaflets from one to three inches long. The densely hairy stems trail and twine over other vegetation, sometimes forming mats in wet fields and along the edges of marshes and ponds. V. luteola reportedly blooms from April through November, but we found it most common in early autumn, particularly east of Houston along Galveston Bay.

The genus Vigna honors Dominico Vigna, a seventeenth-century botany professor at Pisa in Italy. Luteola simply means “yellowish.”

SOUTHERN CORYDALIS

Corydalis micrantha

Scrambled eggs

FUMARIACEAE Fumitory Family

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