Astragalus cibarius

  • Title

    Astragalus cibarius

  • Author(s)

    Rupert C. Barneby

  • Scientific Name

    Astragalus cibarius E.Sheld.

  • Description

    146. Astragalus cibarius

    Of moderate stature, with a shortly forking, ultimately gnarled and woody caudex, strigulose with appressed or subappressed, straight or nearly straight hairs up to 0.5-0.75 mm. long, the herbage greenish or rarely cinereous in youth, the leaflets glabrous above; stems several, decumbent or weakly ascending simple, (0.4) 0.6-2 (2.5) dm. long, arising from buds at or just below soil-level; stipules 3-8 mm. long, the lowest (or all) membranous, several-nerved, sometimes purplish, ovate, mostly obtuse, large and conspicuous, semidecurrent-amplexicaul, the upper ones progressively narrower, the uppermost deltoid or lanceolate, acute; leaves 3.5-10 cm. long, all petioled but the upper ones shortly so, with (9) 13-19 obovate, oblong-obovate, or broadly oblanceolate, obtuse or commonly retuse- emarginate, mostly flat leaflets 4—17 mm. long; peduncles 3—8 cm. long, incurved- ascending at anthesis, reclinate in fruit; racemes loosely but shortly 4—14-flowered, subcapitate in early anthesis, the flowers spreading-ascending, the axis little elongating, 0.5-1.5 cm. long in fruit; bracts membranous, ovate or lance-acuminate, 2-4 mm. long; pedicels ascending, at anthesis 1—1.6 mm. long, in fruit thickened, 2—2.5 mm. long, finally disjointing and falling with the marcescent calyx and pod, bracteoles 0—2; calyx 6.4—8.6 mm. long, densely strigulose with black or largely black hairs, the disc 0.8-1.3 mm. deep, the campanulate or subcylindric tube 5-6.5 mm. long, 2.4-3.8 mm. in diameter, the subulate teeth 1.4-2.5 mm. long, the ventral pair commonly shortest and broadest; petals ochroleucous tinged with dull lavender, pale bluish-white, or occasionally purple with white wing-tips;.banner recurved through about 45°, 15—19 mm. long, the cuneate claw expanded into a rhombic-ovate blade 8-10 mm. wide; wings 13.4-17 mm. long, the claws 5.4-7 mm., the narrowly oblong, obtuse, nearly straight blades 9-11.2 mm. long 2.2-2.7 (3.3) mm. wide; keel 9.8-12.7 mm. long, the claws 5.2-6.8 mm., the half-obovate blades 5.3-6.7 mm. long, 2.7-3.2 mm. wide, incurved through 75-90 to the rounded apex; anthers 0.55—0.7 mm. long; pod loosely ascending (humistrate), subsessile or cuneately narrowed at base into a thick, necklike stipe up to 2 mm. long, the ellipsoid or oblong-ellipsoid body 1.7-3.2 cm. long, 7-9 (10) mm. in diameter, nearly straight or incurved through one third circle (the curvature usually more abrupt in the lower than the distal half), contracted distally into a short, laterally compressed, deltoid beak, otherwise obcompressed (caveat lector: often distorted by pressing), when relatively long openly sulcate both dorsally and ventrally, when short only a little sulcate ventrally near the base and flattenned or low-convex dorsally, both sutures thick and prominent but the dorsal one less so and commonly undulate, the fleshy, green, minutely strigulose valves becoming stramineous, woody or stiffly leathery, rugulose-reticulate, not inflexed, or inflexed as a narrow partition less than 1 mm. wide; ovules 27-32; seeds dark brown pitted or nearly smooth, 2.5-3.3 mm. long.—Collections: 76 (x) representative: J. H. & C. B. Christ 19,933 (ID, NY, WS); Hitchcock & Muhlick 8833 (CAS, NY, RSA, WS); Lingenfelter 526 (CAS, NY, RSA, SMU, WS); C. L. Porter 4154 (RSA, SMU, TEX); Ripley & Barneby 6456 (NY, RSA); Kirkwood 2063 (CAS, NY, OB); W. A. Weber 7338 (RSA).

    Grassy hillsides, sagebrush flats, valley floors, and canyon benches, in stiff clay or gravel, but without apparent rock preference, (3300, northward) 49008000 feet, common and locally plentiful in southeastern Idaho and northern Utah, extending less abundantly north to Clarks Fork in Missoula County and to the Gallatin and Yellowstone Valleys in Gallatin, Sweet Grass, and Stillwater Counties, Montana, thence southeast to the upper North Platte in Carbon County, Wyoming, and to the Yampa and North Gunnison Rivers in Moffat and Delta Counties, Colorado, west into the calcareous ranges of northeastern and eastcentral Nevada, and south along the Wasatch in Utah to Iron County.—Map No. 59 —April to early August.

    Astragalus cibarius (suitable for fodder) Sheld. in Minn. Bot. Stud. 1: 149. 1894.— Collected in Utah Valley, Utah, May, 1880. by M. E. Jones; also west side of Johnston Pass, south fork of Humboldt river and Great Desert, Utah, May, 1859, by Henry Engelmann and in gravelly bottoms, Gros Ventres fork and Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming, June, 1860, by F. V. Hayden."—Lectotypus, Jones 1679, collected May 3, 1880, MINN! isotypi GH NY POM! Paratypi (Engelmann, from Johnston’s Pass and s. fork of the Humboldt, doubtless in Nevada, in 1859), MO! The Hayden collections from Wyoming (MO) both represent A. terminalis. A. Webberi var. cibarius (Sheld.) Jones, Contrib. West. Bot. 10: 87 1902 Xylophacos cibarius (Sheld.) Rydb. in Bull. Torr. Club 40: 48. 1913.

    Astragalus cuspidocarpus (with pointed pod) Sheld. in op. cit. 147. 1894.—"Collected near Grafton, Montana, June, 1892, R. S. Williams; also on dry rocky ground near Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, May and June, by Mr. F. H. Burglehaus." —Holotypus, the first cited, labeled "type-specimen" in Sheldon’s hand, MINN!—A. thermalis (of hot springs) Greene in Erythea 3: 76. 1895, a deliberate, pedantic substitute. A. lentiginosus var. cuspidocarpus (Sheld.) Jones in Proc. Calif. Acad. Sci. II, 5: 673. 1895 (quoad nom., exclus. spm. cit.—cf. Barneby, 1945, pp. 106, 141). Xylophacos cuspidocarpus (Sheld.) Rydb. in Bull. Torr. Club 40: 48. 1913. A. missouriensis var. cuspidocarpus (Sheld.) Jones, Rev. Astrag. 213. 1923.

    Astragalus arietinus (resembling a ram’s head, from the divergently recurving valves of the dehiscent pod, a character mistakenly derived, acc. Jones, 1923, p. 203, from A. iodanthus) Jones in Proc. Calif. Acad. Sci. II, 5: 653. 1895.—"No. 5554o. June 30, 1894, Fairview, Utah ... No. 5208a. May 11, 1894, Cedar City, Utah.. .’’—Holotypus, Jones 5554o, POM! paratypus (Jones 5208a) POM!

    The browse milk-vetch, A. cibarius, is a superficially commonplace species of undistinguished mien, resembling in habit several of the larger-flowered forms of A. lentiginosus, to which flowering specimens are often referred in herbaria. The large, veiny lower stipules usually provide a clue to the identity of even quite young material. The pod resembles in exterior form that of several Argophylli, but it is either stipitate or at least contracted at base into a thickened neck continuous with the receptacle and therefore falls together with the disjointing pedicel. It varies greatly in length and simultaneously in the degree of dorsiventral flattening. A fruit of relatively short and plump outline is commonly rounded on the dorsal face and ventrally sulcate near the base, whereas the longest pods are commonly grooved along both sutures from the beak downward. Intergradation between the extreme forms and sizes of the pod is gradual and completely documented by specimens, and variation even in small colonies of otherwise like plants is often considerable. Although much of the material examined from Wyoming and Montana has fruits of the smaller type, a long pod is characteristic of the known populations in Missoula County, a short pod appears sporadically in central Utah, and it is impossible to regard the northern form, maintained by Rydberg as Xylophacos cuspidocarpus, as anything but a minor variant.

    The species was collected first in 1844 by Fremont, but the locality was not recorded. It was next seen by Stansbury in 1850 near Great Salt Lake, and again along the Emigrant Trail in 1859 by Dr. Engelmann. In 1869 Watson found it in the Wasatch foothills near Salt Lake City and on Antelope Island in the lake, but since he misinterpreted (1871, p. 71) his material as a form of A. iodanthus, A. cibarius remained undescribed until 1894. Watson’s assumption that A. cibarius and A. iodanthus are close relatives has led many students of Astragalus astray, and the error continues to echo in the literature up to the present day. The epithet arietinus which Jones applied to A. cibarius was in reality descriptive of A. iodanthus, in which the pod splits downward through the beak and the valves coil outward in a manner suggesting a pair of ram’s horns. The differential characters of the two species are mentioned at greater length under A. iodanthus.