Duration: Perennial

Nativity: Native

Lifeform: Vine

General: Sprawling perennial with elongate stems, twining or prostrate, 15-50 cm or more long.

Leaves: Alternate, leaflets oblong or elliptic with entire margins, 15-30 mm long, usually tri-foliolate with deciduous stipules.

Flowers: Many flowered axillary racemes, flowers purplish or yellowish on peduncles 7-15 cm long, calyx of 4 unequal lobes, upper 2 united, lower ones longer than others, with broad erect standard and keel coherent to the wings; anthers alike, style filiform and not bearded.

Fruits: Linear oblong pod, flattened, 2-valved, linear, 20-30 mm long, canescent.

Ecology: Found sprawling over other plants and in rocky canyons from 4,500-6,000 ft (1372-1981 m); flowers July-September.

Distribution: AZ, s NM, s TX; south to n MEX.

Notes: Distinguished by being a sprawling, twining perennial vine, crawling over and tangling with other vegetation; the trifoliate, linear-elliptic leaves which are more pubescent and silvery-reflective on the undersides and less hairy and green above; and the whitish-pink banner and dark pink wings of the flower. Resembles Phaseolus but doesn-t have the incurved keel.

Ethnobotany: Unknown

Etymology: Galactia comes from the Greek gala, meaning milky, for the sap, while wrightii is named for Charles Wright (1811-1885) an American botanical collector.

Synonyms: None

Editor: SBuckley 2010, FSCoburn 2015