Cushion Milk-vetch: Creamy white prairie flowers

Close-up: Tiny Cushion Milk-vetch flower.   © SB

In the dry grass on a rocky outcrop above the Qu'Appelle River, fresh growth: Creamy white and purple flowers on short green woolly tufts, each plant only a few inches high.

Cushion Milk-vetch — Saskatchewan prairie wildflowers new to me this year, and so even more lovely and surprising!

These native plants are among the first to bloom in spring... They bloom so early, in fact, that those I found (while mounds of snow still huddled in the trees) already sported spent blooms.

And, like many early flowering plants, they are small — Cushion Milk-vetch rarely grow above four inches high, say Vance/Jowsey, in Wildflowers of the Northern Great Plains, aka the Prairies, aka a must-have book that also goes by the title, Wildflowers Across the Prairies. (Out of print, but well worth searching for the latest, Third Edition.)

And each flower is only about half an inch long...

Hidden in dry grasses, three tufts
of Cushion Milk-vetch.  © SB

Cushion Milk-vetch plant.  © SB

Woolly gray-green leaves and white/purple
Cushion Milk-vetch flowers.   © SB

Delicate creamy white petals and purple keels,
over leaves washed with silky, silvery hairs. © SB

Note on these plants: Royer/Dickinson in Plants of Alberta (seriously! if you're reading this blog, you should search for and buy this book, too!) say that these plants were used as rattles for ancient ceremonial occasion, as "the dry pods make great noisemakers."


Prairie Wildflower: Cushion Milk-vetch (Astragalus triphyllus)

Location: Above the Qu'Appelle Valley, near Southey, Saskatchewan, Canada.

Photo Dates: May 12, 2013. 

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