SPECIES DESCRIPTION
TRIFOLIUM PAUCIFLORUM
Family and Genus:- See- LEGUMINOSAE/Sect. TRICHOCEPHALUM
Common Names:- Few-flowered Clover, Sand Clover
Homotypic Synonyms:- Calycomorphum pauciflorum.
Meaning:- Trifolium (L) With three leaflets.
Pauciflorum (L) With few flowers.
General description:- Glabrous annual.
Stems:-
1) 10-40 cm, usually branched from base, with several ascending, more or less
appressed hairy.
Leaves:-
1) Alternately arranged along the stems and are ternately compound.
2) Leaflets, 5-20 mm long, oblanceolate to obcordate, margins denticulate.
3) Stipules, ovate in shape and deeply incised along the margin.
Flowers:-
1) Heads, globose, c. 12 mm in diam. at anthesis, c. 25 mm and nodding in fruit.
2) Peduncles, slender, more or less equalling the subtending leaves.
3) Fertile flowers, 4-8, in 1 row.
4) Calyx, with lanceolate setaceous teeth, equalling the tube.
5) Corolla, somewhat longer, pinkish-purple.
6) Inner flowers, numerous, consisting of sterile calyces with long, setaceous,
pilose, teeth, eventually deflexed and covering the fertile the flowers.
7) Fruiting head, 12-18 mm in diam., appearing as a woolly ball, detached as a unit.
Fruit:-
1) Appearing as a woolly ball, detached as a unit.
Key features:-
1) Fertile flowers 1 or 2.
2) Pedicels, short or lacking.
3) Fruiting head, 8-10 mm in diam. .
Habitat:- Gravelly slopes by streams, roads and tracks, dry open shrubby
vegetation, open coniferous woodland, fallow fields, 0-1000 m
Distribution:- In Greece not recorded outside the Aegean area. ~ Istanbul,
widespread in Anatolia, extending to W Syria, Iraq and Palestine.
Flowering time:- April-May
Photos by:- A. N. Other
