Authors: Griseb.  

Botanical Description

rather coarse perennial 10-40cm tall with loose, green foliage. Leaves 5-11cm long having nine to fifteen well-spaced, slender oblong-lanceolate leadets, folded, adpressed bristly and with blunt, acute or notched tips. Racemes on peduncles 4-10cm long. Flowers well spaced, sessile, reddish-violet, narrow, but 2-2.5cm long with black-hairy calyces, late spring to autumn in the wild. Pods on dedexing peduncles, leathery, tighdy indated, oblong-rounded, up to 3cm long, more or less bristly and channelled along the belly. Internally, the seeds are packed in a cotton wool-like tissue. Chile and Argentina, from the high Atacama to southern Andean Patagonia, but especially the central area, often dominant and forming small colonial fields or wayside strips as a major element of the more vigorous alpine steppes in deep soils at 100-3600m. For comparative details of other commonly encountered and collected species from the temperate Andes with notably inflated bladder-pods see A. ameghinoi, A. arnottianus, A. palenae, A. patagonicus, A. pehuenches and A. vesiculosus.