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Botanical Description

spreading perennial hairless and branching from the base, 10-45cm tall. Leaves 5-9cm long of fourteen to nineteen oblong leaflets with a tiny mucro at the tip. Flowers six to nine, violet, bluish or white up to 1cm long in head-like racemes at about the same level as the foliage, summer. Pods spreading or pendulous, papery, glabrous, 2.5-4cm long, tightly indated and strongly channelled along the undersurface joints. Chile and Argentina from the northern central Andes to central Patagonia in low to mid dry mountain slopes and valleys, often as a local dominant at 1000-2400m. A. darumbium and A. monticola are closely related but confined to the central cordilleras of Chile and Argentina. The former differs in its more erect habit, smaller flowers and silky hairs on the stems, leaves and fruits, the latter, less coarse, has dull, shaggy hairs. A. vagus, the common northern desert mountain counterpart (at 3200-3800m), has fifteen to thirty pinkish flowers and a congested, globosa head of smaller pods. These species are included here by virtue of occurring throughout the areas regularly visited by travellers and plant hunters where their balloon-like and frequently mottled legumes simply beg to be collected.