Florida beggarweed

Desmodium tortuosum, known as Florida beggarweed, dixie tick trefoil or giant beggarweed, is an annual to short-lived perennial herb in the Fabaceae family, native to tropical and subtropical Latin America and widely introduced as a forage and weed across the world's warmer regions, including the southeastern United States, Africa, Asia and Oceania. It grows in disturbed sandy soils, fields, roadsides, beaches, lake margins and floodplains, preferring full sun. The plant produces an erect, ribbed, finely pubescent stem 0.5 to 2 metres tall, usually well branched in the upper half. The alternate leaves are pinnately trifoliolate with stipulate petioles and small interfoliolar stipels; leaflets are ovate to rhombic, 3 to 8 centimetres long, with entire to slightly undulate margins and short, hooked hairs on both surfaces. Small pea-shaped pink to pale purple flowers about 5 millimetres long are borne in long terminal and axillary racemes. The fruit is a flat, jointed loment 2 to 4 centimetres long, deeply constricted between three to six segments that break apart at maturity; each segment is covered in hooked hairs that cling tenaciously to clothing and animal fur, dispersing the seeds.