Phasemy-bean

Macroptilium lathyroides, the phasey bean or wild bushbean, is a herbaceous annual or short-lived perennial legume in the family Fabaceae, native to tropical and subtropical America from Mexico south to Argentina and now naturalised throughout the warmer regions of the world. Plants are erect to scrambling, 0.6 to 1 meter tall in the open and up to 1.5 meters when twining through other vegetation in shaded conditions. Stems are slender, ribbed, and sparsely hairy. The leaves are pinnately trifoliolate with ovate to lanceolate leaflets 3 to 8 centimeters long and 1 to 3.5 centimeters wide, the terminal leaflet on a longer petiolule. Flowers are borne on long erect axillary peduncles in lax racemes; each papilionaceous corolla is dark red to purple, with the broad wing petals larger and more conspicuous than the keel and standard, opening at dusk. The fruit is a slender, paired, cylindrical pod 5.5 to 12 centimeters long and 2.5 to 3 millimeters wide, holding many obliquely oblong seeds about 3 millimeters long, mottled light and dark grey-brown or black. The species spreads readily in moist disturbed soils and is grown as a forage, green manure, and cover crop.